The Far West (23 page)

We broke camp at last and went on up the Grand Bow. At every stop, Elizabet took readings, Roger and Bronwyn checked for underground changes, and Professor Ochiba spent time doing world-sensing on the river. It wasn’t long before it became obvious that the magic level was climbing as we moved upriver. It wasn’t climbing much, but Roger pointed out that we didn’t know how long the Grand Bow was, and that if the river went all the way to the Rocky Mountains, as seemed likely, and if the magic level kept increasing at the same rate, then by the time we reached the mountains, the magic levels would be sky-high.

That worried everyone, for a lot of reasons. Rivers generate magic as they flow; that’s the main reason why the Great Barrier Spell runs up the Mammoth River and down the St. Lawrence Seaway — so that the natural magic of the river can keep the spell going without any magicians needing to add power every so often. But the magic always flows the same way as the river, getting stronger and stronger as it moves from its headwaters down to the ocean. Nobody, not even Adept Alikaket, knew of any exceptions. Except the Grand Bow.

Mr. Corvales was especially puzzled because he thought that somebody would have noticed before now if the magic along the Grand Bow was behaving oddly. After all, a couple of hundred miles of the river flowed through settlement territory in the Middle Plains. Finally, Roger and Elizabet did some calculations on the rate of change and showed him that if the change in magic was consistent all up and down the river,
the magic levels would be well within the normal range long before the Grand Bow reached settlement territory. And as long as they were normal, nobody was likely to notice that they were always on the high side of the range.

“Which is all very well,” Lan said to me that night, “but it doesn’t do anything to explain why this river is behaving so oddly.” He sounded very cross, and I thought maybe it was because he’d been asking Roger questions and not getting answers.

“No, but everything we find out is important.” I’d been working with Professor Torgeson for three years, and if there was one thing I’d learned from her, that was it. “You never know what is going to be the key thing that tells you what’s going on.”

“There’s too much that we don’t know,” Lan grumbled.

I understood how he felt, but I couldn’t help thinking that he ought to try coming to Adept Alikaket’s practices more often. It’d help him calm down, or at least work off some of his mood instead of taking it out on the rest of us.

I knew better than to say so.

We’d expected to find a lot of wildlife along the river, coming to drink, and we did. There were all the familiar critters — bison and silverhooves, terror birds and prairie wolves, mixed prides of saber cats and Columbian sphinxes, flocks of whooping cranes, piebald geese, and at least six kinds of ducks — but there were unfamiliar ones, too. Dr. Lefevre found a chameleon tortoise on the third day, and at the start of the second week, Wash caught a creature that looked for all the world like a horse that only stood waist-high, with long hair like a mammoth’s. After that, new creatures started turning up at a great rate.

What we hadn’t expected was how many of the new creatures would be magical, or that there would be more of them that absorbed magic, like the mirror bugs and medusa lizards. We found out about the first one almost by accident, when Greasy Pierre brought in a white ground squirrel, alive in one of the specimen cages.

Dr. Lefevre frowned at it. “White?”

“Animals go white in winter up here, don’t they?” one of the soldiers suggested. “Maybe it just hasn’t shed its winter coat yet.”

“By June?” Greasy Pierre said derisively. “Also, it’s larger than a normal ground squirrel.”

“Maybe it’s a sport, then. Albino, or some such.”

“Nonsense,” Dr. Lefevre put in firmly. “Look at the eyes.” He glanced at Mr. Melby, his assistant, and gave him a brief nod of approval when he saw that the man was ready with his recording notebook and pencil. He set the cage on the ground and motioned to Greasy Pierre to stand back so he’d have room to do a sleeping spell. We only did that with the smaller creatures, so that we could examine them without getting bitten or pecked. As soon as everyone was far enough from the cage to suit him, Dr. Lefevre cast the spell.

The squirrel squeaked and turned brown and stripy. It didn’t fall asleep at all.

Mr. Melby scribbled madly in his notebook. “What in —” Dr. Lefevre bit off his exclamation, and cast another spell. The squirrel squeaked again and turned white. It still didn’t fall asleep.

“Mr. Melby!” Dr. Lefevre snapped. “Do me the favor of monitoring the next cast.”

“Dr. Lefevre?” I said. “If you’re trying to find out whether it’s absorbing the spell, I can tell you it is.”

“You were monitoring the spell casting?”

“Aphrikan world-sensing,” I said. “It soaked up the first spell, right enough, but I think there was some left over the second time.”

