Thirteenth Child Page 16

  It was one of those warm, clear days in fall when all the leaves have turned shades of red and gold and half of them have fallen and gone crunchy underfoot. The sky was pale blue around the edges, and the slanting sunlight made everything shimmer in the breeze.

  Miss Ochiba, William, and I had been working with the prairie dogs, which were getting slow and fat, storing up food in their tunnels against winter. The prairie dogs were especially good for us to practice on, Miss Ochiba said, because we had to concentrate a little harder to tell them from the squirrels and mice and chipmunks that lived around the college buildings. Once we’d finished persuading the prairie dogs to take particular bits of food and store them in spots we’d chosen instead of where the prairie dogs wanted, we went out to the field where Professor Jeffries kept the mammoth.

  The mammoth was four or five years old, Professor Jeffries thought. That made it about half grown, though it was hard to think of something the size of a stagecoach as half grown. Its tusks were already three feet long, but they hadn’t started curling yet, and its coat was getting thick and shaggy for winter. Normally it was a peaceable animal, but it got restless every fall, when its cousins in the west started walking south to their winter feeding grounds, so Miss Ochiba made sure that we stayed outside the split-rail fence.

  That day, Professor Jeffries had brought his fall class out to observe the mammoth, so there were eight men in the field when we arrived. The seven students were listening respectfully to Professor Jeffries’ lecture, paying heed to the mammoth while Professor Jeffries waved in its direction.

  When he saw us, Professor Jeffries frowned. It was clear he’d forgotten it was our day to visit the menagerie, and equally plain that he didn’t want us anywhere near the class he was teaching. Miss Ochiba just nodded and took us across to the other field, where they kept regular farm animals. We worked with them sometimes, too, because she said that we needed to know the feel of useful, tame animals as well as the wild ones. There was a yearling colt that the horsebreaker thought was still too young to work on a line, though he’d been halter-broke. William thought we could use Aphrikan magic to teach it not to spook at flapping sheets, and after consulting with Miss Ochiba, the breaker had said we could try.

  We’d just started work when we heard a shout and a great trumpeting noise behind us. We all turned, just in time to see the young mammoth charge up the field, swinging its head side to side as it came. It knocked two of Professor Jeffries’s students out of its way—the others had sense enough to scatter on their own—and slammed into the rail fence. The fence posts leaned over and the rails bent outward and cracked. The mammoth trumpeted and rammed the fence again. The rails flew apart.

  William and I stood frozen as the mammoth charged toward us. Then Miss Ochiba stepped forward and raised one gloved hand. Just before the mammoth reached her, she clenched her fist and said a word. The surge of magic that followed was so strong that I fell right off the fence I’d been sitting on. It stopped that mammoth right in its tracks, just as if it had run into a solid wall.

  The mammoth couldn’t move forward, but it was still plenty mad. It stomped its feet and swung its head, then lashed out with its trunk. Miss Ochiba stood there cool as anything, holding the mammoth in place with an invisible cage of magic.

  Nobody could hold an angry mammoth for very long, though, even if it was only half grown. I groped around for the trickle of magic we’d been using to gentle the colt, and urged it toward the mammoth. I felt it take hold, but what was plenty enough, for a yearling was nowhere near strong enough to calm an angry mammoth. It snorted and stamped some more, and its big beady eyes glared at Miss Ochiba.

  William shouted a warding spell we’d learned in our regular classes. The air shimmered as it went up around us. I climbed to my feet, slow and careful so as not to startle the mammoth any more than it already was. I wasn’t sure what to do next. William’s spell wasn’t strong enough to hold the mammoth off if it broke free of Miss Ochiba, but I didn’t much like the thought of walking out of it.

  And then Professor Jeffries and his students ran up at last. Between them, they got a good solid restraining spell up, so Miss Ochiba could relax, and then Professor Jeffries sent one of them off to the main building, to get the ingredients for the charm Dr. McNeil had used when he’d brought the mammoth through the Great Barrier Spell. They all had a nice, busy time of it, but in the end, they got the mammoth calmed down and back in its field, and a temporary fence up with lots of reinforcing spells to keep it there.

