"0098 Dragon on a Mountaintop" by J. Post (Rosesred)

Spotting dragons is easy.

Try to find a nice photogenic mountain top, or a particularly dramatically shaded group of rocks and set up your camera. If you just wait a while, a dragon is bound to show up. There isn’t one alive that can resist such a beautiful chance to show off it’s beauty.

This draconic instinct has been put to good use by the inhabitants of the Blue Mountains. While unable to afford the expensive import-cameras the tourists from New Holland bring they still needed something to distract the local dragongoats.

Like the white shark or the tiger, dragongoats are not particularly fond of human meat. However, unlike the two other animals dragongoats are smart enough to realise that the helplessness of the prey might outweigh the bad taste. You don’t go to McDonalds for the gourmet taste, you go there because it’s an easy way to get your food.

The people of the Blue Mountains needed something that could get them away from a hungry dragongoat. Guns and spells didn’t work for the obvious reasons, and cameras were too expensive. If you ran into a dragongoat, you’d just have to hope a bunch of tourists was close and would come to investigate the noise with the usual disregard for common sense tourists exhibit. The moment the tourists would see the dragon and whip out their cameras, the dragon would climb the nearest rock and try to look as impressive and mysterious as possible, giving you the chance to escape.

Because of the increasing popularity of the region as a holiday destination, the level of dragongoat-casualties has dropped over the years, but it still was a very dangerous activity to walk in the mountains past the high season.

However, the locals have found a solution to this. Using the cheap materials of a small cardboard box, a toilet paper roll and a little black paint, every inhabitant of the Blue Mountains now walks around with a small fake paper camera on their chest. When a dragongoat attacks, they grab the ‘camera’ and start making clicking noises. The instinctive reaction of the reptile is to immediately find the best place to pose for the pictures. This makes it possible to slowly retreat, walking backwards while the dragongoat just keeps posing for an empty camera.