“You think.” He looked annoyed, and he certainly sounded cross, but I got the feeling that underneath it, he was pleased. “And if I want exact numbers, I will still require the monitoring spell, won’t I? Mr. Melby!”

I stepped back and let them get on with it. Sure enough,
the squirrel was soaking up any magic that was thrown at it. A bit more experimenting showed that it didn’t absorb magic that wasn’t cast directly at it. That was a relief, at first, because it meant that the ground squirrels were no threat to our travel protection spells — Dr. Lefevre checked that as soon as he was sure the critter was eating magic. But then someone pointed out that the ground squirrel probably wouldn’t have developed a knack like that unless there was something that threw magic at it in the first place. That got everyone worrying again.

We found the critter that was throwing magic at the squirrels about two weeks later. It was a kind of small hawk that nobody’d heard of before, with wings that were cloud-white on the bottom side and a pale, speckled brown on top. When it dove down to catch something, it sent a burst of magic ahead of it that stunned whatever it was trying to catch. Mr. Gensier saw it first, so he got to name it. He called it a Priscilla hawk, after his wife back home. Everyone was pleased, because we’d already found two completely new magical animals, even though we hadn’t passed the Lewis and Clark or the McNeil Expeditions yet.

Getting farther than the earlier expeditions was important to everybody, but especially to Mr. Corvales. For the first month, he kept us moving as fast as he could without stinting on the work or wearing down the horses. Near the middle of July, we finally passed Wintering Island. We had another celebration that night, though it almost felt more like we were trying to cheer each other up than like a party. Wintering Island was the very last point in the Far West that anyone knew anything about at all. From there on, we were truly on our own.

Once we’d passed Wintering Island, Mr. Corvales didn’t push us to move quite so fast. “And that’s a relief,” Lan said. Then he added hastily, “Not that I’m not pleased to have finally beaten every other exploratory expedition that’s gone up the Grand Bow.”

“We may not actually have beaten them,” William pointed out. “We don’t know how far Lewis and Clark got after they passed Wintering Island. Or Turnbull’s men, either.”

“I don’t think it counts until we get home,” I put it. “Like the McNeil Expedition.”

That sobered everyone up, but Lan was still grumpy about it for the rest of the day.

Around mid-August, Mr. Corvales started looking for a good place for us to winter over. The easiest and safest spot would have been an island in the middle of the river. There weren’t many kinds of wildlife that would swim out to attack an island, not with all the regular animals that lived on the plains, and even when the river froze over, the flowing water underneath the ice would add power to the protection spells.

Unfortunately, we hadn’t seen anything but sandbars since we’d passed Wintering Island. That left us with two choices: We could push on and hope that we ran across an island before we
had
to stop, and then throw together as much in the way of walls and buildings as we could in whatever time we had left, or we could find a good spot along the riverbank and make a proper job of building winter quarters.

It wasn’t really a hard choice, not if we wanted to be sure
of making it through the winter, but there was some grumbling when Mr. Corvales announced that we’d gone as far west as we were going to go for the year. He picked a spot where a smaller river joined up with the Grand Bow, so that we had water along two sides of our camp. Big cottonwoods grew all along the banks of both rivers, with a few oaks and birches and shredbarks mixed in, so we wouldn’t have to go far to cut wood. In addition, the riverbanks rose a steep ten feet above the water where the two rivers came together, which meant that even if the river froze all the way over, any wildlife would have a hard time getting up to us on those sides.

We spent the next month and a half building a storage area, temporary quarters for ourselves and the horses, an outhouse, and a log wall with two sentry platforms. As soon as each part was finished, the magicians cast the strongest protection spells they had over it. The mammoth was especially useful for hauling logs, as it was large enough to move even the biggest trees, and we needed so many that even with all the growth along the river, we still had to move a lot of them a fair distance.

The wall and a medium-sized corral outside it were the only things we used logs for; there weren’t enough trees to build more and still have firewood for the winter. We made the storage area and living quarters by digging out part of the rise inside the log wall and piling up squares of sod to make short walls around the edge of the hole. We roofed it over with small branches and more squares of sod. The inside was dark and cramped, but it would be warm, and that was the main thing.

As soon as the storage area was finished, Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez sent half the soldiers and explorers
out every day to cut hay and hunt. We built a smokehouse next to the river, to smoke the bison and deer and silverhooves that the hunters brought in. Everyone who wasn’t hunting or building walls spent at least part of every day gathering plants that would keep for a few months in a root cellar — cattail roots, late prairie turnips, sunflower and needlepoint seeds, elderberries, and so on.