  As soon as they finished, Professor Jeffries called one of the students over, a big man in a long brown muffler, and started giving him what for. Seems he’d been the one to set the mammoth off, flapping his scarf at it to find out what it would do. Professor Jeffries told him that would have been a foolish thing to do to an elderly, well-broken cart horse, and it was downright idiotic to do it to a wild mammoth three times as big. It made me see clear and personal what Wash had meant about people who weren’t afraid of wildlife at all.

  After he was done getting yelled at, the man who’d started it came over and apologized to Miss Ochiba and William and me. By then, I wasn’t paying too much attention, because I was starting to worry that when Mama and Papa heard about the mammoth getting loose, they’d make me stop coming to work with the menagerie animals. But there wasn’t anything I could do to keep them from hearing about it, so all I could do was hope.

  CHAPTER 19

  WORD ABOUT THE MAMMOTH GOT HOME BEFORE I DID THAT DAY. Mama was waiting for me on the front porch, and she swept me up in a big hug as soon as I came within reach. My heart sank. I could tell she’d been scared bad by what she’d heard. When she let loose of the hug enough to take a good look at me, and saw all the mud on my coat from where I’d fallen off the fence, she wouldn’t listen to a thing I said, but made me go in and lie down.

  Papa wasn’t near so put out as Mama was. He’d heard the whole story from Professor Jeffries, and he said that the professor had commended my presence of mind and was quite happy to have William and me and Miss Ochiba continue our visits. Papa also said that if Miss Ochiba could teach me to stop a charging mammoth, he’d be more pleased than not, and in any case the incident showed that I was a sight safer with her than running around the college on my own. He got Mama soothed down enough to see that I wasn’t hurt, and asked what I thought of the matter. Of course I said that I wanted to keep on with my lessons.

  That wasn’t the end of it, though. Seeing all the mud on my coat gave Mama the notion that working with the menagerie animals was a hard and wearying job, like mucking out stables, and she said she didn’t want me tiring myself out. It was no good pointing out that hauling the wet laundry every Monday was harder work than doing spells at the menagerie. She’d been used to thinking of me as delicate, ever since the rheumatic fever, and that was that. She didn’t put a stop to my lessons, but she fretted over them until it drove me to distraction.

  Still, I loved the animals at the menagerie too much to let them go. After the incident with the mammoth, Professor Jeffries kept his classes outside the fence, and I snuck close enough to listen as often as I could. When he saw that I was interested in the animals, and not just in Miss Ochiba’s lessons, he let me help with feeding and tending them sometimes. I didn’t mention any of it to Mama.

  In February, right after his eighteenth birthday, Jack announced that he’d gone down to the North Plains Territory Homestead Claim and Settlement Office and signed up for a homestead claim. Mama was almost as upset by that as she’d been over the mammoth, and Papa wasn’t any too pleased, either, but there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. The law said that at the age of eighteen any citizen who had a sound body and the will to work a claim could put in for a settlement allotment, and Jack had gone and done it.

  Papa wasn’t much for yelling, even when he wasn’t happy about something the boys had done, but he came awfully near it with Jack that time. He couldn’t see why Jack would want to go out to
the settlements at all, and if he had to go, Papa thought he should put in a few more years at school and become a settlement magician. It was a bit safer than homesteading, and it was an easier and better living, because the Settlement Office chipped in with the homesteaders to pay settlement magicians. Also, Papa was aggrieved that Jack hadn’t said anything before he went down to the Settlement Office, like he thought Papa would forbid him from doing it.

  Jack heard Papa out with more patience than I’d ever thought he had. Then he rolled his eyes and said that he’d told Papa time and again that he didn’t want more schooling, and that he wanted to go out and do something real. It wasn’t his fault if Papa hadn’t believed him.

