Buck Johnson: Dragon Wrangler Collection I

By Wyatt McLaren

In Dragon Wrangler Collection I, you’ll encounter dragon breaking, a dragon drive, and a dragon roundup – all served up with plenty of western/cowboy adventure (albeit on another planet) and a generous dollop of fun character interplay. A wild mix of fantasy, action/adventure, western, and science fiction, this book is a new twist on the space western and a rollicking ride across the vagaries of a dragon wrangler’s and his sidekicks’ lives on planet Terul. Think of "The Good Old Boys," "The Rounders," and a little bit of "Lonesome Dove" all rolled up together and cast into space.

Follow Buck Johnson, Skeeter Evans, and Snort Jones in their attempts to make a little money to get off Terul and get to some place where there’s easier money and a lot more fun. But, as you’ll see, breaking, roping, herding, and rounding up dragons – especially when there are more than a few green-broke korths and churlish native Terullians involved – don’t always turn out quite as expected.

This is the very first book-length collection of Buck Johnson short stories. It includes five inter-related stories that loosely hang together as a sort of cycle, as well as an author’s introduction to set the stage and explain the genre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyatt McLaren
• Release date: Dec 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301309184

Book preview

Buck Johnson

Dragon Wrangler Collection I

Wyatt Mclaren

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Wyatt McLaren

This is a work of fiction. The characters and situations are nothing more than inventions of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of anything in here to real persons, places, or institutions on Earth is purely coincidental.

Dragon Wrangler

The Dragon Drive?

Trailing the Herd

Drive’s End

Dragon Roundup

Introduction

Most of us love a good western and/or cowboy tale (which aren’t necessarily the same thing, but often are). We may be reluctant to admit it in the company of our cultured and literary friends, but it’s often true nevertheless. The wild and untamed settings, the more elemental characters, and the big struggles that really matter—these are the things that conspire to make us love westerns and cowboy stories.

It’s all there much like it is in, say, the Odyssey—man battling unyielding nature, man conquering beasts, man overcoming savagery, man against himself, man seeking a home. These are the ingredients of all good stories.

But in westerns it’s the setting primarily that allows a large, adventure-filled, moving, and morally (most often) unambiguous narrative portrayal of these struggles. Trouble is, though, the requisite settings have almost disappeared. Certainly, the nineteenth-century American West is gone. Similarly, in our modern, technologically advanced world, it’s increasingly hard to find models for main characters with the self-reliance and resourcefulness and rugged individualism that formerly defined Americans.

Of course, we can always look backward, return to the past, for settings and characters. But that’s been done—and done too well for the likes of me to try to compete with the big guns. Larry McMurtry and Elmer Kelton spring to mind first here.

So modern stories have largely turned inward. The psychological frontier is now the wild setting where the struggles take place. And that means something of a good story is, consequently, lacking. It becomes more difficult for outward conditions to represent or parallel or be emblematic of the inner struggles. The rough, portentous adventure—played out in a dangerous, unyielding, and at most semi-civilized environment—is missing. And, as a result, so is much of the fun.

Why do you think fantasy is so popular now? Invented worlds permit these struggles to play out unfettered by the constraints of familiarity and our quotidian civilized world. In the invented worlds of fantasy, where different physical and moral laws often obtain, you’ve got clear-cut good guys and bad guys, seemingly insurmountable obstacles overcome (or at least tackled head-on and forthrightly), roughly emblematic settings, and the sheer fun of adventure and suspense. But, although fantasy worlds permit the telling of a good story with realistic struggles, they obviously don’t lend themselves well to all the conventions of westerns/cowboy stories.

For westerns, then, the solution is to keep the defining characteristics of these tales, but to transplant them to worlds where the necessary settings still exist. And that, of course, would be other worlds within our universe—credibly depicted worlds where we can imagine such stories playing out. And that is why we have the sub-genre called the space western.

(There does remain one place, though—well, that is, up until about the mid-1980s certainly and maybe still—in our world where such stories can still be set. And that is the microcosm of the rodeo arena. It’s western, it has the elemental struggles, and the characters live big. So, that’s why you’ll soon see Buck and his sidekicks, always trying to make a profit and get ahead, competing in a rodeo on Terul. There’ll be bronc riding, korth riding, dragon team roping, and more—a unique combination of worlds and settings.)

Here we are, then, with Buck Johnson, as well as Skeeter Evans and Snort Jones, on planet Terul. Here, on Terul, the geography is uninviting, the climate harsh, the inhabitants verging on uncivilized and often truculent, the characters’ aspirations simple, and the struggles large and emblematic. So there’s the requisite rough setting and concomitant trappings.

You may have also noticed that the characters are in some ways just barely more than two dimensional and the plots swing (perhaps) too close to the clichéd. But that’s all intentional at this point because, most of all, everything is supposed to be fun—just sheer, unalloyed adventurous fun in a western/cowboy way.

And don’t forget that it’s variation within a given form that provides the opportunity for real experimentation. You want to write a love poem? Well, there’s the sonnet already waiting for you. All you have to do is use the given form with its set rhyme scheme and metric conventions—within which you’re free to be inventive and original. It’s the same thing here, really.

We’ve all read and seen enough westerns to have certain expectations. If we want to do the genre justice, then, we can’t veer too far away from these. That’s why there’s a main character who is usually in charge, who is often irascible, who is strong physically and plot-wise, and who is often noticeably flawed. Then, too, there are the expected supporting characters: the slow-thinking, slow-moving, loyal sidekick and his more flamboyant foil who is also often a loose cannon. The idea is to deploy the given western form and its standard plot and character conventions in a slightly different way on different worlds.

And why this limited trinity of characters? Well, because it’s natural—trinitarian-ness or unified three-ness (which is perhaps more accurate and less pretentious) is an in-built aspect of human affairs when they’re stripped down to the essentials. You see it everywhere, and that’s why it works so well in a story. Just think, for instance, about the family (father, mother, and child making up the three components of the single unit) or Plato’s tripartite soul or even the three branches of our government. Or consider the trinity of main characters in Rio Bravo played by John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson. (Buck, Skeeter, and Snort are in good company it seems.)

So how come Buck is out here on this barren world just barely eking out a living anyway? Well, because he had to leave home, Earth, in order to remain free. If there’s one thing a cowboy values above all else, it’s his freedom—even when his striving for freedom leads, ironically, to another kind of servitude. Here are two excellent illustrative examples from movies: Lonely Are the Brave and The Good Old Boys. And Buck’s no different.

Dragon Wrangler

When Buck Johnson finally managed to breathe a little again and knew he wasn’t dead, he propped himself up on one elbow. He spat dirt out of his mouth—pthit, pthit. Worse yet, the dirt was at least half dragon dung.

Commiserating, Skeeter Evans called across the football field-sized round pen, You okay, Buck? He was pretty sure Buck was uninjured—he was the best hand at breaking dragons Skeeter had ever seen—but the claims of friendship drew the question out of him anyway. Buck, is anything broke?

Finally managing to stand, but with hands on knees and head down, Buck worked hard at re-inflating his lungs, getting as much air into them as he could with each gasp. But the sulfur-tainted air of Terul didn’t give him much help in getting his wind back. Eventually, he answered: Yeah, I’m okay. Too far from the heart to kill me. Did you see what that bitch did, Skeet?

Yeah, I seen it. Treacherous, ain’t she? What