The Far West (27 page)

Around the middle of March, there was a warm spell, and Captain Velasquez sent out a couple of small groups, one to scout the land ahead and the other to expand the area we had mapped away from the river. A week after they left, a blizzard blew up, and for a while we weren’t sure we’d see them again. They showed up at last, one after the other, three days late and with four men suffering frostbite in their toes and fingers but all alive and otherwise well.

Some of the army men from down South had been agitating to get the expedition moving again, but that blizzard sobered them right up. They didn’t say anything more about it, not even when the songbirds started showing up and the ducks and piebald geese flew over, heading north.

We finally left our winter quarters around the middle of April, when the prairie grass was starting to green up and the horses had something to graze on. We left a cache of things Mr. Corvales thought we might need on our way back, but didn’t need to haul all the way to the mountains — extra saw blades and wheel rims and gun stocks and so on. We were careful not to leave any food to attract wildlife.

As we went on up the Grand Bow, Roger, Elizabet and Bronwyn kept checking the magic levels in and around the river. They were well above normal by then, and still rising. Nobody was too surprised that we were running into a lot more magical wildlife along the river; what was a surprise was finding more of them that absorbed magic.

“
Another
one?” Dr. Lefevre said when Wash and Mr. Zarbeliev brought back the first short-eared rabbit and explained that Wash had felt it sort of nibbling on the edges of their protection spells before Mr. Zarbeliev shot it. “You’re quite sure?”

“’Fraid so, Professor,” Wash replied. “Though if you like, we can keep an eye out for a live one for you to test.”

Dr. Lefevre tapped his lips thoughtfully. By then, most of the camp had collected to see what Wash had brought. I slipped around to stand by Lan just as Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez pushed through to the front from opposite directions. They stepped up beside Wash in time to hear Dr. Lefevre say, “I believe that would be an excellent idea, Mr. Morris.”

“No,” Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez said at exactly the same time. They exchanged glances, and then Captain Velasquez went on, “We can’t risk bringing wildlife that absorbs magic anywhere near the wagons or camp. They could interfere with the protection spells —”

“Or disrupt the spells on the equipment!” someone called.

Captain Velasquez nodded. “We don’t know what these things are capable of. If —”

“Captain,” Dr. Lefevre interrupted, “I appreciate your concerns, but that is exactly the point. We don’t know enough,
and we must learn. And I do not believe I said anything about bringing live specimens anywhere near the wagons or camp.”

Mr. Corvales frowned. “What
are
you proposing, then, Dr. Lefevre?”

Dr. Lefevre frowned. “That I accompany Mr. Morris tomorrow to look for one of these creatures, of course.”

Everyone looked startled, and Mr. Corvales’s frown lines got deeper. “I appreciate your willingness to take such personal risk, Dr. Lefevre, but you must understand —”

“I understand that we have now found five creatures that absorb magic,” Dr. Lefevre said. “The mirror bugs, the medusa lizards, the color-switching ground squirrels, the so-called invisible foxes, and now this one.”

Beside me, Lan snickered. I frowned at him and he whispered, “That’s just how he sounds when he’s lecturing a class. Like everyone he’s talking to is two years old.”

I made a face at him and went back to listening. “— species outside North Columbia known to possess this ability,” Dr. Lefevre was saying. “Three, in the entire world, and they are all closely related. Yet the Far West has produced five that we know of, from entirely different classes. We
must
understand more of how and why these creatures have come to have this magic-absorbing ability.”

“You have one right there to study,” Mr. Corvales pointed out.

I got the feeling that Dr. Lefevre was only just barely keeping from rolling his own eyes. “I shall, of course, dissect this specimen this evening, but examining dead specimens is unlikely to provide sufficient information about the way this
creature uses its abilities. Field observation will certainly be required at some point, and it seems pointless to delay it, especially since this particular creature appears to be far less dangerous than, for instance, the medusa lizards.”

Everyone looked at the critter Wash had brought back. It was about the size of a barn cat, with mottled black fur, a long, whiplike tail, and paddle-shaped front paws. Its head looked a bit like a squirrel that had run nose-first into a tree. “Size don’t always mean much when it comes to wildlife,” Mr. Zarbeliev muttered. “Swarming weasels are right about that size.”

This time Dr. Lefevre did roll his eyes. “Swarming weasels are carnivores,” he said in tones of exaggerated patience. “Meat-eaters.
That
” — he waved at the short-eared rabbit — “is a plant eater. You can tell from the teeth.”

The discussion went on for a few minutes more, but I think that was when Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez decided it would be all right for Dr. Lefevre to go looking for more short-eared rabbits. So for the next three days, he went out with Wash or one of the other explorers. The third day, they didn’t come back, and everyone was worried, but they showed up safe and sound around noon the day after. They’d found their rabbit, and Dr. Lefevre had a stack of notes and three more dead specimens to study, so he was pretty smug even when Mr. Corvales gave him a scold for scaring everyone.

We saw our first steam dragon near mid-May, curling lazily through a clear blue sky high above a herd of silverhooves about half a mile away. Wash called the warning, and everyone pulled back close to the wagons, hoping the don’t-notice-it spell worked on steam dragons as well as it seemed to work on
everything else. A few minutes later, the dragon dove toward the herd, its long, snaky body stretched out almost straight, like a knife blade flashing down the sky.

The herd took off across the grass, all but the one the dragon caught, and we moved cautiously on, keeping a careful eye on the silvery coils of the dragon curled up around the dead silverhoof. “Looks like a young one,” Wash commented. He’d taken to riding near the magicians since we left winter quarters.

“How can you tell?” Adept Alikaket asked. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the dragon since we first spotted it, and I couldn’t help thinking that if he kept on that way he’d be trying to ride with his head turned backward pretty soon.

