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.But Wash was real thoughtful allmorning.I couldn t help wondering a bit myself.When I first foundout about the Rationalists, I d thought they lived up to theirname.For a while, I d even wanted to be one.But I could tellfrom the way Brant and Rennie whisked us out of sight whenwe arrived, and from some of the talk they d had, that thingshad changed in Oak River since I d been there the previoussummer.It just might be that the settlers would be crazyenough to get a lot of mirror bug grubs to clear the magic outof their land, even after what Professor Torgeson said.Heck,they might decide they couldn t believe anything a magiciantold them, and never mind that Professor Torgeson was acollege professor and Wash was a circuit magician with moreexperience of the Far West than practically anybody! I justhoped that Rennie and Brant would have sense enough totake their childings and get out before things went too far.Ihad a notion that Rennie would be pleased enough to have achance to leave, but Brant &I felt a little hollow.Rennie had never been my favoritesister, not by a long shot, and she was in a mess of her ownmaking.Still, she was family.I wanted to help, but all I couldthink of was to make sure I wrote to her more often.It wasn tmuch, and it for sure and certain wasn t enough, and I didn tlike either of those things one little bit.I didn t have anyother choices, though.You can t force folks to have goodsense, even if they re family.Maybe especially then.CHAPTER11PROFESSOR TORGESON WAS DISAPPOINTED THAT WE DIDN T GET TO spend more time inOak River, because she d hoped to spend several dayssurveying the plants and animals there.She agreed, though,that we were best off staying out of settlement politics, andwe needed to make up a few days, anyway, because of thesaber cats.So we made do with riding real slow and watchingextra careful until we were off the Rationalist allotment, andthen taking a little longer to write it all down when westopped for lunch.After we left Oak River, the days fell into a rhythm for awhile, like sweeping a floor or hoeing the garden.Wealternated days riding to the next wagonrest with days whereProfessor Torgeson and I worked on the survey while Washwent hunting.If we were close to a settlement, we d stop andtrade papers and gossip, and maybe pick up a few provisionsif we were running low.The settlements we stopped at were all different.If I dthought about it at all, I d thought most of them would besmaller versions of Puerta del Oeste, the way Puerta delOeste was a smaller version of West Landing and WestLanding was a smaller version of Mill City.They weren t.Most of them were more like Oak River  a bunch of friendsand relatives from the same place, or folks with the sameideas of how to make a go of things, who d gotten up asettlement group and come West together.We passed three settlements in a row that were all settledfrom Scandia.Nobody but their settlement magicians spokeany English at all.Wash said that the only reason all thesettlement magicians spoke English was because theSettlement Office made it a requirement, and the only reasonthey did that was to make sure the settlement magicians couldlearn any new spells the Settlement Office came up with,without needing a translator.He also said that the SettlementOffice couldn t make up their mind whether to assign land sothat all the immigrants bunched up in one place or so theywere scattered around, so sometimes you got clumps of fiveor six settlements that were all from one country andsometimes every settlement you came to was different fromthe last four.Professor Torgeson did pretty well getting people to collectdata for the college, even though she wasn t actually fromScandia.The first settlers on Vinland had come from Scandia,and even though that was a good five or six centuries ago, thelanguage was still close enough to Scandian that she could getacross what she wanted.She had less luck at the Polishsettlement that came next, but she just shrugged and said thecollege didn t need an observer at every single settlement wecame to. This isn t nearly as exciting as I thought it would be, Itold the professor one evening when we were setting up campat a wagonrest. Forgotten the saber cats already? Wash said, raising hiseyebrows. I ll take boring any day, Professor Torgeson said,nodding. I didn t say it was boring! I protested.Professor Torgeson just looked at me. Gathering basedata is just as important as making entirely new observations.More important, sometimes; you can t tell whethersomething s changed if you don t know what it was like tobegin with.As we went farther west, the wagonrests got smaller andthe settlements got newer and less finished, until we finallygot out where everything was so new they hadn t built up anywagonrests at all yet.We had to camp inside the settlementpalisades.The newest settlements didn t have much to sparefor travelers, whether that was in the way of space or food ortime, so whenever we stopped at one, Wash was real carefulabout helping out with whatever work was going forward.Mostly, that meant cutting trees.The grubs had killed mostof them by eating away their roots, but the wood was stillgood for building, as long as someone got to it before thecharcoal beetles and the ruby pit borers and all the otherthings did.Sometimes helping out meant hunting the animalsthat were coming back along with the plants and groundcover.Usually, they were small critters, like raccoons andfoxes and squirrels, but about three miles outside theGreenleaf settlement, we passed a small herd of bison.When we got to Greenleaf and Wash told the settlers, theyreacted like an anthill that had been stirred up with a stick.Inless time than it took to tell about it, half the settlers weresaddled up with their rifles to hand.Professor Torgesondecided to join them, so I went along, too.Wash led the group quietly behind some low hills,downwind of the herd.Once he made sure of where the bisonwere, the hunters crept up to the hilltop and fired down intothe animals.All of the bison jerked at the sound of thegunshots, and two of them fell over.In the half second beforethe whole herd took off running, Wash gave a loud yell.Twoof the settlers  ones who d stayed mounted  did thesame.The bison took one look at the yelling settlers andstampeded away from us [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]