Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 9

PEOPLE STARTED FIRING. I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LINE AND I didn’t have a clear shot at either cat. Remembering the day before, I turned, and sure enough, there was another saber cat charging from the right, and two more directly behind us. Without thinking, I raised my rifle and shot, pumped the lever to reload, and fired again. I heard a man scream, and a cat snarl. There were more shots and shouts.

Professor Torgeson cast an area spell, revealing the sphinxes. There were three: smaller than the saber cats, black as night. They had bodies like a lynx, but their heads were set higher above their shoulders, and they had a long, thick mane of black hair. If you didn’t pay too much attention to the faces, they really did look a lot like the drawings of the Egyptian Sphinx in my history books.

They were fast, too — even faster than the saber cats. I heard one of the settlers later telling folks back in Bejmar that he’d seen one of the sphinxes actually dodge a bullet. He was exaggerating, I think, but I can’t deny they were almighty hard to hit.

I shot twice more, backing up in between shots. All of the saber cats that hadn’t fallen were in among us by then, and so were the sphinxes. The animals had each been hit at least once, but they were all mad as blazes and wouldn’t go down. It was hard to get a clear shot without maybe hitting someone else. I lowered my rifle and knocked one of the animals back with the spell I’d used before. Someone else shot it.

And then, as quick as it had started, it was over. We’d killed five saber cats and three sphinxes, and three men had been mauled. “Don’t let your guard down,” Mr. Meyer cautioned as everyone took a breath and started toward the three who’d been injured. “This may not be all of them.”

“A full pride is usually seven to ten cats and four to eight sphinxes,” Wash said, nodding. “With the ones from yesterday, we’ve killed seven cats and four sphinxes. We might have gotten lucky and got them all, but best not to take chances.”

“I can’t believe they got the drop on us,” a settler said. “We knew they were there!”

“Quit jawing,” his companion advised, “or whatever’s left of the pride will catch us with our pants down all over again. ‘Scuse me, ladies.”

Everyone reloaded, even the ones who were going to look after the injured. All of the injured men were bleeding pretty heavily from bites and claw marks, and one of them had a shattered arm bone where a saber cat had bitten down hard. One of the men from Neues Hamburg had brought a bag of remedies that their doctor had put together for them; he and the woman from Jorgen split up the poultices and bandages and started wrapping up the bites, but there wasn’t much they could do about the arm.

After a long argument, Mr. Meyer sent Wash and half the able-bodied through the dead trees to check on the wagon. We drew straws for it; saber cats aside, everyone had a fair notion what they’d find and nobody was any too keen on going to look. I was relieved to get a long straw, which meant I’d stay to help guard the injured.

A few minutes later, we heard another round of shots. A while after that, Wash’s group came back, grim-faced. “Two more saber cats, a sphinx, and five cubs,” Wash reported. “We got them all.”

“They had cubs to protect?” Mr. Meyer said. “No wonder they came at us like that!” He paused for a minute. “What about —”

“The settlers?” Wash shook his head. “No survivors.”

“We were lucky,” another man said, and spat. “These cats were still half starved. It can’t have been more than a day or two since they got the wagon; if they’d had more time to feed on the greenhorn’s oxen, they’d have had a lot more of their strength back.”

We stayed on guard until the trackers had circled the camp, looking for signs of any more cats. Once they were sure we’d gotten them all, we had to decide what to do next. With three men hurt (two of them badly enough that they couldn’t ride), we wouldn’t make it to a settlement by nightfall. Half the men wanted to get as far as we could; the rest wanted to stay put and ride out in the morning. They’d all pretty much decided that since the saber cats were dead, they didn’t have to follow Mr. Meyer’s orders without giving their own opinions first. They had a lot of opinions. Then the three who were most set on having things their own way got to arguing with each other, and even when someone pointed out that the longer they argued, the more likely it was that we’d have to stay put, it only made them argue harder.

