Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 4

I PASSED MY EXAMS AND STARTED WORKING AT THE MENAGERIE FOR real in April. I was happy and busy, and I didn’t pay too much heed to Mama’s worrying or to the visits of the new head of the North Plains Territory Homestead Claims and Settlement Office. There were always people from the Settlement Office coming by in the spring, on account of their arrangement with the college. The Settlement Office never had enough magicians, so they’d taken to hiring on some of the magic students during the summer, and of course the college professors always helped out when there was an emergency.

At least, the professors helped out if the emergency was the sort magic could deal with. Magic couldn’t do much to replace the oats and Scandian wheat and meadow rice and soybeans the mirror bugs had eaten, and that spring, eighteen settlements failed. A lot more were right on the edge of failing. The only small bit of good news was that the bugs had driven back a lot of the wildlife and had cleared a whole bunch of land that the settlers could plant. If we had a good growing summer, maybe the shaky settlements would get back on a solid footing again.

Meantime, the government in Washington had put a hold on building any new settlements until they’d studied up on the situation. That made a lot of folks in town very cross, including some of the people from the Settlement Office.

“We’ve solved the mirror bug problem,” I heard one of them tell Papa. “And there are acres and acres of land that the bugs wiped clean, just begging to be filled up. But by the time those imbeciles in Washington realize it, the prairie will be back and it’ll be twice as hard to expand. Wildlife always comes back stronger after a fire clears an area, and this will be no different.”

Papa just hmphed at him, which meant he didn’t really agree with the Settlement Office man but didn’t want to start an argument right then.

I was busy most of April with the young mammoth at the menagerie. The McNeil expedition had brought him back as a baby, along with a few other samples of wildlife. He wasn’t a baby anymore; in fact, it was hard to think of him as only partway grown. He was half again as tall as a tall man, and his tusks were three and a half feet long and as big around as my arm. He could split a rail fence with one blow of those tusks, and he’d done it a time or two, which was why his pen had a high fieldstone wall around it now, outside the rail fence. We still needed the wooden rails, because when he got edgy he’d charge at the wall and do himself an injury if there wasn’t something in between for him to take out his mad on.

The mammoth always got restless in spring and fall, when the mammoth herds out on the plains were migrating, and that year was the worst ever. Professor Torgeson had to help out with the calming spells a time or two, and once even Professor Jeffries joined in. “It’s because he’s growing,” Professor Jeffries said.

“That may be true, but it won’t make any difference to the college or the people who live around it if he gets loose,” Professor Torgeson snapped. She was a tall, rangy, red-haired woman with a marked Vinland accent, and she spoke her mind to anyone, which had already gotten her into difficulties with some of the other professors.

“I think we’ve been taking the wrong tack,” Professor Jeffries said. “He doesn’t need calming down; he needs exercise.”

“Ride him North and feed him to an ice dragon,” Professor Torgeson suggested. She had strong opinions about wildlife, most of them unfavorable.

“An ice dragon would eat the rider first,” Professor Jeffries said absently. “They prefer the taste of people to just about anything else.”

Professor Torgeson sniffed. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said, and her accent was especially strong, like she wanted to remind him that Vinland was a whole lot closer to ice dragon territory than the North Plains Territory of Columbia was.

Her tone didn’t put Professor Jeffries out one bit. “Professor O’Leary is planning to teach a class on poetry for magicians next year,” he replied. “He thinks our students need more literary background than they’ve been getting.”

Professor Torgeson looked startled, then laughed. “All right,” she said. “But you’re going to have to put this thing down eventually.”

“Possibly,” Professor Jeffries said, still staring at the mammoth. “But not just yet. Certainly not until we run out of other options.”

“Is he always like this?” Professor Torgeson asked me.

I could see she didn’t actually expect an answer, and right then the mammoth whacked the inner rail fence so hard the top rail splintered and we had to step smart to keep it contained.

By the time the mammoth calmed down, we were all hot and damp and thirsty. As we walked toward the offices, we saw Dean Farley standing outside Professor Jeffries’s office. “Professor!” he called as soon as he saw us. “We’ve heard from the Frontier Management Department! We have funding.”

Professor Jeffries stopped mopping his forehead and smiled. “Excellent! Professor Torgeson, would you join us? This may concern you.”

