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.
CHAPTER 5
WASH WAS IN A POWERFUL BAD MOOD WHEN HE FIRST GOT BACK TO Mill City, but all he would say about it was that Eastern cities didn’t much agree with him. I thought that was stretching it some. Belletriste was only about halfway between Mill City and the East Coast, just north of the border of the State of Franklin, and it wasn’t all that much bigger than Mill City, especially if you counted in West Landing. Compared to New Amsterdam or Washington, or even St. Louis, it counted more as a largish town than a city.