Across the Great Barrier

by Patricia C. Wrede

  From the look of it, the fawn wasn’t more than a week old. Its legs were folded up under it, but its head was up and its eyes were wide, as if it had just seen or smelled something and was wondering what to do. The stone it was made of had a faint pinkish cast to it, but aside from that it looked just like all the other gray-white stone fragments we’d been collecting for days.

  “Yonnie Karlsen and three of his friends were hunting off to the west when they came across it,” Mr. Macleod said as we looked it over. “He said there was a doe, too, caught standing. The others wanted to get out of there right quick, but Yonnie made them rig a sling to carry this little one back with them. Said he didn’t want folks calling it another tall tale.”

  “How far west?” Wash asked.

  “T’other side of the Red River,” Mr. Macleod said. “They were about a week out, which is why they needed the sling. This statue isn’t very heavy, but it’s awkward to haul around for very long.”

  The professor had pulled out her magnifying glass to study the fawn more closely. “Except for that pink tinge, it’s just like the others,” she said. “Well, the pink, and that it’s not broken.”

  “It was a fair bit pinker when they brought it in,” Mr. Macleod offered. “It’s faded out quite a bit over the last two weeks.”

  “So they brought it in two weeks ago,” the professor said. “And they found it a week before that.”

  “Early June,” Mr. Macleod confirmed.

  “I’m not liking the look of this,” Wash said.

  “What? No, no, it’s amazing!” Professor Torgeson said. “We’ll have to get it back to Mill City somehow without breaking it. I don’t suppose you still have that sling, Mr. Macleod?”

  “I don’t think that’s what Wash meant,” I said.

  Wash nodded. “Studying up on that statue is your job, Professor. Mine is keeping the settlements safe.”

  “I sent word as soon as I saw it,” Mr. Macleod said. “Up here, white-tailed deer birth in mid to late May, most years. This fawn looks to be a week old or thereabouts, so it must have been petrified in late May or early June.”

  “So three or four weeks ago, whatever does the petrifying was a week’s travel from this settlement,” Lan said. “It seems to me that if it was coming this way, you’d know by now.”

  “Maybe,” Wash said. “Or maybe it just travels a whole lot slower than Mr. Karlsen’s hunting party.”

  “If we’re lucky, it won’t be able to cross the Red River,” Mr. Macleod said. He frowned. “I purely do hate depending on luck.”

  “You’re assuming that this fawn was petrified this year,” Professor Torgeson said reprovingly. “We have no evidence that that is the case. You’re also assuming that whatever it is can move, which is likewise unproven.”

  “Professor, ma’am, that’s true enough,” Mr. Macleod said, “but out here, it’s better safe than sorry, because generally speaking, too much of the time sorry means you’re dead.”

  “I would like to speak with your hunting party, if any of them are available,” Professor Torgeson said.

  Mr. Macleod allowed as how the Anderson brothers had gone right back out to look for game, heading north this time instead of straight west, but he thought Mr. Karlsen was still about. He went off to fetch him while the professor returned to studying the statue.

  “It feels wrong,” I said after a while.

  Wash nodded, but Lan and Professor Torgeson gave me questioning looks. “It just feels wrong,” I repeated. “There’s no magic in it, not even a little bit, and there ought to be.”

  “Just like the ones back at Daybat Creek,” Lan said, nodding.

  “No,” I said. “Those are old, and they’re used to being the way they are. This one is … fresh. New. And it’s wrong.”

  “How can you tell?” the professor asked.

  “This is some of that Aphrikan magic you learned from Miss Ochiba, isn’t it?” Lan said at almost the same time.

  I glanced at Wash, but he didn’t give me a hint what to say, one way or the other. So I nodded. “The ones at Daybat Creek just feel like old rocks. Kind of peculiar rocks, but just rocks. Whatever they used to be, they’ve forgotten. This one hasn’t.”

  Professor Torgeson’s eyes narrowed. “And what does all that mean? Rocks don’t think!”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t explain it any better than that,” I said.

