Patricia Wrede - Across the Great Barrier

“And without it getting twisted when it gets passed along,” Wash added sternly.

Several people shifted uncomfortably.

“Nils, you first,” Mr. Macleod said.

Nils Anderson stood up from his place next to Mr. Karlsen. He seemed a little hesitant at first, but once he got going he didn’t seem to want to stop. He and his brother had started off looking to hunt deer or bison — they didn’t much care whether they got one of the natural varieties or a magical one, as long as they could eat it. They’d run across Pierre at one of the fords where the trappers and hunters were accustomed to water their horses, and the three of them had gone on together. They figured that whatever they shot, the Andersons could take the meat and Pierre could take the skin.

They hadn’t expected the trip to take very long, but about all the game they could find were rabbits and squirrels and such like. Everything larger seemed to have gone missing. Then they came across a stone bear with its paws full of early bison-berries, and they decided that if something was turning things to stone and had scared off all the game, they ought to be scared off, too.

The three of them cut back toward Big Bear Lake. Back by the ford, they found some strange tracks. “Not more than two hours old, and the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” Nils said. “The prints were flat and stretched out, like a hand pressed down on a tabletop, and all four toes were thin and triangular, almost like fingers.”

“I have never before seen such a thing,” Greasy Pierre put in, nodding. “Not even in the Far Northwest, where I am one of the few who are bold and daring enough to lay traplines in winter.”

Several folks snorted at this, and then someone in the back called, “How big were the prints?”

“So,” Pierre said, measuring what looked like four or five inches between his two hands. “It would be the weight of a young horse, I think.”

The three men had dismounted, and Pierre and Nils went to examine the tracks, while Olaf took the packhorses a little way downstream to water them and adjust their loads. Pierre had his rifle handy, but the other two were relying on the travel protection spells to at least give them warning of anything nasty coming their way.

Wash frowned when Nils said that, and Greasy Pierre sniffed and looked superior.

“It was my turn to hold the travel protection spells,” Nils said. “They were fine, I swear — no sign of anything for half a mile out. And then the horses spooked. Olaf grabbed the lead line for the pack animals, but his riding horse took off for the far side of the ford — ripped the branch right off the bush Olaf had him tethered to.”

“He should have used a larger branch,” Greasy Pierre commented, but not very loudly.

“I went to try to calm the other horses,” Nils went on. “And then … it felt like something hit me on the back of the head. I went out like a blown candle. When I woke up, Olaf …”

He choked up and stopped speaking. Mr. Macleod told him to sit down and let Pierre take over, since the trapper was the only one who’d seen all the rest. Pierre stood up with considerable relish; I could see he liked being the indent of attention. He didn’t tell a straightforward story, the way Mr. Anderson had; he kept gussying it up with comments about his other adventures and how brave he was. The heart of it wasn’t hard to come at, though.

When the horses spooked, Greasy Pierre jumped for cover and raised his rifle. He saw the three packhorses dancing around Olaf, and Olaf’s horse bolting. Then he heard a noise like an owl hooting, only he said the hoot went on a lot longer than an owl’s would have. He saw Nils collapse, just as the travel protection spells came down, all at once. An instant later, Olaf let out a yell and fell over backward into the creek, and all three of the packhorses turned gray-white and froze motionless. It wasn’t until Pierre had a chance to look at them later on that he realized they’d all turned to stone.

Pierre let off four rifle shots as fast as ever he could, aiming for the brush along the bank where he thought the hooting might be coming from. The hooting stopped abruptly, and he heard rustling heading away from the ford. He didn’t figure he’d hit anything, only maybe scared it off, but that was good enough for the time being. He peeked out from behind the tree and fired again a couple of times, just to make sure, then went to the creek to fish Olaf out.

Olaf was pale as a new sheet, and when Pierre got a good look at him, he didn’t blame the man one bit. His left leg had turned to stone from just above the knee on down. Pierre hauled him out of the water and left him by a tree with the rifle while he went to see what had happened to Nils. He was a mite surprised to find Nils still alive but unconscious.

“It was a state most dire!” Greasy Pierre said dramatically. “For alone, I could not hope to return two injured men to safety, and the creature might return at any moment! What could I do? I approached the stone horses to see what I could learn!”

What he was after was the medical kit in the Andersons’ pack, and whatever else he could salvage. Turned out he could salvage as much as they could carry. The packhorses had turned to stone, but their packs and gear hadn’t. Pierre grabbed another rifle and all of the ammunition, and the medical kit, but he didn’t figure on taking much more than that. It was more important to get out of there — and bring the news of what had happened back to Big Bear Lake — than to try to haul their supplies back to the settlement.

By the time Pierre finished digging through the packs, Olaf had passed out and Nils had woken up. Nils was too drained to cast even a fire-lighting spell, and he had a headache powerful enough to make his eyes cross, but he could ride. Pierre got him up on one of the two remaining horses, and between them, they loaded Olaf in front of him, and then they left. They didn’t even take time to recast the travel protection spells, though Pierre had sense enough to do a strong speed-traveling spell once they were away from the ford. They’d covered what was normally a day’s ride from the ford to the settlement in less than an hour, hoping that Mr. Macleod would know what to do for Olaf.

There was a long silence when Mr. Le Grise finished his tale. Then someone in the back said in a shaky voice, “Turned to stone? His leg just … really?”

“I can attest to that,” Mr. Macleod said. “Or if you’d like to look for yourself, we have it under a preserving spell, so that the magicians in Mill City can take a closer look at it.”

“You don’t need a preserving spell for stone,” a hard-faced man in front objected.

“You do if it used to be somebody’s leg and it’s still flesh for about half an inch around the bone down the indent,” Mr. Macleod said grimly. “At least, it is as far as we could tell.”

Several people in the audience turned green, and Mr. Anderson made a strangled noise. Mr. Macleod shook himself and said, “Yonnie, why don’t you take Nils back to my place and let Martha come on here? You can sit with Olaf. Pierre can tell us anything else we need to know.”

“What else do we need to know?” someone muttered as Mr. Karlsen and Mr. Anderson left.

“How to stop the thing, whatever it is,” someone else said.

“Why did it get all three of the packhorses, but only Olaf’s leg?” the hard-faced man demanded.

Pierre shrugged. “He was standing behind the horses; perhaps they blocked the spell, so that it only struck his leg. Or perhaps it is because he fell into the water, and that is what saved him. I was not watching closely to see exactly what turned to stone when, you understand.”

“You said it took down your travel protection spells?” a woman in a blue calico dress asked.