In the end, we sent five people to get the horses and the guards we’d left with them, and started hacking down the dead brush for firewood. Wash and Professor Torgeson set up the strongest protection spells they could do at short notice, though as Wash said, it wasn’t really necessary.

“A pride of saber cats has been living here for at least three days,” he pointed out. “With cubs. Most of the wildlife has sense enough to stay far away from saber cat territory, if they can.”

“Most of the wildlife?” someone asked.

“Well, I doubt that a steam dragon would be bothered,” Wash said, “but it’s been seven years since one of them got blown out of the Far West into settlement territory.”

That got a nervous laugh from some of the settlers, but I shivered. I remembered that steam dragon. It was the first time I’d ever heard the alarm bell in Mill City ring the wildlife warning. The dragon had flown right over the Great Barrier Spell, and it had taken most of the magicians in town to bring it down.

Once the protection spell was up, Mr. Meyer asked for volunteers to bury the dead and salvage what they could from the wagon. I wasn’t too keen on helping with the burying, but I could see that someone should at least try to find out who they’d been and where their people were, so that their family could be notified. I said I’d help with the wagon.

I was sorry almost as soon as I got near. The wagon had had four oxen pulling it, and they and the settlers had been dead in the hot sun for two days. On top of that, the saber cats had been marking the area as theirs. The whole area stank of death and decay and cat urine. I hauled out my handkerchief and tied it over my nose and mouth. It helped, but I still had to breathe shallowly.

Four of the men gathered up the bodies of the settler and his family, while some of the others started in digging the graves. As soon as they said the wagon was cleared out, I climbed up on the driver’s seat and started looking around. There was an old sawed-off shotgun lying crosswise right where the driver would have been sitting. Both barrels had been fired. Under the seat, I found a metal box, the sort most settlers used to carry money and family papers. It wasn’t locked, and when I opened it I got a shock. The dead settlers were Giles Carpenter, the man we’d met at Puerta del Oeste who’d been in too much hurry to get to his allotment to wait for a travel guide, and his family.

That rattled me more than a little, and I was still shaky from the fight with the saber cats. I’d always known that the settlements were dangerous, and I’d met a few folks who’d been injured by wildlife, but Mr. Carpenter was the first person I’d met who’d actually gotten killed in the West. That I knew of, anyway; about half of my class from the day school had gone out to settlements and I hadn’t kept in touch with any of them. That thought was even more unsettling. I closed up the box and set it aside, then crawled back into the wagon to see what Mr. Carpenter had brought along with him.

Mr. Carpenter may not have been too smart about traveling with a guide, but he’d done a bang-up job at picking his supplies. There were two more guns packed away, an old smoothbore rifle and a revolver, and plenty of ammunition for all of them. He had a small keg of nails, two barrels of flour and another of sugar, a lot of beef jerky, a large crate of tools for building and mending things, seed for both a field of soybeans and one of Scandian wheat, and a lot of other things. All of it seemed like it would be real useful, even to a well-established settlement like Neues Hamburg, so rather than deciding anything myself, I made a list for Mr. Meyer. I was glad when I finished and got back to the camp, even if it was only a little way from the wagon.

Over dinner that night, the settlers had a solemn talk on what to do with Mr. Carpenter’s wagon and supplies. There was too much to just abandon, but nobody wanted to come back a second time. Luckily, one of the men said he could jury-rig a harness for horses from what was left of the straps and the yoke for the oxen. It wouldn’t be as good as a proper horse collar, but if they went slowly and some of the men helped push the wagon, it would do. What clinched the argument was that we could put the three injured men in the back. They’d be jolted around — there was no helping that — but there was no way they could ride, and the wagon was better than having to ride double.

As soon as she heard we were taking the wagon, Professor Torgeson asked if there’d be room for one of the dead saber cats. The settlers gave her funny looks. One of them offered to skin one for her right there, if she wanted it that bad, but she said she wanted the whole cat for the college to dissect. Mr. Meyer said that as long as she took care of preserving it herself, and knew what she wanted done with it, he didn’t see a problem. So the professor spent the rest of the evening looking at the dead cats to find the one that had been shot up the least. She picked out two, a female saber cat and a male Columbian sphinx, and stayed up through the first watch putting layers of preservation spells on them so they’d get back to the college in good condition.