  “Aphrikan magic never has been easy to explain,” Wash said.

  “Insight and assurance,” Lan muttered. Professor Torgeson gave him a questioning look, and he said, “It’s what my professor in comparative magic used to say — Aphrikan magic is about insight and assurance. I never did figure out what he meant.”

  The door banged open, and Mr. Macleod came in. With him was a middling-tall man of about thirty with a long face and hair the color of fresh-cut oak planks, whom he introduced as Mr. Karlsen. “Nah, just call me Yonnie,” the man said. He spoke with a thick Scandian accent. “Bert says you’re wanting to hear about my hunting trip?”

  “That we are,” Professor Torgeson said, and launched into a whole series of questions about where they’d found the stone fawn, whether they’d seen anything unusual, whether they’d been there before, and a whole host of other things.

  Mr. Karlsen answered patiently, for the most part. He and his friends had been in that area before, though he couldn’t swear to the exact spot. He hadn’t noticed anything odd; no strange plants or odd smells. It wasn’t an area for sinkholes, just plain old prairie running endlessly on toward the west.

  “You could maybe be asking the Andersons if they noticed anything more than I did,” he said at last. “They’ll be back by tomorrow.”

  “They might be back tomorrow,” Mr. Macleod said. “They might not. Hunting’s not so easy to say.”

  “They’ll be back by tomorrow, or I’ll be going out to look for them,” Mr. Karlsen said firmly. “Nils promised.”

  Mr. Macleod looked skeptical, but early that afternoon there was a shout from the lookout and a few minutes later a boy came running in to tell us that the hunting party was back, moving fast, and they’d brought someone with. We’d taken the fawn outside so as to be out of Mr. Macleod’s way (and to have better light and more space to work in), and the professor had spent most of the time taking measurements and studying the fawn through her magnifying glass, while I wrote down measurements for her in a little notebook. Lan had gotten bored and wandered off to talk with some of the settlers, and Wash and Mr. Macleod were holed up in Mr. Macleod’s front room, but they came out as soon as they heard.

  So we were all standing around just inside the palisade gates when the Anderson brothers came through. I thought at first that the boy had been wrong, because I only saw the two men, but then I realized that the second horse carried two men riding double. The one in front sagged forward in the saddle, and only the other man’s hold on him kept him from falling right off.

  The first man through the gate fairly leaped down from his horse and ran to help the other two, yelling for Mr. Macleod. He got Wash and Mr. Macleod both, and the three of them eased the unconscious rider down to the ground. As he came off the horse, I heard the first rider say, “Beware for the leg! It will not bend.”

  I started forward to see if I could help, but Wash turned and shook his head at us, then he and Mr. Macleod and the first rider clustered around the man they’d brought back.

  “For God’s sake, get the gate shut!” the second rider shouted, and the boys who were on gate duty jerked out of their fascination and shoved the gates shut. The rider sidled his horse away from Wash and the others, then dismounted.

  By this time, half the settlement had gathered. “Nils, what happened?” one of the settlers asked as the second rider handed the two horses over to one of the gatekeepers.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “Olaf — we should never have gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  The man shook his head and twisted to stare at the l
ittle clump of people crouched around the man on the ground.

  “Is that Greasy Pierre?” someone said. “What’s he doing back here?”

  Right about then, Mr. Macleod stood up and came over. “Eric, Thomas, we need your help carrying him inside. My place. Yonnie, you stay with Nils. Anfred, we’re going to need two bottles of that whiskey you brought back from Mill City; I’ll see you’re paid for it later.”

  “Bert, you can reverse it, can’t you?” Nils Anderson said. “We brought him back as fast as we could — there’s still time, isn’t there?”

  “Maybe time to save his life,” Mr. Macleod said. “But I’m afraid we’re going to have to take his leg off to do it.”

  “No!” a young woman cried. She pushed through from the back of the crowd and Mr. Macleod caught her just before she tried to run for the man on the ground. “No, you can’t!”

