“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 little 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.