Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 8

WE SPENT THE REST OF THAT DAY COUNTING PLANTS AND ANIMALS around the wagonrest, the same way we had at the first one. Professor Torgeson let me do one side while she did the other, though she came and checked my work around mid-morning and again a few hours later. She must not have found anything to complain of, because she just nodded and told me to keep on the way I was going. Later on, she showed me how to collect specimens, though she only kept one of the plants she’d collected herself. She had a special case for them, divided into compartments to hold small vials (for insects and seeds) and press blocks (for pressing and drying and protecting flowers and leaves).

When we left the Puerta del Oeste wagonrest the next morning, we made a sharp turn straight west. Wash warned us that soon we’d be crossing into the area that the grubs and the mirror bugs had laid to waste the summer before, and asked if the professor wanted to do any more surveying before we got there.

Professor Torgeson looked thoughtful for a moment, but then she said that we had enough to go on with and she was more concerned with documenting the new growth in the recovering area. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant at first. I’d been through some of the area the summer before, when we went to Oak River, and it had looked the way I’d always thought a desert would: barren and dusty and eerily quiet. I couldn’t see much recovering happening any time soon.

But two hours later, we were riding past green, green meadows and settlements with fields sprouting. From a distance, it looked almost normal, until you noticed that nearly all of the trees were dead, leafless skeletons. The grubs had eaten away all their roots and killed them. One or two had a single clump of leaves on a high branch, but that was all.

Closer up, you could see that the meadow looked a little too green — there were no long, brown remnants of last year’s grass to be seen — and it was barely ankle high. And every hillside and uneven patch of ground had deep, irregular channels cut in them where rain had washed away the dirt. We had to slow down so the horses wouldn’t stumble on the uneven footing.

Professor Torgeson made us stop to list the plants and bugs and so on. Wash picketed the horses and stood guard with the rifle while we worked, even though he still had all the protection spells for traveling up.

We ended up spending nearly three hours, and had to stop at the next wagonrest instead of going farther on the way we’d planned. Turned out that the plants that were coming back — bluestem grass, catchfly, fleabane, milkweed — were all natural ones, not magical. Once the professor noticed, we started hunting for the magical plants in deliberate earnest, but we only turned up one stunted flameleaf and a hardy northern sleeping rose in the whole three hours.

“Mr. Morris, is this common, in your experience?” she asked once we were finally back on our horses.

“I can’t rightly say, Professor,” Wash said. “The grubs that laid waste to this area were a brand-new thing. But now and again I’ve crossed stretches that were coming back after a wildfire, and as best I recall, the magical plants came back first.”

There were a few more magical plants around the wagonrest than there had been along the road — another flameleaf, three clumps of goldengrass, a scattering of demonweed, and a couple of spindly witchvines — and the professor got excited all over again. We didn’t leave until nearly mid-morning, and then only because Wash said if we waited much longer, we wouldn’t make the next wagonrest by nightfall.

We made pretty good time to begin with, but shortly after noon, Wash pulled his horse to a stop at the crest of a low hill.

“Something wrong?” Professor Torgeson asked.

“Could be,” Wash said. He hesitated, then went on, “Would you mind taking over the traveling spells for a few minutes, Professor?”

“Not at all, Mr. Morris,” the professor replied. Her eyes narrowed in concentration and she stretched out a hand. After a moment, her arm dipped as if she had caught a thrown ball or a falling plate, and I knew that Wash had handed off the protection spells to her.

As soon as the spell hand-off was done, Wash turned in his saddle to face due south and went still as a stone. His horse shifted once, then stood quietly. I thought he must be doing Aphrikan world-sensing, and without thinking about it much, I took a deep breath and did the same.

It was like stepping out the door on a dead calm day in mid-January when it’s so cold it hurts to breathe and it feels like everything is frozen so solid that nothing will ever move again. It was so unexpected that it threw me right back into my own head, which hadn’t happened to me when I was world-sensing since my first year in upper school.

Wash was still sitting motionless on his horse. I tried again, slowly, like poking your nose out the door just a little to see how cold it is. I could feel our horses, and Wash and Professor Torgeson, and they all felt normal. But the plants and the ground underfoot felt … empty and cold. I poked a little further, trying to sense things that were farther away, but nothing changed. I could barely tell the difference between the top of the hill and the bottom. I wondered what it felt like to Wash.

As I pulled back, Wash shivered all over and took a deep breath.

“What is it?” Professor Torgeson said in a low voice.

“Trouble,” Wash replied in a grim tone. He reached for his rifle. “The sort that needs looking into. If I’m not back in an hour —”

“No,” the professor interrupted firmly. “Splitting up in the wildlands is asking for trouble. More trouble. Either we head for the nearest settlement for more assistance —”

“That’s a good ten miles,” Wash said, shaking his head.

“— or we all investigate now. If you are confident of handling things alone, the three of us together should manage quite —”

The air at the foot of the hill rippled, and even though I wasn’t the one holding the protection spells, I felt them give. A tan-colored streak bounded up the slope toward us. Wash had his rifle to his shoulder, and the professor started muttering a spell. My horse shied and tried to bolt, and so did the packhorse. I heard the first shot while I was trying to get the two of them under control again. At the same time, I felt a spell sweep past me.

