[Marcus Spinnet worked for over 20 years as an international class-XXXXX beast transporter; How to Flip Your Dragon: 20 Years as a XXXX-Beast Transporter, his reminisces on the trade, was published in 2008. It contains a passing account of an incident, described in Potter’s 1st-year Hogwarts memoir,involving the transportation of a Norwegian Ridgeback originally hatched by Hogwarts groundskeeper R. Hagrid. As Spinnet’s account conflicts somewhat with Potter’s, the particulars of this peculiar event in Potter’s first year may never be known. Re-published with permission from Weasley Worldwide Publishing.]
[. . .]
One of the less interesting parts of the job was cleaning up the results of hobbyists whose projects had gotten out of hand. The most dreadful of those were beating out the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes to incidents involving missing Dobermanns, charred office buildings, and carbonized corpses. The sillier involved emergency transportations required when someone’s summer dragon-egg adventure had reached the point of no return. I was shocked when I first learned that a retired Ministry man, living among muggles in a Norwich suburb, discovered too late that his vegetable garden was insufficient space for housing a hatchling Antipodean Opaleye. Imagine my surprise when this sort of occurrence happened around the world two or three times a year! Every few months my team and I would have to pack up and transfer to another corner of Europe to pack up an adolescent dragon and ship it off to a proper home. At best they went to reserves overseen by trained magizoologists. More often they went to breeders with sketchy Romanian licenses. At worst we had to place them, thoughtfully as possible, in their natural habitats – and then turn tail before we had to see them get gobbled up by territorial females.
If there was a single hotspot for this type of foolishness, it would have to be Hogwarts. All the magical schools ended up with a dragon from time to time, but Hogwarts was the worst. I only had two in my time as a transporter, but word among the trade is that it happens at least once a decade that some student gets hold of an egg and tries to hatch it under their four-poster. It was common enough that there was an established routine. Stewie Arbuckle taught me the procedure on my first call, sometime in Spring 1992. The student was to meet us at the top of the Astronomy tower at midnight. We’d swing in, a team of three or four on broomsticks ready with harnesses, get the dragon strapped in, and then swing out. The whole procedure took about ten minutes – five if the dragon was sleeping. It was best we never talked too much to the kids about it; the less culpability, the better. That first call of mine I remember thinking, how in hell did some kids so young end up with a Norwegian Ridgeback? They were all first-years, I don’t think much older than ten. It’s fascinating the things that privilege can do to a person’s sensibilities. I didn’t realize until after we’d dropped it off that the dragon I was picking up belonged to Chuck Weasley’s brother, and the famous Harry Potter!*
We got her out to Romania, and Chuck out of sentimentality made sure she got sent to one of the better reserves and kept out of the market. I think she made it up to Norway in the end (I like to imagine she’s still alive today). Of course when the Potter memoirs came out, they made it seem like a bigger affair than it was. I’m sure it felt that way to a kid – but really that dragon couldn’t have been more than ten pounds. A dragon is more like a cat than you realize, at least for the first month or two. But I suppose a cat under your bed is quite a bit of nuisance for a kid who doesn’t even know how to vanish a litter tray.
[. . .]
*And it wasn’t until later that we learned that they’d gotten it from the drunk who served as Groundskeeper. It wasn’t the first or last time that class-XXXXX beast issues came about on account of benders undertaken by service staff. That particular groundskeeper went on in two years to become a Care for Magical Creatures professor. Ah, Hogwarts in the ‘90s!
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