Patricia Wrede - Across the Great Barrier

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.