Just before dark, Mr. Meyer set watches, and the rest of us settled down under the stars to try to sleep. I was restless for a long time, and when I finally did fall asleep, I had the first of the dreams. Even then, I knew it was different. It was sharper and clearer than my other dreams, and I never had any fear that I’d forget the smallest part of it.

I dreamed I was standing in the old well house back in Helvan Shores, where I’d lived until I was five. It was dark and damp and too warm. Someone had left the cover off the well, and a bucket on a rope beside it. I was desperately thirsty, but I was afraid to go near the well to try to draw up any water for myself. Mama had drilled into us all that we weren’t to be in the well house without an adult, and if that hadn’t been enough, the older childings told all us youngers all sorts of tales about childings who’d fallen in and drowned.

After a while, I crept to the bucket and pulled it back to the wall, where I could look at it without getting too close to the well. There was a little stale water in the bottom, barely a palmful, but I drank it down as fast as I could. It only made me thirstier, but at the same time, I was more afraid than ever.

I decided that it would be best to leave. I peered into the dark well room, but I couldn’t see the door. I edged around the wall, peering, and feeling the cool stone with my fingers. After a long time, I tripped over the bucket. I’d gone all the way around, and there was no door. I pressed back against the wall, sure that something would come out of the well and get me. And then I heard rain on the roof.

I woke up feeling terrified and chilled. As soon as I recollected where I was, I went straight to the fire. It had burned to embers, but it still gave off heat enough to warm me a little. When I was finally warm, I laid myself back down, but it was a long time before I slept again.

The next morning, we finished burying Mr. Carpenter and his family. Mr. Meyer read a psalm out of the little Bible he carried with him, and Wash said a few words about people brave enough to come across the Great Barrier into the West. He didn’t mention people who weren’t smart enough to follow good advice when they got it, but that would have been unkind. Then we got to work loading up the professor’s dead cats and the three injured men, and started back toward the settlements.

With four horses pulling and five men across the back pushing, we kept the wagon rolling pretty well until we had to part company. We sent the wagon on to Neues Hamburg, because the settlement was old enough and large enough to have its own doctor and two of the injured men were from there. One of the men from Jorgen went with, on account of the other injured man being from Jorgen. Before they left, the settlers from Jorgen and Neues Hamburg both thanked Wash and the professor and me for letting them know about the saber cats. Mr. Meyer even tried to offer a reward, but Wash said helping out like that was a circuit magician’s job, even if he was only half on duty, and the professor said that as long as they saw to it that her large samples got back to the university, she’d be more than happy to call it square.

When we got back to Bejmar, we had to go over the whole business one more time for the settlement magician. “Thank you,” he said when we finished. “Both for the warning and the help.” He shook his head tiredly. “I’d hoped that with so much forage and cover gone, we’d have a year or two before the big predators came back, but it seems not. Though the smaller wildlife aren’t much better.”

“Those cats shouldn’t have been there at all,” one of the men who’d come with us burst out. “They were starving, all of them; since when does a starving animal come to a place where there’s no food?”

“They found food, right enough,” one of the others muttered, and the first man turned on him.

“There are herds of deer and bison and silverhooves to the west, out past the land the mirror bugs destroyed,” he snarled. “Hell, a full pride can bring down a mammoth, and there are plenty of mammoths out past settlement country! Why didn’t the blasted cats just stay there?”

No one had an answer.

We stayed in Bejmar just long enough for the professor to find some people to observe the plants and animals for the college, and then we went on our way. The settlement magician and a couple of the other settlers made a halfhearted try at persuading us to stay the night, but Wash and the professor thanked them kindly and said no. We’d already lost nearly two days; if this kept up, we’d be all summer just getting out to the western edge of the settlements, let alone heading north and back around to Mill City.