  Mama just looked sad and said she didn’t want the Far West swallowing another of her children. Jack told her that he wasn’t getting swallowed up and he wasn’t sneaking off the way Rennie had, either. Also, it wasn’t like he was leaving right away. He’d have to wait for a place in a settlement group, because the Settlement Office hadn’t let anyone go out alone since the very first year, when over a hundred farms were overrun by wildlife because the magicians were stretched too thin. It might take two or three years for a group to have an opening for a single man. Meantime, Jack meant to hire out to one of the farmers on the far side of the river, to get some practical experience in an established settlement.

  Once they saw that Jack was determined, Mama and Papa quit arguing, but it took a couple of weeks. I think Papa was impressed by the way Jack had worked out his plans, though he wouldn’t say so straight to Jack’s face.

  Jack found himself a position and moved across the river in April, just in time for spring planting. He promised he’d come home every Sunday, since it wasn’t far, but the first week he was so tired that Mama told him he wasn’t to ruin his health for her peace of mind, and once a month after planting finished would be plenty. She and Papa still grumbled when Jack was gone, though.

  I was more on Jack’s side than not. Jack had always hated school and loved adventure, and he’d had a hankering for the Far West since the day he heard we were moving to Mill City. And with so many of our school friends moving out to the settlements every year, it felt like a natural thing to do. I thought Robbie might mean to go the same way, if he didn’t find himself a town girl, but I surely wasn’t telling any of that to Mama and Papa.

  What with all the grumbling at home, I took to spending more of my free time at the menagerie all through April and May. Which was how I happened to be there when Washington Morris turned up in mid-May, looking for Professor Jeffries.

  “I’ll fetch him for you, Mr. Morris,” I told him.

  He looked at me in considerable surprise, for he hadn’t given his name. Then he smiled that wide, white smile and said, “You’ll be one of Miss Maryann’s students. I thought I told you all to call me Wash.”

  “You’d have been a sight more taken aback if I had,” I pointed out. “You jumped when I called you Mr. Morris.”

  “I never,” he said. “I was merely looking behind me for the Mr. Morris person you were addressing. But it strikes me that you have me at a disadvantage, when it comes to names.”

  “I’m Eff,” I said. “Eff Rothmer.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Rothmer,” Wash said gravely, raising his hat.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Morris,” I said, and gave him my best curtsy.

  “Wash,” he corrected sternly.

  “Wash, then,” I said, and went off to find Professor Jeffries. He was out by the mammoth field, fiddling with the fencing spells. I told him that a Mr. Morris was waiting for him over at the classroom building. Then I followed him back, because I was curious what business Washington Morris would have with our college wildlife professor.

  “You’re the circuit-rider Miss Ochiba spoke of?” Professor Jeffries asked when Wash introduced himself. “Has she told you what I’m looking for?”

  “Just that you’ve a job that’s suited to a circuit-riding magician,” Wash said in his deep drawl. “Miss Maryann is a great one for letting folks see for themselves.”

  “I see.” Professor Jeffries frowned. “I need someone to collect information on wildlife behavior in their natural habitat. It’s all very well to study these creatures in captivity, but to expect me to predict something like the Batterson fiasco with nothing to go on but this…Well, I’m sure you see the difficulty.”

  Wash nodded soberly. The Batterson settlement had been half destroyed the previous summer when a flock of cinder-dwellers had flown in and burned most of its crops, two barns, and at least one homestead. The settlement’s one magician had been keeping off cinder-dwellers in ones and twos for a good six years, but a flock of sixty birds had been too much for him. Everybody had heard about it, and everybody wanted to know why a flock that size had suddenly showed up after so long. All the nearby settlements had been jumpy for months, not knowing if another big flock would turn up before they finished harvesting.

  “I can see why you’d want better information,” Wash told Professor Jeffries. “But you have to understand that when I’m out in the borderlands, a lot of other things have to come first.” He smiled. “I can’t rightly see myself stopping to make observations when a bear’s after my supply cache, for instance.”

  “Your notes won’t do me any good if you’re not alive to bring them back,” Professor Jeffries said with a small smile of his own. “And, frankly, whatever you provide will be more than what I’m getting now, which is nothing.”

