Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 24

LAN WAS STILL QUIET AND UNHAPPY AT BREAKFAST, BUT NOT QUITE as much as he had been. Not that I had a lot of time to watch him. It was our last day in Philadelphia, so everyone we’d met came to call and wish us a good journey, and a bunch of new folks dropped in because it was their last chance to meet up with us.

Professor Lefevre came early in the day, and I showed him the stone bird with the broken-off wings. He’d brought a magnifying lens, and he studied it carefully the same way Professor Torgeson had when we first found the statues. I could see he was surprised, and right away he started muttering about his laboratory and testing. I took my bird back before he could get too excited, and promised him again that I’d make sure we sent him a good sample as soon as the collectors got home.

Next day, we boarded the train for the two-day trip back to Mill City. It rained most of the way. Mama occupied herself with tatting a lace trim for a baby bonnet to send off to the next grandchild, and Lan and I sat and read.

As soon as we were home, I went back to work for Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson. I was surprised to see Professor Torgeson that first day. I’d expected her to be off collecting more stone animals, but she said that between finishing up teaching her classes and making arrangements for all the mules and a guide, she’d be lucky to leave town before July. Then she asked if I still wanted to come along.

I hesitated. Lan was still brooding, and I didn’t want to leave him on his own. Of course, with Mama and Papa and Allie and Robbie, he wouldn’t exactly have been alone much. Professor Torgeson very kindly gave me some time to think on it, and that night over supper, I brought it up.

The next thing I knew, Papa took the notion to send both me and Lan along with the professor. He’d noticed the way Lan was dragging around the house, and he decided that a trip to the West would be just the thing to take his mind off his troubles. That’s what Papa said, anyway; I had a strong suspicion that he and Lan had finally sat down for that talk I’d suggested, and Papa wanted Lan off doing something useful when he broke it to the rest of the family.

What with the sample-collecting trip being mostly a college project, it wasn’t too hard for Papa to arrange for Lan to go on it. For the next couple of weeks, Lan came over to the office house with me. Between the two of us, we got caught up on all the mail the professor had gotten, and we even made a list of all the people who’d asked for samples of the stone animals after we ran out.

Working with the professor seemed to cheer Lan up some, but he wasn’t the same as he had been. Robbie commented on it once when Lan wasn’t around, and Allie lit into him good and proper. She said that almost dying from a bad spell was enough to sober up anyone, and Lan was a lot more grown up now, and that was a very good thing.

Robbie shook his head, but he didn’t try to argue with her. I was pretty sure he suspected more than he let on, though. He’d spent more time with Lan when we were growing up than Allie had, and knew him better than any of our other brothers. I half expected him to badger me for information, but he didn’t. He only came close to admitting that he was worried once, when he and I were talking about the sample collecting.

“You’ll be safe out there?” he asked me.

“I expect I will,” I said. “It’s plenty dangerous, but we did all right last summer.”

“Fine for you,” Robbie said. “But I don’t know about Lan, after all that’s happened.” He paused, then looked me straight in the eye. “You take care of him.”

“Of course I will,” I said. “He’s my twin.”

“Right, then.”

And that was all he ever said about it in my hearing.

Once the semester was over, it didn’t take as long as Professor Torgeson had predicted to get the sample-collecting trip put together. The Homestead Claims and Settlement Office had been working on it all along, and by the second week in June, two days after Lan and I turned twenty, we made the crossing to West Landing.

There were so many of us that we pretty near filled the ferry all by ourselves. There was Lan and me and Professor Torgeson, plus two of Professor Torgeson’s students who were to help with the specimen gathering. All of us had horses, plus two pack animals, and the college had arranged for two muleteers and eight mules to meet us on the far side of the river.

Our guide was a tall, whip-thin man with raggedy blond hair and three scars down the side of his right cheek where something had clawed for his eye and barely missed. His name was Lawrence Jinns, and I never met a grumpier, more close-mouthed man. He knew his job, though. Mules and all, we got on the road out of West Landing less than two hours after the ferry docked.

The trip out to Daybat Creek took us a bit under two weeks this time, even with the mules. Instead of swinging south around the lakes and marshes straight west of Mill City, we went north and then angled west and north through Water Prairie, Mammoth Hill, Wyndholm, and Hoffman’s Ford to Adashome. From Adashome, we followed Daybat Creek downstream through the hills to where the landslide had dammed it up.

The third day out from West Landing, we ran across a bison herd, and later on we saw a couple of prairie wolves following it. Luckily, the wolves were interested in the bison calves, not us, and they didn’t give us any trouble. Mr. Jinns shot a porcupine one day and made soup at the wagonrest later. It was pretty good soup, too. Other than that, we didn’t see much wildlife except for a few birds.

Once we passed Mammoth Hill, the land was still coming back from the grub-killing. Where there was open prairie, the only sign left was a lack of magical plants, but the natural plants like bluestem grass and coneflowers and catchfly had grown back so tall and thick that if you didn’t look close, you wouldn’t know anything had happened. Wherever there’d been woods, though, the bare, dead trunks still stood black against the sky. Even in the dead woods, though, there was new growth — young birches and aspens poking up knee-high like they were in a hurry to replace what was gone, and weeds and bushes that had only needed light to sprout up.

Lan wasn’t talkative on the trip out, but he didn’t seem as gloomy as he’d been. I thought it helped that he was out of doors and away from people he knew. Mr. Jinns and the students didn’t know anything about what had happened in Philadelphia, and Professor Torgeson knew there’d been an accident, but she didn’t much care about details.

When we finally started down Daybat Creek, it didn’t take long before we began seeing bits of gray-white stone scattered along the banks. Professor Torgeson was pleased and excited, but she wouldn’t let us collect any of them. “We’ll leave them for the historical excavators,” she said. I couldn’t help wondering just how many acres of hills she expected them to dig up, but I knew better than to say such a thing straight out.

The place where we’d found the landslide blocking the creek turned out to be about a day and a half west of Adashome. It would have been less, but the hills were covered with grub-killed trees, and we had to make a wide swing around one where the dead trunks had all fallen down in a tangle.

After nearly a year of the creek washing it away, plus all the snowmelt from the winter, the landslide looked more like narrow rapids than a dam that had cut off the creek for a while. Most of the dirt in the middle of the creek had been washed away, though you could still see the steep, bare slope of the hill that had sheared away and a weedy heap of dirt covering the bank of the creek by the bottom of the slope.

We made camp at the top of the hill, in the same place we’d been before. Professor Torgeson asked Lan if he’d help set up the protection spells around the camp, but he declined. The professor tried to persuade him, on account of him being a double-seven and therefore able to do stronger spells and cover more ground for all the people and mules we had with us. Lan went white and absolutely refused. The professor gave him a sharp look, and went off with Mr. Jinns to work the spells. Lan just sat with his head down for a while.

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 could 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.