Across the Great Barrier fm-2

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Once we’d finished setting up camp, we all headed down to the creek to collect bits of stone. Digging through the collapsed part of the hill was a lot easier with proper shovels and buckets. The professor had brought along a couple of gadgets like big wire sieves to separate out the rocks from the dirt. We cleared off a patch of ground next to the creek, then Lan shoveled dirt into the sieve and I shook it and cleared out the rocks. There were a lot more rocks than just the stone animal pieces we were looking for.

  Professor Torgeson sent one of her students to walk along the creek shallows, looking for bits of stone that might have washed downstream as the water cleared away the dam. The other man she set to washing off the stones we collected, and then carrying them up to camp in a bucket after she’d sorted out the best ones.

  We got about half a packful of fragments from that first day’s work, so the professor figured we’d be at it for at least a week. By the end of the first full day, I was wishing I’d stayed in Mill City. It was hard, hot, heavy work, no matter what job you were doing. Even wading along the creek was only fun for about five minutes; after that, your back ached from bending over and your eyes got sore from squinting to see through the sunlight on the water and your feet hurt from banging against all the rocks that weren’t stone animal pieces.

  So I was plenty glad when, a few hours after noon of our third day at Daybat Creek, I heard Professor Torgeson say, “Mr. Morris! What brings you out this way?”

  I turned to see Wash riding toward us along the bank of the creek. “Wash!” I cried.

  “Afternoon, Professor, Miss Eff, Mr. Rothmer.” Wash touched the brim of his hat. “All’s been well?”

  “We’ve had no difficulties I know of,” the professor said, frowning slightly. “Why?”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Wash replied. He looked us over, and his eyes narrowed. “You have a guide?”

  The professor nodded toward the top of the hill. “Mr. Jinns. He’s up at camp.”

  “Ah.” Wash sat back in his saddle, considering. “I’ll have a word with him in a bit, then.” He dismounted, staying well clear of the area we’d been working on.

  “What’s wrong?” the professor asked.

  “Maybe nothing,” Wash said. “Or maybe more trouble than is normal, even out here. I was down Lindasfarm way last week, when I got an urgent message from the magician at the Big Bear Lake settlement a bit north of here. Seems they had an Acadian fur trapper come through in early spring complaining about something running off the animals, breaking up his traps, and ruining his catch.”

  “Isn’t that what trappers always say?” Lan asked.

  “In the general way of things, yes,” Wash said, grinning. Then he sobered. “This one, though, was considerably more exercised about it than most. He claimed some of his catch had been turned to stone.”

  Professor Torgeson’s eyes went wide. “Turned to stone?”

  “That’s what he said, at least once he’d drunk enough,” Wash said. “They didn’t pay him much mind until one of their hunting parties came back hauling a stone fawn. Said they’d found the doe with it, but they couldn’t carry both of them. That’s when the settlement magician sent me the message.”

  “But — you’re saying these are newly petrified animals?”

  “I’m not saying either way just yet,” Wash replied. “I haven’t seen them for myself. But I’ve known Bert Macleod for a good ten years, and he’s a good magician and a reliable man. He used to ride circuit closer in toward the Mammoth River, before he decided to settle in one place and let trouble come to him instead of running around looking for it. If he’s worried, I’d say he has reason.

  “I’d heard you were out here digging up some more rocks,” Wash went on, “and since it was nearly on my way, I figured I’d stop by and let you know.”

  “And check that nothing strange was happening here,” I said before I thought.

  Wash nodded. “It seemed like a reasonable thing to do, being as how this is the only other spot we know of where anyone’s found stone animals.”

  “Yes, but these are not recent,” Professor Torgeson said. “Besides, someone would surely have found something before now, if animals were still being petrified.”

  “That depends,” Wash said. “Nobody’s gotten much farther west than Wintering Island in the Grand Bow River. There’s plenty of strange things out there that we don’t know about yet.”

