“You buy fancier stuff for fundraisers and other school occasions, I’ve noticed,” he said, falling into a stride next to me. “Goat cheese and grapes, bagels and lox, and whatnot.”
“Not to mention champagne. But the school pays for it, you know that. In the grocery store the stuff that’s in the middle of the store is cheaper and requires little actual cooking.”
“You wouldn’t put the cheapest, subpar gasoline into your car, why put subpar food into your body—”
I increased my pace so I could eat my cookies in peace.
“Those clouds are starting to concern me,” Ruth-Ann, who was carrying the paddles, said. I had one end of a kayak and Jacob had the other. Nate and Ron were carrying the second kayak, while Dr. B led the group, occasionally signaling us to adjust our route when she felt herself being slowed down by History’s constraints.
I glanced back. “Hmm, I hope it doesn’t rain.” Some grayish clouds, which had been hugging the ground to the east, deep in the prairieland, had started to rise skyward in our direction.
“Nothing our rain jackets can’t handle—” Nate said with a shrug, then stopped. Jacob bumped his end of the kayak into the small of Nate’s back.
“Oops, sorry, Chief Kirkland.”
Nate shaded his eyes with his hand and, with a frown, scanned the horizon.
Ruth-Ann said, “Rain clouds don’t billow up like that. It’s almost like—”
She didn’t finish her thought. In the minute or two we had been standing there, the clouds had broadened and were rising steadily in the previously blue sky. It struck me that they were spreading entirely too fast in the breezeless afternoon and were an odd shade of gray—smoky, charcoal-tinted, ashy.
Nate swore. “Those aren’t rain clouds—it’s smoke from a wildfire.”
As we all stood frozen to the spot, he added, “Though the smoke plumes are so uniform I could almost swear that someone started the fire intentionally…”
Ruth-Ann gasped. “Yes…the villagers might be hunting and want to drive bison or other game into the lake, or are clearing the land to discourage the growth of trees and underbrush so that fresh grass will grow for grazing—”
I wanted to hear more about it, but not at the moment. A pair of white-tailed deer—I couldn’t tell if they were the ones we had seen before—thundered past us and over the rise ahead. There was no mistaking the stench of burned grass and shrubs that followed them.
We had fallen into a ghost zone after all.
“Follow the animals,” Nate commanded. “Run!”
27
Like I said, Nate had experience with wildfires from his years in the Boundary Waters wilderness, by the border with Canada. Wanda the cocker spaniel was a constant reminder of that time, a string tied around his finger that said Don’t trust too easily again. Or not. He had probably chosen to keep the dog because he felt sorry for her after her owner went to jail.
Which was completely irrelevant at the moment, except for the experience with wildfires part, which was hugely relevant.
“This is what ghost zones are like, huh?” said Jacob, panting as we hurried along. Under the circumstances, I was glad to see that he seemed calm. It was a sign that he might be successful in leading his own research team a few years down the road. If we made it back.
We crested a rise, which gave an unnerving view of the burning prairie behind us. A jagged line of red-orange gobbled at the prairie grass with an eerie crackling that drifted in and out on the breeze. The nearing edge of the fire had not caught up with us yet, but its heat was creating a wind that drove the smoke and heat in our direction, making it hard to breathe.
We hurried downhill into a bowl-shaped depression. It had to be the only valley in the entire state without a lake. Nate swore again and turned to Dr. B. “Can we use the Slingshot?”
“You mean jump blindly, without running the necessary calculations? Not a good idea. We could end up someplace worse.”
“Worse than this?” Nate jerked his thumb in the direction of the fire.
In the depression, the air was not yet thick with smoke, but it soon would be. I could taste the fire, a gritty mouthful of ash and heat that made it hard to speak. I managed to get a few words out anyway. “Xavier had no problem using it to whisk us out of a ghost zone—”
“—and into another. I’m not Xavier Mooney. I won’t just hit a button and send us into the unknown. We could end up in the middle of the ocean, or some place even less survivable, like, I don’t know, outer space or something. I’d rather face a known danger.”
