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“I should think not!” Rennie said.

“This is … I’m going to have to tell people right away.” Brant raked a hand through his hair. “I just hope they believe me.”

Rennie made a face, but she just nodded and went to call the children back to wash up for dinner. We had a solemn meal that night, and Brant went off in the morning to talk to his uncle, Toller Lewis, who headed up the Oak River settlement. He returned just before Wash and the professor and I left Oak River, and he didn’t look happy. He and Wash had a low-voiced conversation that didn’t make Brant look any happier, and then we retrieved our horses from the settlement stable and left. But Wash was real thoughtful all morning.

I couldn’t help wondering a bit myself. When I first found out about the Rationalists, I’d thought they lived up to their name. For a while, I’d even wanted to be one. But I could tell from the way Brant and Rennie whisked us out of sight when we arrived, and from some of the talk they’d had, that things had changed in Oak River since I’d been there the previous summer. It just might be that the settlers would be crazy enough to get a lot of mirror bug grubs to clear the magic out of their land, even after what Professor Torgeson said. Heck, they might decide they couldn’t believe anything a magician told them, and never mind that Professor Torgeson was a college professor and Wash was a circuit magician with more experience of the Far West than practically anybody! I just hoped that Rennie and Brant would have sense enough to take their childings and get out before things went too far. I had a notion that Rennie would be pleased enough to have a chance to leave, but Brant …

I felt a little hollow. Rennie had never been my favorite sister, not by a long shot, and she was in a mess of her own making. Still, she was family. I wanted to help, but all I could think of was to make sure I wrote to her more often. It wasn’t much, and it for sure and certain wasn’t enough, and I didn’t like either of those things one little bit. I didn’t have any other choices, though. You can’t force folks to have good sense, even if they’re family. Maybe especially then.

CHAPTER 11

PROFESSOR TORGESON WAS DISAPPOINTED THAT WE DIDN’T GET TO spend more time in Oak River, because she’d hoped to spend several days surveying the plants and animals there. She agreed, though, that we were best off staying out of settlement politics, and we needed to make up a few days, anyway, because of the saber cats. So we made do with riding real slow and watching extra careful until we were off the Rationalist allotment, and then taking a little longer to write it all down when we stopped for lunch.

After we left Oak River, the days fell into a rhythm for a while, like sweeping a floor or hoeing the garden. We alternated days riding to the next wagonrest with days where Professor Torgeson and I worked on the survey while Wash went hunting. If we were close to a settlement, we’d stop and trade papers and gossip, and maybe pick up a few provisions if we were running low.

The settlements we stopped at were all different. If I’d thought about it at all, I’d thought most of them would be smaller versions of Puerta del Oeste, the way Puerta del Oeste was a smaller version of West Landing and West Landing was a smaller version of Mill City. They weren’t. Most of them were more like Oak River — a bunch of friends and relatives from the same place, or folks with the same ideas of how to make a go of things, who’d gotten up a settlement group and come West together.

We passed three settlements in a row that were all settled from Scandia. Nobody but their settlement magicians spoke any English at all. Wash said that the only reason all the settlement magicians spoke English was because the Settlement Office made it a requirement, and the only reason they did that was to make sure the settlement magicians could learn any new spells the Settlement Office came up with, without needing a translator. He also said that the Settlement Office couldn’t make up their mind whether to assign land so that all the immigrants bunched up in one place or so they were scattered around, so sometimes you got clumps of five or six settlements that were all from one country and sometimes every settlement you came to was different from the last four.

Professor Torgeson did pretty well getting people to collect data for the college, even though she wasn’t actually from Scandia. The first settlers on Vinland had come from Scandia, and even though that was a good five or six centuries ago, the language was still close enough to Scandian that she could get across what she wanted. She had less luck at the Polish settlement that came next, but she just shrugged and said the college didn’t need an observer at every single settlement we came to.

“This isn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it would be,” I told the professor one evening when we were setting up camp at a wagonrest.

“Forgotten the saber cats already?” Wash said, raising his eyebrows.

“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 base data is just as important as making entirely new observations. More important, sometimes; you can’t tell whether something’s changed if you don’t know what it was like to begin with.”

As we went farther west, the wagonrests got smaller and the settlements got newer and less finished, until we finally got out where everything was so new they hadn’t built up any wagonrests at all yet. We had to camp inside the settlement palisades. The newest settlements didn’t have much to spare for travelers, whether that was in the way of space or food or time, so whenever we stopped at one, Wash was real careful about helping out with whatever work was going forward.

Mostly, that meant cutting trees. The grubs had killed most of them by eating away their roots, but the wood was still good for building, as long as someone got to it before the charcoal beetles and the ruby pit borers and all the other things did. Sometimes helping out meant hunting the animals that were coming back along with the plants and ground cover. Usually, they were small critters, like raccoons and foxes and squirrels, but about three miles outside the Greenleaf settlement, we passed a small herd of bison.

When we got to Greenleaf and Wash told the settlers, they reacted like an anthill that had been stirred up with a stick. In less time than it took to tell about it, half the settlers were saddled up with their rifles to hand. Professor Torgeson decided 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 bison were, the hunters crept up to the hilltop and fired down into the animals. All of the bison jerked at the sound of the gunshots, and two of them fell over. In the half second before the whole herd took off running, Wash gave a loud yell. Two of the settlers — ones who’d stayed mounted — did the same.

The bison took one look at the yelling settlers and stampeded away from us. They kicked up quite a dust running away, and I could feel the ground shaking under my feet from the pounding of their hooves. The hunters dropped another one before they got too far away to hit, then most of them remounted and rode after the herd to make sure they kept going. The rest of us went down to start dealing with the dead bison.

One of the settlers rode back to Greenleaf for a wagon to haul the bison skins and meat back to the settlement for smoking and drying and tanning. With everyone helping, we had the hot, dirty job of butchering the animals all done by sunset. The settlers were double happy, first on account of having a lot of meat drop into their laps unexpectedly, and second because they’d gotten to the bison herd and stampeded it off before the bison got into their fields and tore up their crops.