Professor Torgeson’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded. Professor Jeffries turned to me. “Miss Rothmer, I think that will be all for today. Tell your father the good news, if you please, and let him know I would like to stop by tomorrow evening to discuss it, if that would be convenient.”

Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson both showed up late the following day. I thought they’d disappear into the study with Papa, but instead Papa had us all sit down together. And then they explained.

For years and years, ever since the McNeil expedition got back in 1850, Papa and Professor Jeffries had been trying to persuade people that we still didn’t know enough about the wildlands in the West. The plague of mirror bugs and the failure of eighteen settlements had finally convinced the Assembly in Washington that something needed to be done right away, but they were still arguing about what. Until they decided for sure, they were asking the land-grant colleges in the North, Middle, and South Plains Territories to do wildlife surveys out in the settlements, so they’d have some baseline to compare to.

“Pity they didn’t think of this before the mirror bugs showed up,” Professor Torgeson said in an acid tone.

“It would have been far more useful, certainly,” Professor Jeffries conceded. “On the other hand, this should give us a very clear picture of the way wildlife returns to an area after such devastation. I’m sure you’ll do a stellar job, Professor Torgeson.”

“The newest person in the department always gets the worst assignments,” Professor Torgeson said, but there was no heat in her voice and her eyes had a gleam that said she was looking forward to it.

“We would like to offer you the position of record-keeper and assistant, Miss Rothmer,” Professor Jeffries said.

My mouth fell right open. The corners of Papa’s mouth tucked in, the way they did when he was trying not to smile, and suddenly I knew why Mama had been so cross when I’d said I wanted to go West one day.

“Papa! You’ve known about this for months!” I said, and then I remembered that this was supposed to be business and not family. “Excuse me, Professor Jeffries.”

“That’s quite all right, Miss Rothmer.” Professor Jeffries looked like he was enjoying himself. “The stipend is rather less than your current wages, I’m afraid, but the direct costs will be part of the survey’s budget. That would be things like food, lodging, feed and stabling for your horse as required, and so on.”

“I—” I swallowed hard. “Yes. I accept, Professor Jeffries.”

“Excellent,” Professor Torgeson said. “We’ll be leaving as soon as Mr. Morris returns from Belletriste.”

“Wash is in Belletriste?” I said. “I thought he was going to New Orleans for the winter.”

“I believe he did,” Professor Jeffries said. “But when I tracked him down last month, he was in Belletriste, visiting friends.”

“Visiting — oh.” Triskelion University was in Belletriste, which meant that was where Miss Ochiba was now. Also William, but I wasn’t sure Wash would think of William as a visiting sort of friend.

“Mr. Morris will be our guide,” Professor Torgeson said. She frowned slightly, as if she weren’t quite happy about that for some reason. I thought maybe it was because she didn’t think she needed a guide, but everyone who traveled across the Mammoth River into the West had a guide, even Papa and Professor Jeffries, who’d been doing it for years.

Wash was one of the best; he’d even gone far enough to catch a glimpse of those Rocky Mountains, all on his own. He hadn’t gone far enough to actually start climbing them, of course. Nobody’d ever done that and come back alive, except maybe for three men so stark out of their minds that some folks still said they’d made up their whole story.

“What about his circuit?” I asked. The settlements that were farthest out depended on help from the circuit magicians; I couldn’t see Wash leaving them to get along on their own for a whole summer.

Papa cleared his throat. “That shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “Wash’s circuit is somewhat emptier than it was.”

I reddened. The grubs and the mirror bugs had come in from the Far West, right into the middle of the North Plains line of settlements. I’d seen the devastation they caused for myself— acres and acres of dead, empty land that had been forest and fields and prairie. And Wash was circuit magician for the northern half of the North Plains Territory, from midway up the Red River down to the Long Chain Lakes. Most of those eighteen settlements that failed had to have been all along Wash’s circuit.

Professor Jeffries coughed and said something about planning our route so that Wash could see to his duties for the Settlement Office as well as taking care of us, and Papa brought out a map. The three of them — Papa and Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson — bent over it, pointing and arguing. I moved around to where I could watch, but mostly I just stood there thinking.

First I thought about getting to go West at last. I’d been wanting this since before I started upper school, but except for that one trip last summer that was supposed to be just a visit with my sister Rennie, I’d never been west of the Mammoth River. In fact, that and the horrible trip to Helvan Shores when I was thirteen were the only times I’d been out of Mill City since Papa moved half the family here.