The others reluctantly nodded their agreement.
“Can we outrun the fire?” Ron asked.
“We can’t. It’s too late.” Nate already had a blanket out and was pouring our drinking water on it. Ruth-Ann pulled a blanket out of her own bag and did the same with Ron’s help.
Moving as quickly as we could, we found a rocky spot clear of vegetation and wedged our bodies into it. We covered ourselves with the wet blankets, hauled the kayaks over us, and hoped for the best.
28
“Well, now you’ve been through a ghost zone,” I said to the Tuttles, who looked a little wild-eyed. I suspected that the rest of us looked a bit wild-eyed too. Ghost zones were not the kind of thing you could get used to. There was no sense of exhilaration like you might get from, say, skydiving or climbing Mt. Everest (neither of which I had ever done), only a feeling of being blindsided and the realization that it might happen again at any time, without warning.
Coughing and with watery eyes, we staggered away from the charred area with its blackened remnants of vegetation, heading back into the woods without regard for direction, our only goal to get as far away as possible. The fire had mostly run its course, tapering off by design or because it had run out of fuel, leaving behind gently falling ash and six coughing time travelers.
Ron was limping, having twisted his ankle during our run into the valley, and was holding on to Ruth-Ann’s arm for support as he hobbled along. I hoped they didn’t regret coming with us. I wanted to ask Nate if he was all right—I knew the fire might have brought back some painful memories, however stoic he tried to be—but I didn’t want to ask him about it in front of the others. Next to me, Jacob was clutching his backpack, and up ahead, Dr. B was swatting ash off her clothes.
The kayaks were gone, melted into an unrecognizable black mass that we had left behind. It meant that we would be on foot from this point on, and unless we wanted to chance using the Slingshot again, were going to have a hard time getting back to STEWie’s basket on Runestone Island.
Well, at least my hair had dried quickly.
I had completely lost my sense of orientation, but thought that we’d doubled back a bit, into what would one day become the Andes Tower ski hill area. Soon we reached a small lake. In silent agreement, we dropped our backpacks onto the ground, happy to catch our breath and wash the soot off our faces in the cool water.
“It sent us right into a ghost zone,” Jacob said as he splashed water on his face. “The Slingshot.”
“I’m not sure it did, actually,” Dr. B said. “I think we actually walked into that one. We chose to go into the prairie, but there were other directions open to us. Just not the one we wanted.”
I lowered myself onto the uneven ground, feeling the coolness of the spongy moss on my hands, and asked the question that needed to be asked. “Do we keep trying to find Quinn and Dr. Holm even if it means risking falling into another ghost zone? Perhaps the wildfire was a sign that we should turn back.”
“I know you don’t think Dr. Holm needs rescuing, Julia,” Nate said. He was still on his feet, rubbing his jawline with one hand as if trying to decide which course of action would be best.
“I don’t. Do you?”
“I’d like to make sure, that’s all.”
“Besides, we could have guess
ed wrong…they might not even be coming here. What if they are camping out in Duluth or Hudson Bay or Newfoundland? Even if they are here, we still might miss them.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Nate said. “I think we might be here too early in the year. Judging from the vegetation, it must have been a long winter. I think we should jump ahead a few weeks.”
“Ron’s ankle might require medical attention,” I pointed out.
Ron had found a seat on a boulder and was loosening the laces of his hiking boots. He gingerly felt his left ankle as Ruth-Ann looked on with a furrowed brow. “It’s an old snowshoeing injury. I’ll be fine—I just need to rest the ankle a bit.” He reached up to wipe a bit of soot off Ruth-Ann’s cheek. “Ruth-Ann, what do you think?”
She handed him her water bottle. “That I’m in no hurry to go back. I don’t think you are either.”
“You know my opinion,” Dr. B said. “There’s no reason to think that we’re going to keep falling into ghost zones.”