  “We have to, Martha,” Mr. Macleod said gently. “It’s turned to stone.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  THE YOUNG WOMAN BURST INTO TEARS AS A BUZZ OF CONVERSATION and questions broke out. I found out later that she was Martha Anderson, Olaf’s wife, so she had plenty of reason for tears. A couple of the women came and huddled around her, but nobody else moved. Mr. Macleod frowned, and then he started snapping at people to do as he’d said, and didn’t they have more sense when a man’s life was at stake, and a few other choice words. That got people going, right enough, though there was still plenty of jawing about what kind of spell accident he could have had.

  I stayed long enough to see them carry the man into Mr. Macleod’s house, then I went back to the longhouse. I’d heard tales of all the amputations in the Secession War, when the doctors had only been able to save half their patients, and neither Wash nor Mr. Macleod was a doctor. Even if I didn’t know the man, I didn’t want to be anywhere near when they started working on him.

  Lan stayed just inside the gates with most of the settlers. Mr. Karlsen took Nils Anderson back to his house, away from the operation. I heard later that he got Nils roaring drunk so as to take his mind off what was happening to his brother. Olaf Anderson was the man who was losing his leg; the third rider was Pierre Le Grise, the Acadian fur trapper that Mr. Macleod called Greasy Pierre.

  Just before dark, Professor Torgeson came in to say that they’d gotten the leg off and Olaf was still alive. If he hadn’t died by morning, they could stop worrying about the shock of it killing him and start worrying about infection and gangrene. They had hopes that it wouldn’t come to that; that’s what they’d wanted the whiskey for. Everyone knew that if you poured whiskey over a bad cut, it wasn’t so likely to take an infection. Nobody knew if it’d help something this bad, but at least they would try.

  We still didn’t know what had happened. Except for Nils Anderson, everyone who knew anything was holed up in Mr. Macleod’s house, and Nils was passed out at Mr. Karlsen’s. When Wash and the others finally came out, they were too exhausted to say much except that they needed folks to sit with Olaf and Olaf’s wife in case he needed more caring for in the night than she could handle. Lan offered straight off, but so did everyone else in the settlement, and they thought familiar faces would be the best if he woke. So Lan slept in the men’s half of the longhouse after all.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that we found out what had happened. Olaf was still alive and looked to be staying that way for a while, so Mr. Macleod left Martha to sit with him and gathered everyone else into the longhouse. “I know all of you want to find out what happened to the Andersons,” he told us. “This is the best way I could think of for everyone to get the whole story as soon as possible.”

  “And without it getting twisted when it gets passed along,” Wash added sternly.

  Several people shifted uncomfortably.

  “Nils, you first,” Mr. Macleod said.

  Nils Anderson stood up from his place next to Mr. Karlsen. He seemed a little hesitant at first, but once he got going he didn’t seem to want to stop. He and his brother had started off looking to hunt deer or bison — they didn’t much care whether they got one of the natural varieties or a magical one, as long as they could eat it. They’d run across Pierre at one of the fords where the trappers and hunters were accustomed to water their horses, and the three of them had gone on together. They figured that whatever they shot, the Andersons could take the meat and Pierre could take the skin.

  They hadn’t expected the trip to take very long, but about all the game they could find were rabbits and squirrels and such like. Everything larger seemed to have gone missing. Then they came across a stone bear with its paws full of early bison-berries, and they decided that if something was turning things to stone and had scared off all the game, they ought to be scared off, too.

  The three of them cut back toward Big Bear Lake. Back by the ford, they found some strange tracks. “Not more than two hours old, and the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” Nils said. “The prints were flat and stretched out, like a hand pressed down on a tabletop, and all four toes were thin and triangular, almost like fingers.”

  “I have never before seen such a thing,” Greasy Pierre put in, nodding. “Not even in the Far Northwest, where I am one of the few who are bold and daring enough to lay traplines in winter.”

  Several folks snorted at this, and then someone in the back called, “How big were the prints?”

  “So,” Pierre said, measuring what looked like four or five inches between his two hands. “It would be the weight of a young horse, I think.”