“Size, mostly,” Wash said. “Not that I’ve seen too many of them.”

“The one that fell on Mr. Stolz’s feed store when I was eleven was a lot bigger around,” I put in. “I’m not sure how long it was, though. I only ever saw it after it was all in a heap on top of the store.”

“This was in Mill City?” the adept asked. “I thought your Barrier Spell prevented such invasions.”

“The Great Barrier Spell can’t block things that fly,” Professor Ochiba told him.

“It seems a regrettable failing.”

“Maybe so,” Wash said with a sidelong look at Professor Ochiba, “but it keeps folks east of the river from getting too sure of themselves.”

“Possibly,” Professor Ochiba replied calmly. “But only among those living near the Mammoth River. Those who live
in New Amsterdam or New Bristol or Philadelphia rarely give the wildlife threat a second thought. They’ve no need to.”

“There is no wildlife in the eastern forests?” Adept Alikaket said, sounding skeptical.

“Of course there is some, but the forests have been hunted clean of the most dangerous and destructive animals, for the most part. Or they have moved out as people moved in.”

“Indeed.” Adept Alikaket glanced back at the steam dragon one last time and fingered the silver dragon scale that always dangled from the lock of hair on the right side of his face. “I did not think of that.”

Wash raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

Adept Alikaket gave him a small smile and said, “Dangerous animals … predators … do not like to be crowded. It explains why your countries have grown so rapidly, here in the Columbias.”

“Ah.” Wash sounded pleased, like someone had given him a real nice compliment.

Right about then Professor Torgeson called me over to ask about the purple spotted rattlesnake we’d found the day before. It wasn’t until we’d camped for the night that I got a chance to ask Professor Ochiba what the adept had meant.

“He meant that people are the most dangerous predators in Columbia,” she said shortly.

Two weeks later, we saw another steam dragon, though it didn’t seem to be hunting anything, and after that we spotted one every couple of days, if the weather was clear. There were
more medusa lizards, too, and we had to skirt around three swarming weasel burrows in five days. We lost a horse to the second medusa lizard, and one of the soldiers was badly mauled by an enormous silver-gray bear that we ended up calling a diamondclaw.

The more wildlife we ran into, the slower we traveled. Finally, Professor Torgeson and Dr. Lefevre suggested that we move away from the river for a while. They were mostly interested in finding out whether there was as much wildlife out away from the river as there was near the open water and high magic levels. Everybody else latched onto the notion of getting away from the wildlife, and didn’t pay so much attention to the finding-out part, which made both of them a bit cross.

They were crosser still when it turned out that they’d been right. Away from the river, we passed plenty of bison and antelope and silverhooves, a couple of saber cats, and at least one pack of prairie wolves, but there weren’t nearly as many of the highly dangerous magical creatures we’d been tangling with. We made considerably better time that day, and that evening the expedition leaders called everyone together to discuss the matter.

Captain Velasquez summed up the problems we’d been having, and Adept Alikaket went over Dr. Lefevre’s theory about the high magic levels along the Grand Bow River having something to do with it. Then Mr. Corvales stepped forward and said, “So that’s the situation. We have a couple of choices. First, we can turn back now.”

There was a rustle of discontent, even among the soldiers, who you might expect wouldn’t be too happy about keeping
on. After all, their main job was to keep the expedition safe, and it was getting harder and harder to do.

“We’ve already come farther west than any successful expedition in the past,” Mr. Corvales went on. “Turning back now would not be a failure.”

The unhappy rustle was louder this time; I didn’t think most folks agreed with him.

“The second choice is to keep on as we have been, following the Grand Bow. We’ll be moving slowly and it seems likely that the risk from wildlife will only increase, so it is unlikely that we will reach the mountains that were our original goal before we have to turn back. But we will still map a great deal more territory, and in all probability we will make additional interesting discoveries.”

Mr. Corvales paused to let everyone murmur for a minute. Nobody liked the idea of not getting all the way to the Rocky Mountains when that’s what we’d set out to do. Still, there’d always been a chance we wouldn’t make it all the way, as nobody knew what was between us and the mountains. If there were another set of Great Lakes out there, we’d never get around them in time to go back.

“Our third choice is to move away from the river and travel more directly overland. I think today’s experience shows that we’ll be able to travel faster and with less risk of attack, but we’ll be taking the chance that we won’t find water. Sergeant Solomon, how far can we get between water stops?”

“Right now, it’d be about two days, sir,” Sergeant Amy said. “More if we cut back drinking water and lead the horses instead of riding, but that’ll slow us down again. We only have
two barrels, because we didn’t figure on needing more, what with following the river.”

Mr. Corvales nodded. “So there you have it. The floor is open for discussion, and I’m open to suggestions.”

There was a moment of silence, then Mr. MacPhee scowled and said, “Sounds as if you don’t think we’ll make it to the Rocky Mountains no matter what we do.”

Mr. Corvales nodded again with obvious reluctance.

Elizabet stood. “If we’re not making it to the mountains, regardless, then I think we should stick to the riverbank so that Mr. Boden, Miss Hoel, and I can continue to take readings. If we can puzzle out the reason for the rise in magic, it may allow the next exploratory expedition to get farther, even if we can’t.”

“It don’t make sense to come out here to do a job of work and then go where you can’t do it,” one of the soldiers said, nodding in agreement.

“And I don’t like getting away from a sure water supply,” another soldier put in. “Remember what happened that time out by Red Rock Canyon?” Several of the other soldiers nodded. “I say we stick to the river.”

Professor Torgeson was frowning in the way that meant she was thinking real hard. “If the high level of magic around the river is attracting magical wildlife and making them more dangerous, perhaps we can make use of it as well,” she said slowly.