  “Nobody knew about the mirror bugs until about three years ago,” Lan put in.

  “Big Bear is a new settlement, relatively speaking,” Wash said. “It’s only three years old. Doing well, but then, they’re a timbering town, and north of the grub-kill. They’re as far west as anyone’s settled up at that end of the circuit, so if there’s anything coming east that we haven’t seen before, they’d be one of the first to spot it.”

  “Still, you’d think some of those fur trappers would have noticed something,” Professor Torgeson said.

  Wash shrugged. “Maybe some of them did. There’s always a fair few that don’t come back from the bush every year.”

  There was a moment of silence as we all considered that. “Well,” Professor Torgeson said after a minute, “I’ll have to think about this. Will you be riding on right away, or can you stop for a bit?”

  “It’s late enough in the day that I’ll be better spending the night here, if you’re willing. Safer, too — the big animals haven’t moved back into the woods, and the small ones aren’t likely to attack a large group. Especially with four of us to renew the protection spells,” he added, looking at Lan.

  Lan’s eyebrows drew together. “Three,” he said.

  Wash’s eyebrows rose, but all he said was, “Three, then.”

  “You’re more than welcome,” Professor Torgeson said.

  “Thank you kindly,” Wash replied. He tipped his hat again and then rode off to camp. The rest of us got back to work picking rocks until dinner. Thanks to the professor’s wire screens, we’d found a lot more good specimens than we’d expected, though we still didn’t have any that were completely whole. Everything seemed to be missing the thin, fragile bits — legs or feet or tails or ears. The closest we came to a whole animal was a loon with its feet tucked up. The head had broken off, but we found it, too, so there were just a couple of missing chips around where the break was.

  Wash’s news made for quite a conversation over dinner. Lan was particularly excited. “It proves that the petrification is some kind of spell,” he said.

  “It doesn’t prove anything of the sort,” Mr. Torre, one of the students, said. “Until somebody actually sees it happen, we can’t know for sure. And I think it’s some kind of natural process.”

  “Fast enough to petrify a live animal all at once?” Lan said scornfully. “That’s ridiculous. The only natural petrification we know of is fossilization, and fossils take thousands of years to form.”

  “Obviously they’re not fossils,” Mr. Barnet, the other student, said. He’d just graduated, and he and Lan didn’t get on. I thought it was because he felt that being two years older and finished with college made him the next most important person in the group after Professor Torgeson. Lan thought he was just an idiot. “But they can’t have been the result of a spell; they haven’t any magical residue at all.”

  “Neither does anything else around here,” Lan shot back. “The grubs and the mirror bugs ate it all.”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” Professor Torgeson said. “I’d assumed that the lack of magic was a feature of the stones themselves, but it might very well have happened later.”

  “Professor!” Mr. Torre said reproachfully, like he’d expected her to side with them because she was their professor. She just looked at him, and he drooped a little. Then he straightened up. “But most of the stones we’re finding were buried in the hill,” he said. “I could believe that the mirror bugs absorbed the magic from all the ones near the surface, just like they did with everything else, but cou
ld they have pulled magic from that far underground?”

  “Something did,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me. I sighed. “It’s just common sense. Everything that’s alive, and a lot of things that aren’t, has magic. Natural animals only have a tiny bit that doesn’t do them a lick of good, but they still have it. Even rocks and dirt have magic, most places — Professor Torgeson said last summer that the magical plants can’t grow here because the grubs absorbed it all and it’ll be a while coming back.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mr. Barnet. “What does that have to do with the petrification problem?”

  “If all these stone animals used to be live critters, they had magic in them when they were alive,” I said. “It has to have gone somewhere.”

  “Very true,” Professor Torgeson said. “Which is why you and I are going on with Mr. Morris tomorrow morning, Miss Rothmer.” She looked at Lan. “Since you are something of a volunteer, you may come or stay as you see fit. The rest of you will stay here with Mr. Jinns and continue with the sample collecting. You know how by this time.”