“Jacob, you get a vote, too,” I said to him. The ginger-haired graduate student was sitting on a tree root with his arms wrapped around his knees, poking at the moss with a reed.
“Hmm, what, Julia?”
“You get a vote, too. Stay and keep looking for Quinn and Dr. Holm, or go home?”
The danger of what we had just been though must have finally sunk in. Instead of answering my question, he said with something of a dazed look, “Time travel isn’t at all like I imagined…I’ve been thinking about Sunniva.” I thought he meant the university, but he went on. “As a thesis topic, I mean. But that would mean going to the tenth century, and who knows what I’d encounter that far back?”
I realized that he was talking about the school’s namesake, the woman whose name meant “sun gift.” Sunniva, the patron saint of Western Norway, had an unusual story—the tenth-century Irish princess had fled aboard a ship to escape an unwanted marriage to a pagan king. She had ended up hiding in a cave off the coast of Norway, where she died after a rockfall blocked the entrance, causing her and her followers to starve. When the cave was opened decades later, her body was found intact, as if she had simply fallen asleep. Or so the legend went. Dr. Edberg of the European History department had not had much luck on his investigative runs to the region and so had moved on to other things. It was a good idea for a thesis topic. “I wonder what everyone is doing,” Jacob added pensively.
I sat down on the tree root next to him. “Everyone home at St. Sunniva? Here, have some water.”
“No, everyone in the whole world. I miss being connected.”
I guessed he was talking about his online buddies. “You can catch up on Twitter news when you get back. Are you saying you’d rather go home, then?”
“Hmm? What? No. We can’t give up now, can we?” He dropped the reed onto the forest floor and brushed soot off his jeans. “I’m ready.”
I turned back to the others. “Sounds like we’re pushing on.”
Nate nodded to me and sat down with a penknife to fashion a walking stick for Ron. “Same location but three weeks from now, please, Dr. B.”
29
A safe jump of three weeks and a meal of granola bars and fresh water gave us renewed energy. The steady pace through the woods kept us too busy for conversation. The air was warmer and the forest now denser, with only intermittent shafts of light filtering in through the canopy, illuminating bountiful wildflowers and ferns. Birds chirped and dragonflies flitted among old oak and elm trees like miniature helicopters. A squirrel toddled by. I wondered if we might run into a moose or a caribou this far south—or, more unnervingly, a bear or a wolf. I had a sudden vision of us getting lost in the seemingly endless forest and slowly starving to death over the course of several weeks as we unsuccessfully tried to hunt down deer and other large game with nothing but a pointy stick…which was when I remembered that Nate had brought a gun. Of course we weren’t going to get lost—Dr. B had left a beacon on Runestone Island—but I was suddenly happy that we had a means of self-defense. Hopefully it would work if we really needed it.
“Nice woods,” said Jacob, who seemed to have completely perked up.
We struggled through for a good two hours, pushing low-hanging branches out of the way, stepping over fallen and decomposing logs and thriving ferns, all the while swatting mosquitoes out of our faces. All of us were scratched up and bug bitten. I had never realized how difficult it was to walk through the woods without an established path to follow. North, south, west, east, no matter what the direction, there were just…more trees. If we had not possessed a compass, it would have been hard to know which direction we were heading in, not that we had much choice in the matter—even with the adjustment in time, History’s hand was still leading us where it wanted. It took all my energy to focus on staying on my feet without tripping or twisting an ankle to match Ron’s injured one. It probably helped him that we were making such slow progress, but as the afternoon wore on, his face took on an increasingly pale hue. I caught Ruth-Ann casting a concerned look in his direction several times, as if she was wondering if we’d made the right decision in continuing our quest.
“Dammit, I wish we hadn’t lost the kayaks,” Nate said as we wound our way around the marshy shores of another sprawling lake. Like all of us, he no doubt realized that the kayaks would have made things a whole lot easier for Ron.