Watching Papa and the other two professors arguing over the map made me realize how little I really knew about the country west of the Mammoth River. Oh, I knew the things everyone did. I could make lists of the two types of wildlife, the natural (mammoths, terror birds, bison, saber cats, prairie wolves, piebald geese) and the magical (steam dragons, spectral bears, swarming weasels, chameleon tortoises, cinderdwellers, sunbugs). I could calculate the yield of a field of soybeans or Scandian wheat or meadow rice, and I could draw a line on the map that showed where the well-charted territory ended and the land began that only a few folks like Wash had ever looked on.

But I also knew that studying up on a thing in school and actually living with it were two different things. Miss Ochiba had made quite a point of that, and even if she hadn’t, I’d have figured it out from the letters home that my brother Jack and my sister Rennie had written over the last few years.

More than that, there were a lot of things I still didn’t know. There were a lot of things nobody knew about settlement country, let alone the Far West beyond it — that was the whole reason for the survey. Even the circuit-riders got surprised by things sometimes, and they’d had more experience with the wild country than anybody.

By the time the professors left, they’d drawn up a route for us to follow, starting from West Landing and heading west to Lake Le Grande, dipping south and west to the Oak River settlement, and then farther west to zigzag north along the Red River and eventually circle back through the thin spot and down the Mammoth River to Mill City.

The thin spot was the place where the Great Barrier Spell had to cross land. The Great Barrier Spell protected all of the United States of Columbia — and a little bit of Acadia, in the Northeast — from the dire wolves and saber cats and steam dragons and other wildlife of North Columbia. It ran for nearly five thousand miles, all the way up the Mammoth River from the Gulf of Amerigo to the headwaters in Lake Veritasca, and then east through the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean. The rivers and lakes not only made a natural barrier against the wildlife that added to the spell but the flow of water and magic along the rivers also kept the Great Barrier Spell going once it was set up.

But there were 175 miles between Lake Veritasca and the westernmost point of Lake Superior where there was no river and the Great Barrier Spell stretched thinly through the forests. That was why the lumber camps in the North paid so well, and why they were always looking for magicians even though they were inside the Barrier Spell. If any wildlife got through, they wanted to take care of it real fast, before whatever-it-was got to feeling better and started attacking people.

Even the Settlement Office didn’t complain about keeping extra magicians up along the thin spot, though usually they grumbled about anything that meant fewer magicians for them to send out to keep the settlements safe. Everyone had heard the horror stories about the dazzlepig that had poisoned three miles of creek, or the short-faced bears that killed four men before the magician got there to stop them. I shivered just thinking about it.

And I was going out on the other side of the barrier, where deadly trouble with the wildlife happened a lot more often than once or twice a year … and I still wasn’t half as good at working protective magic as most of my classmates. The only person I knew who’d been to the Far West and come back safe without using magic was Brant Wilson, the Rationalist who’d married my sister Rennie. He’d had a whole expedition full of magicians with him, but it was Brant’s revolver that had saved them all from swarming weasels.

I’d never shot a revolver, but right after his first trip out to the settlements, Papa had seen to it that everyone in the family older than twelve learned how to handle a rifle, and he’d made sure that each of us younger ones learned as soon as we were old enough. I’d learned, though I didn’t enjoy it much. It had been a long while since I’d done any shooting.

The day after Professor Torgeson asked me to go West as her assistant, I got Robbie to take me to the college range for some practice. Robbie was a good teacher, and he made me practice every day no matter how busy I was, until I could hit what I aimed at two times out of three. I’d never make a markswoman, but I was a whole lot better with the rifle than I was with my spells, and at least Wash and Professor Torgeson wouldn’t have to spend extra time worrying about protecting me.

The last thing Robbie did before I left was to take me down to Gantz’s General Store and buy me a brand-new repeater rifle to take with me. When I objected to the expense, he said that he wasn’t spending all his own money; Lan and Jack had both sent a little to help pay for it, and Papa was in on it, too. “Just don’t let Mama find out,” he told me. “And take it to the range tomorrow for some practice, so you know how it handles before you go.”

After considering for a bit, I decided to stick my new rifle and ammunition in with Professor Torgeson’s supplies, so that Mama wouldn’t notice and ask awkward questions. It was a good thing I thought of it then, because three days later, Wash turned up at last and all the plans and preparations sped up like a dire wolf going after a jackrabbit, and I didn’t have time for anything else.