  “I’ll see what I can do for you,” Wash said. “Always provided you don’t mind an uncertain schedule. I go where there’s trouble and stay as long as I’m needed, which doesn’t lend itself to a regular correspondence. I wouldn’t be in town now if I hadn’t wanted the sawbones to look over a bit of an infection I picked up last winter that was slow clearing up.”

  “You can mail me your notes whenever it’s convenient,” Professor Jeffries assured him.

  A month later, a tatty-looking packet arrived for Professor Jeffries, containing ten pages that looked like they’d been crumpled up, sat on, and maybe used to strain coffee. Every one was covered, both sides, with tiny, meticulous notes that drove the professor from ecstasy to despair and back. When we came for our next Aphrikan magic class, he told Miss Ochiba that the bits he could make out were exactly what he wanted, but it would take him months to figure out what the rest of it said.

  Miss Ochiba glanced at the page he held out and nodded. “I apologize for not warning you.”

  “No, no, I’m very grateful to you for putting me in touch with Mr. Morris,” Professor Jeffries said. “But I wish he were a tad less inclined to abbreviation. What, for instance, can he mean by ‘J3,8m/n fr Klein set.’?”

  “June third, eight miles north from Klein settlement?” I suggested after a minute, when Miss Ochiba didn’t answer.

  Miss Ochiba and Professor Jeffries both looked at me. “Yes, that would be it!” the professor said.

  “What do you make of the rest of it, Miss Rothmer?” Miss Ochiba asked, plucking the page from Professor Jeffries’s hand and giving it to me.

  I studied the page for a minute. It didn’t seem much worse than the hen-scratch that some of my brothers called writing. The abbreviations were harder, but when I thought of Wash’s deep voice saying the parts I could see right away, all the other parts came clear. I started reading it out slowly.

  “June third, eight miles north from Klein settlement. Red fox and three kits at watering hole. Deer mice tracks. Iceweed at water’s edge; haven’t seen this far south before. Looks spindly.”

  Right about there, Professor Jeffries stopped me. “Remarkable!” he said. “It took me hours to get that far.”

  “Young eyes, plus experience,” Miss Ochiba said drily, and I remembered that she’d taught three of my brothers, including Jack, whose penmanship was the most hen-scratchy of them all. Plus it was pretty clear that she’d known Wash a good while. Her eyes glinted with amusement as if she knew what I wa
s thinking, and she added, “Perhaps you would be willing to make a fair copy for the professor, Miss Rothmer?”

  I agreed at once. The professor thanked me several times, but truth to tell I was as grateful to him as he was to me. I’d been dying of curiosity ever since I found out that the first set of notes had arrived, and now I was going to be the first to find out what they said!

  For the rest of that summer, whenever one of Wash’s letters arrived, I’d spend a day or two copying it out for Professor Jeffries. At first, he used my copy as a sort of crib sheet to help him read Wash’s notes for himself. After a while, when he saw that I was careful about copying exactly what was there, he only referred to the notes once in a while.

  I found Wash’s letters even more fascinating than the actual wildlife in the menagerie. He wrote about things I’d only ever seen in sketches in books—greatwolves and Columbian sphinxes, curly-horned deer and heatherfish, sil-vergrass and flower moths. Mostly, he wrote where and when he’d seen the creatures. Once in a while, he added a comment on what they’d been doing when he saw them. Jy31 by LngL e.shr—sfb.etg bkby, n/dsrt fr me was one of my favorite entries—July 31 by Long Lake, east shore—short-faced bear eating blackberries, no dessert for me.

  Wash wrote about the weather, too—rain and dry spells and temperature, with a note on whether it seemed normal to him or not. Once he mentioned a strong smell of smoke on the wind, coming from the west, that lasted three days. It drove Professor Jeffries wild. He was sure it meant a big fire somewhere farther out, but it never got close enough for Wash to see even a glow on the horizon, so there was no telling whether it was fifty miles away or two hundred.