Something snarled. I looked up, and the tan streak resolved into a saber cat. It had a large head, with fangs curving down past its lower jaw and chin. It would have been as high as my chest if I’d been standing on the ground instead of up on a horse. From there, its back sloped down to rear legs that were short but powerful enough to send the whole big cat hurtling through the air, even though it was jumping up the hill.

Wash fired again. The bullet caught the charging saber cat in mid-leap, slamming it back and sideways to roll down the hill. As my eyes followed it, I saw something dark moving off to one side. I couldn’t seem to get a clear look at it, but I thought it was maybe half the size of the saber cat, and it was moving at least twice as fast.

I raised my hand and, as hard as I knew how, cast the spell we used at the menagerie to push the mammoth back from the walls. It knocked the second creature all the way back to the foot of the hill. A moment later, another spell hit it. It howled in pain, and the air around it rippled. A third shot rang out. The creature jerked and stopped moving.

I was panting, one hand clenched tight around the reins, the other raised in case I needed another spell. Professor Torgeson was still muttering, though neither of the animals looked to be moving any. The only other sounds were the whisper of the wind, the creak of the harness leather as the horses shifted, and the click of the cartridges as Wash reloaded his rifle.

Professor Torgeson finished her spell. A moment later, she relaxed slightly in her saddle. “That’s all of them,” she said. “At least, that’s all that are nearby.”

Wash shook his head, but not like he was contradicting her. “How nearby?”

“Half-mile radius,” the professor replied. “And yes, I compensated for the sphinx effect.”

“Saber cats and Columbian sphinxes travel in prides,” Wash said, frowning. “Meaning, more than three.”

“Three?” I said before I could stop myself.

The professor pointed past me, to the north. I turned and saw another heap of tan fur partway up the hillside. “Saber cats are clever, cooperative hunters,” she said. “When they’re stalking, the pride will try to encircle their prey, so that as few as possible will escape.”

I’d just barely begun feeling easy, but that made me tense again. “So where are the rest of them?”

“That is a right good question,” Wash said. He looked at the professor. “Are you as handy with a rifle as you are with a spell?”

“I can manage, at need.”

“Good.” He swung down from his horse and handed her the rifle and me the reins. Then he went down the hill to examine the dead saber cats and the sphinx. After a few minutes, he circled the hill farther out, pausing occasionally to study the ground.

“Scouts,” he said shortly as he reclaimed his rifle and horse. “The rest of the pride will be back that way.” He pointed south. “All three look to be three-quarters starved … but they’ve fed well recently. That’ll be why they aren’t all traveling together — the pride has killed something large enough to last them a few days.” He looked from the professor to me and added, “Maybe a couple of bison, or a mammoth.”

I couldn’t help frowning a little at that. We hadn’t seen any bison or mammoths or even deer since we crossed into the area that the grubs had devastated the year before.

“Starving,” Professor Torgeson said thoughtfully. “That explains why they pushed through the protective spells, then.”

Wash snorted. “Wildlife comes through the protective spells for all sorts of reasons, and we only know about half of them. If that.”

“I take your point, Mr. Morris.” The professor hesitated, as if she wanted to say more, then shook her head slightly and waited.

“We need to warn the nearest settlements,” Wash said after a moment. “Let’s go.”

I noticed he didn’t say anything more about investigating trouble, but he didn’t seem too happy about going on, either. I wondered about that. Wash wasn’t the sort to go courting trouble, and searching out a mixed pride of saber cats and Columbian sphinxes looked to me like being more trouble than even a trouble-seeker would ever want.

The horses were still skittish, so we gave the dead cats a wide berth. As we rode away, Professor Torgeson looked over her shoulder and said, “You did well, Eff.” Then she went back to concentrating on the travel protection spells.

It made me feel good to hear that, but I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I hadn’t been much help when the saber cats attacked. Oh, I’d kept my seat and hung on to the packhorse, which at least kept me from causing extra problems, but I hadn’t been good for much else, and I didn’t like it. I’d grown up on the edge of the West; I ought to have been more use than simply hanging on to a horse and throwing one measly spell.

I stewed over that all the way to the next settlement, a place called Bejmar. They weren’t too pleased to see us at first. Like the other settlements that had managed to survive the grubs and mirror bugs, they were hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and they didn’t have much of anything to be hospitable with. As soon as the words “saber cat pride” were out of Wash’s mouth, though, the man on gate duty hurried off to ring the alarm bell. All the folks who’d been out in the fields dropped what they were doing and came running. By the time we’d finished telling our story to the settlement magician, everyone was inside the walls, and within half an hour of our arrival, the settlement had sent out message riders to the two nearest settlements and started collecting all the people and guns they could spare.