Dr. Visser’s lists came in real handy; there were a lot more things that we could eat than anyone had expected, and he found a slough a ways north that was full of a tall, reddish-purple grass, which he said would be particularly good feed for the horses. We spent three weeks cutting it and filling the wagons, over and over.

In mid-September, two of the soldiers left, along with Mr. Gensier, his assistant, and Greasy Pierre. They took copies of all the important notes and maps and discoveries the expedition had made so far, particularly including the things like the don’t-notice-it spells that worked especially well on medusa lizards. Everyone sent letters, too, though there wasn’t room in the saddlebags for more than two per person. Since the returning party knew where they were going and what to expect, and since they didn’t have wagons to slow them down, they had plenty of time to make it to St. Jacques du Fleuve before travel got difficult, even if there was an early snowstorm in October.

Everyone was a little solemn for a few days after the small group left. It wasn’t just because the expedition had been suddenly reduced by five people. We all knew that they’d been sent back so that we’d have a better chance of getting through the winter, with fewer men and horses to feed, and so that the
things we’d learned so far would get back to people who could make use of them, even if we never did.

Right after the return party left, Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez had a big argument with Adept Alikaket over the mammoth, right in the middle of the compound.

“We’re going to have enough trouble keeping the horses fed all winter,” Captain Velasquez told him. “If we try to keep that creature around, we’ll end up starving the lot of them.”

“It has been of much use,” Adept Alikaket pointed out.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Corvales said testily. “I admit the creature has been useful, but it’s also caused us plenty of problems.”

“None of which have been serious,” the adept said, “and all of which were easy to deal with.”

Captain Velasquez snorted. “Not serious? The day of that fire outside St. Jacques, we’d have been away at least half an hour earlier if it hadn’t been for that thing. It was just luck that the fire went east instead of south. It could have been us burning up instead of that settlement, if the wind had shifted.”

“But it was not.”

“No,” Mr. Corvales said. “But it could have been, and next time we may not be so lucky. And the captain here is right about the feed.”

Adept Alikaket frowned slightly. “Mammoths live wild here, yes? There should be plenty of things for it to eat.”

Right about then, Captain Velasquez caught sight of Professor Torgeson crossing the compound, and he called to her to come and explain things to the adept. “You’re partly right,” she said after Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez told her what the problem was. “The mammoth has been grazing
all summer; we couldn’t have brought enough feed along with us for it. Or for the horses, for that matter.”

“Then —”

“There’s a reason mammoths migrate south for the winter,” Professor Torgeson went on. “Food. You won’t find wild mammoths this far north much after mid-October. And if the past five years are anything to go by, we’ll have trouble keeping this one here. It’s always tried to break out of its pen during migration season, even back in Mill City.”

“If we gather more food —” the adept started.

“Weren’t you listening?” Professor Torgeson snapped. “Food or no food, it’s going to try to take off after its free brethren, starting in about two weeks, and if there’s a spell to stop it, we haven’t learned it in all the years it’s been in the menagerie.”

“And we haven’t the time to gather enough to feed it all winter, nor space to store it if we could gather it,” Captain Velasquez added.

“
And
the thing is more trouble than it’s worth.” Mr. Corvales held up a hand to stop the adept’s objection. “Yes, it’s been useful, but it hasn’t been useful
enough
. I don’t understand why you insisted on bringing it along in the first place.”

Adept Alikaket glared at the three of them. “I will think about this,” he said at last. “If any of you have any other ideas, I hope you will let me know.”

“Personally, I think we should shoot it now, smoke the meat, and tan the hide,” Professor Torgeson muttered.

I could understand her saying that. Though it wasn’t quite full-grown, the mammoth was large enough to provide meat for half the camp for a good part of the winter, and a mammoth-
hide blanket would keep several people warmer than just about anything else. I hoped it wouldn’t come to shooting it, though. I’d been working with the mammoth since my first year in upper school, and I’d much rather turn it loose to take its chances than kill it outright.

The argument continued, off and on, for several days, and pretty much everyone had an opinion. Most of the soldiers were with Professor Torgeson, and thought we should shoot it, at least until Mr. Zarbeliev told everyone that he’d had mammoth a time or two and it was stringy and rank and nothing you’d want to eat unless you were a good way beyond desperate. There were a few folks among the scientists and magicians who thought we should try to keep it — Dr. Lefevre was the most outspoken of those — but most everyone else thought we should let it go, and the sooner the better.