“Daybat Creek has gone dry,” Mr. Ajani said. “All at once, about three weeks back.”
Wash set his cup down, frowning. “All at once?”
Mr. Ajani nodded. “And we’ve had more than enough rain, before and after the creek stopped running. Enough to keep the rice lake from dropping much so far, at least.”
“You sent to Adashome?” Wash said, staring out into the air like he was concentrating on something that wasn’t there to be seen.
“First thing,” Mrs. Turner put in. “The creek is running fine at their end of it.”
“So there’s more than likely a problem in the Forth Hills,” Wash finished. “Giant beavers, maybe; they’d have an easy time of dam building with all this dead wood.”
“We’d like to be sure,” Mr. Ajani said.
Mrs. Turner frowned. “More than that, we’d like to get the creek flowing again,” she said tartly.
“Can’t work on that until we know what the problem is,” Wash told her. “I’m sorry, Professor Torgeson, but unless you want to ride upstream to the Forth Hills, I’m afraid you and Eff are going to be spending a week in Promised Land.”
“Nonsense,” Professor Torgeson said before my heart had time to do more than lurch at the thought of staying behind. “It would be foolish to miss a chance to register the plants and animals of an unpeopled woodland. Of course we’ll come with you.”
I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. I had a notion that I wouldn’t have enjoyed spending a week in the same settlement as Mrs. Turner, and now I wouldn’t have to.
CHAPTER 15
MRS. TURNER DIDN’T SEEM TO LIKE THE NOTION OF PROFESSOR Torgeson and me going off to investigate with Wash, but there wasn’t much of anything she could do about it. She tried to talk Wash into bringing a whole group of settlement folks with us, in case we needed help with whatever was blocking the creek, but Wash pointed out that Promised Land couldn’t spare either the men or the horses for just an “in case.”
She did talk him into taking along one extra person — a tall, weedy, cheerful boy about two years younger than me. His full name was George Sergeant Robinson, but everyone called him Champ on account of him winning a shooting contest when he was a childing. He reminded me a lot of my brother Robbie. He brought along a well-worn rifle that his father had used in the Secession War. The first day, he shot a duck for dinner, and didn’t waste even one bullet. Wash thanked him, but said that we’d be best off not starting a cooking fire with so many dead trees all around, and after that Champ left the ducks alone.
Quite a few ducks had been nesting along the banks of Daybat Creek. We saw them poking in the muddy creek bed, looking puzzled, or dozing at the edges where the water should have been. Wash made us stay out of the creek bed, though it would have been easier riding. He said that we didn’t know what had blocked up the creek, and we didn’t know when it would come unblocked, but we for sure knew that we didn’t want to be in the creek bed when the water came roaring back.
Between the two settlements of Promised Land and Adashome, the land was forested and hilly. It wasn’t easy traveling. Away from Promised Land, most of the trees were grub-killed, and we ran into another blow-down on the second morning and had to go around. Champ thought maybe the blow-down was what had blocked up the creek, but when we finally got past it, the creek bed was still dry and we had to keep going.
It took us nearly three days, but we finally reached the source of the problem. We’d just gotten into the Forth Hills, and riding was hard going. The hills were close together, and the creek had narrowed and cut a deep gash through them. We had our choice of riding up the creek bed or climbing the hill and making our way along the top edge of a thirty-foot slope too steep for horses or people.
Wash was still worried about the creek unblocking itself suddenly, so we climbed. The trees and the bad footing made it hard to stay within sight of the creek. We were just past the top of the second big hill, and Champ was worrying out loud that we’d miss our mark, when Wash pulled up.
“I do believe we’ve found the problem,” he said. “Watch that you don’t get too near.”
Champ gave a long whistle, while the professor and I just stared. Right in front of us, half the hill looked to have just collapsed into the creek in a huge mess of mud and dead trees. The creek had backed up behind it in the low spot between hills, but it didn’t have much place to go. The water was only about halfway to the top of the dam, but it had already made itself a small lake.
“What happened?” Professor Torgeson said after a minute.
“Looks like a landslide,” Wash said. “Mr. Ajani said there’s been rain recently —” “A lot of it!” Champ put in.
“— and the grubs ate away all the roots that held the earth in place before.” Wash nodded at the dead trees that surrounded us. “Could be a few more spots like this elsewhere.”
“Like all the blow-downs,” I said, and Wash nodded.
“Well, this looks like a wasted trip,” Champ said cheerfully. “It’ll take a while for all that to fill up, but by next spring the creek will be back, I’m thinking.”
“Maybe,” Wash said in the tone that meant you’d possibly missed seeing something important. “I want a closer look.”
“So do I,” the professor said.
Wash looked around. “Best make camp here, then. We can’t get the horses down, and I’m not leaving these two here without protection spells. These woods may not be as dead as they look.”
Champ scowled like he was insulted, but I thought about the nest of razorquarls we’d almost stumbled over, and nodded.
It wasn’t that simple, of course. Nobody wanted to camp right at the edge of the slope; even if we’d been sure the ground wouldn’t collapse again, we couldn’t count on all the dangerous wildlife being gone. Even if the magical creatures hadn’t come back yet (and we’d already seen signs of the smaller ones), some of the natural ones were just as bad. A hungry family of bears or a pack of timber wolves could trap us against the slope, if they got riled enough to attack.
So we scouted around for a good spot, then spent an hour or thereabouts making it as safe as we could. We had it down to a routine by then — it had been a while since Wash and the professor and I had been able to stay at a wagonrest or settlement every single night, and of course there hadn’t been any ready-made protected areas since we left Promised Land. Champ and I unloaded the horses while the professor cast a couple of close-up protection spells to cover the camp for the night.
Meanwhile, Wash took his rifle and walked out into the forest, circling the area a ways out to look for signs of anything dangerous living in the area. The first night we’d had to camp out, he’d found a skunk’s den less than ten yards out, which was enough to get us to move the campsite even though a regular skunk isn’t exactly a threat to life and limb. I was sure Wash was also doing some longer-range magic, though he didn’t say and I didn’t ask.
This time, Wash came back in half an hour without spotting anything chancy, so we finished stretching a tarpaulin between two trees to sleep under and went looking for stones to line a firepit. Nobody was completely sure that building a fire would be all right, but all of us were sick to death of cold meals, and Wash said that the woods were still damp enough from all the rain that we could risk a small one, if we were determined on it.
Finding rocks was easy, though I’d never seen any like the ones we hauled back to camp. They were grayish white, of all sorts of sizes and shapes, as if an enormous stone tree had shattered into bits. Some of them had rough textures on one side that looked almost like deliberate patterns. The stone itself was hard, but it broke easily if you dropped it or knocked two pieces together. I commented that the rocks seemed odd, but Champ just laughed.