On the Trail of Dragons (ePub)

When Joseph Soolyn was given an assignment in college to prove that dragons are a myth, his research uncovered so much evidence that they might have actually existed, that Joseph decided to continue his research into his career as an anthropology professor. Acquiring an assistant, Christof Mendoza, the two travel to China where they enlist the help of a beautiful Chinese graduate student and the old Abbott of a hanging Chinese monastery. They had learned that the most compelling evidences of living dragons originated in China's ancient past. Researching in the monastery's vast library they uncover many hints and evidences that lead them back to the dawn of Chinese civilization. As they learn of human and draconic interrelationships the reader is taken back to the lives of fascinating historical characters, like Huangdi, the boy who would become the third emperor of China. We witness the story of the covenant between dragon-kind and mankind that establish their culturally symbiotic reliance upon each other. Huangdi on a journey as a boy just emerging into manhood, is herding his father's camels through a mountain pass. Wanting to show his father and the elders of his village that he can be trusted as a man he pauses in his quest to do some hunting. With only a sharpened stick he stalks into a thicket where he suspects a predator is trying to ambush his charges. But instead of a bear or wolf, Huangdi is surprised by a dragon! But the dragon becomes intrigued by this boy because he senses that the boy can communicate as dragons do by telepathy. They forge a relationship that soon blossoms into friendship and the dragon helps the boy rise to his potential as the third emperor of the land. This relationship remains strong throughout the lives of both the boy and the dragon and becomes a covenant that mutually benefits the draconic society and the human society until around the time of Christ a tragically greedy emperor breaks the covenant and the dragons decide to leave China. We follow their history, jumping from the present with our intrepid researchers and then back in time to the dragons and the humans around them as the dragons move first to the Alaskan wilderness and its primitive people and then down the North and South American coasts. The legends of Raven in the far north and Quetzalcoatl in Central America and more are discovered by our explorers to be legends about the history of dragons. These stories lead them closer and closer to the incredible discovery that, not only did dragons exist in the distant past, but that they exist even now! Spiced with telepathic communication between humans and dragons, conflict between drug dealers and their cartels, romance, intrigue, and evolutionary science this story weaves a tale that will keep the pages turning. This is the first book in a planned three volume series called Draco Historia that will trace the historical origins of dragons to their discovery in a Chilean wilderness in this novel, to the reintroduction of dragons into the human society of the near future in the second book. The story moves into Europe as a second form of dragons is rediscovered and explored in the last book of the series.