Dr. B, as if reading my mind, said, “Maybe we should think about setting up camp here, Chief Kirkland. It’s as good a spot as any. Sheltered, with access to water.” Almost imperceptibly, she nodded in Ron’s direction.
The end of our second day in the fourteenth century found us much worse off than the first—cold, without our kayaks, and in low spirits. Like the previous night, Nate’s lighter and the Tuttle’s matches wouldn’t produce a flame and the stove stayed cold, but our various electronic devices, with their tiny lights, worked just fine. By the glow of Jacob’s cell phone and a setting half-moon, Ron told us of Vinland and the Norse sagas as we munched on dry food and rested our tired legs.
“The Vikings would not have had firearms,” he said, “like Columbus did. They only had spears, axes, bows and arrows, perhaps a sword if they could afford it. They came here not as invaders but looking to settle a land, as they had with Iceland around 870 AD,” he explained. “After that they pushed farther west, to Greenland, led by Erik the Red. He was a hot-blooded outlaw who had been exiled for committing murder—more than once—back home in Iceland. He chose to sail west, to the land that had been spotted by ships blown off course. The sagas tell his story and that of his offspring, three sons, Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein, and one daughter, Freydis. As for his Greenland—” Ron paused for a drink of water from his bottle. “The name is all wrong, you know, an example of an early PR machine at work. Erik the Red was trying to woo colonists over from Iceland. Most of Greenland is covered with ice throughout the year—the only parts that are green are the edges of the fjords. Erik the Red and his colonists built two settlements, one at the southern tip and the other a bit farther north on Greenland’s west coast. The problem was that they used up the trees quickly and found it a struggle to survive on their farming lifestyle—cattle and sheep didn’t adapt easily to Greenland’s harsh climate.
“But a forested land had been sighted even farther to the west, again by ships that had been blown off course. The oldest son, Leif, set sail with a crew of thirty-five. They first made landfall probably somewhere on the coast of Labrador. After two more days at sea, the sagas say, they came across a place that suited them just fine—a fertile, warmer land where wild grapes grew, a place the Norse called Vinland the Good. They decided to winter there and build their houses. But people were already living there. Skraelings, the Norse called them in a not very complimentary fashion. Wretches who screech. The sagas talk of skirmishes with the locals and the colonists soon went back to Greenland, though they occasionally returned fo
r lumber.”
“They would have been Peoples of the Dawnland,” Ruth-Ann said quietly, “those who lived where the sun first rises. Speakers of Algonquian.”
“The sagas tell of five voyages made to Vinland by Greenlanders. But here’s the thing about L’Anse aux Meadows. Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad found the remnants of eight houses, four boat sheds, an iron smithy, and other workshops…but no wild grapes, which all of the stories mention. It must have just been a stepping-stone to Vinland, like your Dr. Holm guessed, with Vinland itself being farther south down the coast, where wild grapes would have been sure to grow.
“As for our Norsemen, of whom we haven’t seen a trace—well, they could be traders looking to set up a new route to the west to match their established one to the east. Another theory is that that they might be Knights Templar. Fascinating but far-fetched. I have a different take.”
“Ron,” said Ruth-Ann, with a fond look at her husband, “thinks he might know what happened to the Greenlanders.”
“All these theories assume that the runestone carvers came to North America directly from Scandinavia, sailing across the North Atlantic. Here’s the thing. The two Greenland colonies struggled in the unforgiving climate and in the end disappeared, the more northern one by 1362—does that date sound familiar?—and the other one a bit later. No one knows what happened, where they went. I think at least some of them gave up on treeless Greenland, where it was difficult to support their way of life, and followed Leif Erikson’s footsteps and the lure of Vinland.”
“The date fits with the runestone,” I said. “But why would they call themselves Norwegians and Gotlanders on the stone?”
“I don’t think they would have thought of themselves as Greenlanders as such. They had strong ties to Norway and depended on it for goods, bishops, and the latest social mores.” Ron frowned. “It’s more problematic that the runestone talks of fishing. Greenlanders didn’t fish.”
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 22