  In spite of the professor’s no-nonsense tone, that caused a bit of uproar. Both of the students thought they should be the ones to go with Wash and the professor, if anyone was going, and Lan and I should stay to collect samples. The professor told them that they’d been hired to collect samples, not to do scientific investigations. She said that I was along as her assistant, and she wouldn’t do without me, and Lan wasn’t employed by the college or the Settlement Office at all and could do whatever he liked.

  “We could all go,” Mr. Torre suggested.

  “Well, now, I’m sorry to disabuse you of that notion,” Wash said, “but a group travels a sight slower than one man alone, and the larger the group, the slower it goes. The professor here talked me into taking her and these two, but that’s my limit. It was an urgent message, after all.”

  “And I’m not sitting around babysitting a bunch of mules, waiting for all of you to get back,” Mr. Jinns growled. He glared at the two students and added, “Not that the two-legged mules are likely to be any better, to my way of thinking.”

  Once the students were finally convinced that they’d have to stay, they wanted to know how long we’d be gone.

  “It’s about two, two and a half days’ ride if we nip right along,” Wash said. “Call it five days for travel, and one or two when we get there to find out what’s actually happened.”

  “A week, then,” Mr. Barnet said. “What if we finish filling all the packs before then?”

  Mr. Jinns snorted up his coffee. I got the feeling he didn’t think much of their chances of being done in a week, but he didn’t actually say anything.

  “If you finish before we return, you will of course take the samples back to Mill City,” the professor said. “We’ll probably catch up with you on the way; you’ll travel more slowly with the mules to see to.”

  I could tell that the students still wanted to argue, but I knew it wouldn’t do them any good. Professor Torgeson was in charge and it was clear that neither Wash nor Mr. Jinns would back them up. I poked Lan and nodded at the dishes, and the two of us collected them and took them down to the creek to wash up. We stayed a mite longer than was strictly necessary for dish washing, so that by the time we hauled everything back to camp, the argument was over and done with.

  And the next morning, barely after dawn, Lan and Professor Torgeson and I rode out with Wash, just as the professor had said in the first place.

  CHAPTER 25

  TRAVELING WITH WASH WHEN HE WAS IN A HURRY WAS A LOT different from the way we’d traveled the previous summer. We didn’t take a pack animal, and we alternated trotting and walking so as to go as fast as possible without foundering the horses. When Lan asked about speed-traveling spells, Wash said that he’d only ever used one once, west of the Mammoth, and he’d only do it again if someone was likely to die if they didn’t get somewhere on time. Mostly, if there was a real emergency but nobody dying, he’d gallop and walk, then trade his tired horse for a fresh one at the next settlement. We couldn’t do that because settlements only had to provide mounts for circuit magicians, and anyway this wasn’t an emergency yet.

  Wash’s estimate for time was dead-on. We got to the Big Bear Lake settlement near sunset of our second day traveling, mainly because it was high summer and the sun rose early and set late, and we rode pretty nearly every minute it was up.

  The settlement folks were surprised to see us; they’d only expected Wash. They found room for all of us, though, in the newcomers’ longhouse. That was a big, plain building three times as long as it was wide, meant for new settlers to stay in until they got their own houses built. Most settlements built one first thing, and then after they earned out their allotments they turned it into a general store or town hall. Professor Torgeson said the settlers got the idea from the Scandians and Vinlanders, who’d been building longhouses since medieval times.

  It was too late in the day to do much in the way of talking, especially with three of the four of us well and truly tuckered out from the fast ride. Wash was the only one who didn’t seem bothered by it. The rest of us turned in as soon as we could and slept as late as they let us, which wasn’t much later than we’d been getting up at the camp.

  Right after breakfast, Wash collected the rest of us and took us to see Mr. Macleod. He was a sturdy gentleman with short graying hair, dressed in an old blue work shirt and bright red suspenders. He lived and worked from a log house right inside the palisade gates. He’d divided the inside in half with a burlap curtain; the front part was where he met with people and did official business, and with five of us there it was pretty cramped. Practically before he had a chance to say anything, the professor asked whether we could talk to the trapper who’d first come in with the news, and she was a mite put out to learn he’d moved on long ago.