Wash and Professor Torgeson assumed that they’d be going out with the settlers to hunt saber cats. The professor offered to let me stay in Bejmar with our packhorse and supplies, and I even thought about it for a minute or two. Part of me wanted nothing to do with hunting because I was still shaking from the suddenness of the attack and the way I hadn’t seen that third cat coming up behind me until after it was shot dead, but another part of me wanted a chance to prove I could do better. There was something else, too — a big, foggy feeling that included the grubs and the dead countryside and the settlements and most of the people we’d met west of the Great Barrier, all in a jumble. I couldn’t put a name to it, but it was pushing me to go along and do whatever I could. So I swallowed my worries and told the professor that I thought the hunters needed as many folks as they could get and it wouldn’t seem right to stay safe in the settlement.

The settlers were extra careful that none of the livestock got left outside the palisade walls after dark, and the settlers who weren’t heading out next morning stood watch all night long. Saber cats have been known to claw their way right over a wall to get at the horses and cows, so everyone was tense.

Next morning, we rode out to take care of the pride: five settlers, Wash, Professor Torgeson, and me. After what we’d seen with only three animals, I wasn’t sure that we had enough people, but Professor Torgeson said we’d be meeting up with folks from the other settlements around. A full pride of saber cats and sphinxes was too dangerous to let alone, especially if they were mostly starving, and all the settlements in the area would cooperate to get rid of it.

I had the repeating rifle that Robbie had given me, and most of the settlement folk had something similar, though their weapons all looked well used. The folks from the other settlements caught up with us around mid-morning — five men from Neues Hamburg and three men and a woman from Jorgen. That made seventeen of us. I still wasn’t sure it was enough, since we didn’t know how many cats there were, but Wash and the settlers seemed to think it was reasonable.

After a quick discussion, they decided on a man named Meyer to be leader of the whole group. He was a bluff blond man with sharp eyes that never smiled even when his mouth did. I didn’t care for him, but all the settlers knew him and plainly trusted him to do a good job.

We went on slowly. It took all morning and a bit of the afternoon to go back over the distance that had taken two and a half hours with just Wash and the professor and me. Wash and Professor Torgeson stayed in front, working a variation on the travel protection spells. This time, we didn’t want to drive the wildlife off; we wanted them to come out where we could see and shoot them. In order to do that, we had to know when they were coming, and from what direction.

Long about mid-afternoon, we got to the hill where we’d faced the saber cats the day before. As soon as we came in sight of the dead animals, Mr. Meyer signaled everyone to stop. “Mr. Morris says we’re getting close,” he told us. “We’ll leave the horses here. Any volunteers for guard duty?”

After a minute, two of the settlers nodded. They didn’t look too happy about staying behind, but someone had to. The horses would panic if they smelled cat, and we’d never get close to them.

We picketed the horses, and Wash and the professor set up a protection spell around them. Protection spells are usually meant to go out as far as they can, to keep the wildlife as far away as possible, but this time they had to keep it as close in as they could. The men who were staying looked uneasy about it, and I didn’t blame them. They wouldn’t have much in the way of warning if the saber cats decided to come through the protection spell, the way they had the day before. Nobody made a fuss, though. We all knew that we were hunting for a mixed pride, saber cats and Columbian sphinxes both, and the sphinxes were particularly sensitive to magic. If they noticed any spells, there was no telling what they’d do; they might run off before we could kill them all, or they might charge, the way the three scouts had charged us the day before. So the spell couldn’t go much past where the horses were picketed.

As soon as the spell was set around the horses, the rest of us went on, as slow and silent as we could. It hadn’t rained overnight, so the tracks were easy to follow, and a good thing, too, because we couldn’t use magic to find the pride. Columbian sphinxes aren’t just extra sensitive to magic; they also put out magic of their own that hides where they are. It also messes up any magic that their prey might use to tell where they are, and that unfortunately includes most Avrupan detection spells. Even Wash hadn’t sensed the cats that had attacked us until they were almost to us.

Mr. Meyer had us fan out in a line, so that if the cats charged, we wouldn’t all be likely targets. It was a scary feeling, trying to walk real quiet through the empty, open land. There weren’t even any dead trees to hide behind on this part, and the prairie plants were only a little more than ankle high.

Wash and two of the settlement men were a little ahead of us, doing the tracking. The air was warm, just at the point where it’s comfortable for sitting in the shade, but not for digging over the garden in the sun. There was no wind, which was good because it wouldn’t carry our scent to the cats, but it was also bad because it just made everything seem even hotter and there was no breeze to carry away the bugs. No matter how good you are at sneaking, you can’t ever sneak well enough so that mosquitoes won’t find you, and no matter how worried and tense you are, or how hard you are trying to pay attention, you just can’t help noticing when a cloud of mosquitoes comes for you like you’re their first good meal since last fall.

After about ten minutes, one of the trackers pointed off to the left. There was a little cluster of dead trees with some equally dead bushes around and between them. Through the bare twigs, I could just make out a covered wagon, still and silent. My stomach went hollow. As we crept closer, I told myself that the settlers from the wagon must have run across the pride, the same as we had, and left the wagon behind so as to get to a settlement faster. I didn’t really believe it, though.

Suddenly, one of the settlers shouted, “On your left!”

Everyone turned to see two saber cats charging up out of nowhere.