  The three men had dismounted, and Pierre and Nils went to examine the tracks, while Olaf took the packhorses a little way downstream to water them and adjust their loads. Pierre had his rifle handy, but the other two were relying on the travel protection spells to at least give them warning of anything nasty coming their way.

  Wash frowned when Nils said that, and Greasy Pierre sniffed and looked superior.

  “It was my turn to hold the travel protection spells,” Nils said. “They were fine, I swear — no sign of anything for half a mile out. And then the horses spooked. Olaf grabbed the lead line for the pack animals, but his riding horse took off for the far side of the ford — ripped the branch right off the bush Olaf had him tethered to.”

  “He should have used a larger branch,” Greasy Pierre commented, but not very loudly.

  “I went to try to calm the other horses,” Nils went on. “And then … it felt like something hit me on the back of the head. I went out like a blown candle. When I woke up, Olaf …”

  He choked up and stopped speaking. Mr. Macleod told him to sit down and let Pierre take over, since the trapper was the only one who’d seen all the rest. Pierre stood up with considerable relish; I could see he liked being the indent of attention. He didn’t tell a straightforward story, the way Mr. Anderson had; he kept gussying it up with comments about his other adventures and how brave he was. The heart of it wasn’t hard to come at, though.

  When the horses spooked, Greasy Pierre jumped for cover and raised his rifle. He saw the three packhorses dancing around Olaf, and Olaf’s horse bolting. Then he heard a noise like an owl hooting, only he said the hoot went on a lot longer than an owl’s would have. He saw Nils collapse, just as the travel protection spells came down, all at once. An instant later, Olaf let out a yell and fell over backward into the creek, and all three of the packhorses turned gray-white and froze motionless. It wasn’t until Pierre had a chance to look at them later on that he realized they’d all turned to stone.

  Pierre let off four rifle shots as fast as ever he could, aiming for the brush along the bank where he thought the hooting might be coming from. The hooting stopped abruptly, and he heard rustling heading away from the ford. He didn’t figure he’d hit anything, only maybe scared it off, but that was good enough for the time being. He peeked out from behind the tree and fired again a couple of times, just to make sure, then went to the creek to fish Olaf out.

  Olaf was pale as a new sheet, and w
hen Pierre got a good look at him, he didn’t blame the man one bit. His left leg had turned to stone from just above the knee on down. Pierre hauled him out of the water and left him by a tree with the rifle while he went to see what had happened to Nils. He was a mite surprised to find Nils still alive but unconscious.

  “It was a state most dire!” Greasy Pierre said dramatically. “For alone, I could not hope to return two injured men to safety, and the creature might return at any moment! What could I do? I approached the stone horses to see what I could learn!”

  What he was after was the medical kit in the Andersons’ pack, and whatever else he could salvage. Turned out he could salvage as much as they could carry. The packhorses had turned to stone, but their packs and gear hadn’t. Pierre grabbed another rifle and all of the ammunition, and the medical kit, but he didn’t figure on taking much more than that. It was more important to get out of there — and bring the news of what had happened back to Big Bear Lake — than to try to haul their supplies back to the settlement.

  By the time Pierre finished digging through the packs, Olaf had passed out and Nils had woken up. Nils was too drained to cast even a fire-lighting spell, and he had a headache powerful enough to make his eyes cross, but he could ride. Pierre got him up on one of the two remaining horses, and between them, they loaded Olaf in front of him, and then they left. They didn’t even take time to recast the travel protection spells, though Pierre had sense enough to do a strong speed-traveling spell once they were away from the ford. They’d covered what was normally a day’s ride from the ford to the settlement in less than an hour, hoping that Mr. Macleod would know what to do for Olaf.

  There was a long silence when Mr. Le Grise finished his tale. Then someone in the back said in a shaky voice, “Turned to stone? His leg just … really?”

  “I can attest to that,” Mr. Macleod said. “Or if you’d like to look for yourself, we have it under a preserving spell, so that the magicians in Mill City can take a closer look at it.”