  “Trappers have itchy feet, ma’am,” Mr. Macleod said. “About the only time you see them in one place for more than a week or two at a time is at the annual St. Jacques assembly or if they’ve been snowed in. Old Greasy Pierre came through back in late March; there’s no way he’d still be here now.”

  “Just like the summer men,” Professor Torgeson said, nodding. “I’d hoped for better, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “Summer men?” Mr. Macleod said.

  “Vinlanders who cross to the mainland to hunt every summer,” the professor replied. “We lose a few every year who insist on staying just a few more days and get caught by an early winter storm. Once that happens, they rarely make it back before the ice dragons come down from the north.”

  Mr. Macleod nodded. “Same thing, really. Pierre took it particularly hard on account of these last few years being so good. He got accustomed to taking enough animals to get his summer supplies without so much work, so when things went back to normal, he was right put out.”

  “The last few years have been good ones?”

  “For trappers,” Wash agreed. “All up the Red River and down to the Middle Plains Territory. Maybe farther.”

  “Likely it was all the animals forced out by the grubs,” Mr. Macleod said. “Leastwise, that’s what everyone says.”

  “Forced out by the grubs?” Lan said. “But they just ate plants!”

  “And when the rabbits and deer and bison and giant beavers and rainbow squirrels have no plants to eat, they leave, and the saber cats and foxes and jewel minks and dire wolves follow,” Mr. Macleod said.

  “Why would this year have been a bad one, then?” I asked. “The grub-killed land is coming back, but it’s not the same, and it won’t be for a long time. There might be enough for the rabbits and ground squirrels to eat, but for sure not the giant beavers and deer.”

  “Who knows?” Mr. Macleod said. “All I can say is that every trapper who came in from the Far West this year had a scanty catch.”

  “Now, there’s an odd thing,” Wash said, rubbing his beard. “I hadn’t rightly thought on it before, but
most all the trappers who work south of the Grand Bow River brought in as many furs as they could carry. There were a lot more new critters among them, too.”

  “More new animals?” Professor Torgeson said.

  “There are a lot of things in the Far West that we don’t have names for,” Wash said.

  “Every so often, the boys bring in something strange,” Mr. Macleod agreed. “There’s a fox with a gray patch on its forehead that they’re partial to, when they can catch one, and a thing that looks a bit like a fat squirrel that’s had its tail bobbed. Come to think on it, there’s been more of those furs these past few years than there used to be. But then, the boys have been working farther west.”

  “Have they?” Wash said in a thoughtful tone. “The way the trappers I talked to were complaining, I got the notion they haven’t ever gone much past their usual runs.”

  “How far west would that be?” Professor Torgeson asked.

  “Most of the trappers on the North Plains work between here and … well, draw a north-south line through Wintering Island on the Grand Bow, and that’s about as far west as they’ve ever gone,” Mr. Macleod said. “I don’t know about the Gauls and Acadians. They call themselves coureurs de bois, and they’re right out of their heads, if you ask me, the chances they take.”

  “They aren’t accustomed to having a safe place nearby,” the professor pointed out. “Acadian settlement isn’t more than halfway along the Great Lakes yet.”

  “If the trappers had their way, they’d stay there,” Mr. Macleod grunted. “They were right pleased when the Settlement Office held up on allowing any new settlements last year.”

  “All this building has been eating up their hunting ground,” Wash said, nodding.

  “Speaking of hunting,” Professor Torgeson said in a pointed tone. “I believe Mr. Morris indicated that one of your hunting parties brought in something interesting.”

  “Yes, well, just let me get it and you can see for yourselves.” Mr. Macleod disappeared behind the curtain for a minute. He came out carrying a stone fawn.