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 was 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.
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.
Professor Jeffries had a big map in his office, stuck with pins to show where things were. Green pins were settlements, brown ones were large wildlife like bears or mammoths, pink ones were birds, red ones were for really dangerous things like swarming weasels or saber cats, and so on. Each pin had a little paper wrapped around it, with the date and a reference code so you could look up more in the little brown book that went with the map. The professor had tried to persuade some of the settlement magicians to send him word of any wildlife that came around their areas, but only one or two had agreed, so if it hadn’t been for Wash, the map would have had almost nothing but green pins.
Mama relaxed a good bit when she heard I was spending most of my time at a table, copying letters. It made me see that all her fretting was partly my own fault, because I hadn’t shown her that I was all the way healthy again. Truth to tell, I’d been happy to keep on doing the lighter chores, right up until she’d broken her leg. And then she’d been too distracted to notice that I was working just as hard as Nan and Allie, and since then, she just hadn’t had to think on it.
From then on, I made a point of mentioning it when I helped Robbie stack firewood, or dug over a piece of the garden, or helped haul feed for the horses. Mama frowned at me the first few times, but she couldn’t rightly complain about me doing chores with the others, and gradually she got used to the idea that I really was strong enough to do them.
Much to my surprise, I liked doing some of the heavier work. It wasn’t like the housekeeping spells that still fizzled on me five times out of six; when I hauled a bucket of water to the sink, it stayed hauled. I loved working with Professor Jeffries, too, and deciphering Wash’s cramped writing.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was happy all summer long.
CHAPTER 20
LAN DIDN’T COME HOME AT ALL THE SUMMER WE TURNED SIXTEEN. One of the teachers had arranged some special tutoring for him in advanced elemental recombination, with a professor from the Broadbent University of Pennsylvania who could only do it during those few weeks. Lan’s letter sounded excited, and of course Papa was very pleased. I was sorry that Lan wouldn’t be home, but by then I was used to him being gone, and I was busy at the menagerie.
Around August, Wash started sending samples along with his letters. The first was a small red flower, pressed and dried between two of the sheets; the second was an orange-and-black butterfly whose wings had come off in the mail. None of the samples that followed were alive—they couldn’t have gotten through the barrier spell if they were—and most of them were things the professor didn’t have in his collection. Once there was a big round beetle, the size of a quarter, with mirror-bright wings and a tiny black head. The note Wash sent with it said:
Professor Jeffries was excited by the beetle, but he didn’t have anything to tell Wash because no one had ever seen one before. Right away, he sent a message to the settlements south of Wash’s circuit area. One of the magicians there said he’d seen one, but it had flown straight into the protective spell around the settlement and died, so it wasn’t anything to worry about. The professor shook his head when he read that, and said that wasn’t the point, and didn’t those settlement magicians think about anything beyond watching out for the crops? Still grumbling, he put six shiny silver pins in his map and moved on to other things.
That whole year was the happiest I could ever remember being. I was doing well enough in most of my classes to please Papa and Mama. The class in practical spells was the only one I had trouble with, but as long as I could show I’d done the setup and procedure correctly, the teacher would give me enough marks to pass, even if the spell fizzled. I had friends, Rindy and Susan, two boarder girls who would be moving out to settlements when they finished school. Rindy was hoping to pass her teacher examinations the next year, so that her settlement could have a lower-grades school; Susan just wanted all the learning she could get while she had the chance to get some. I had my extra class in Aphrikan magic and my work at the menagerie—even during the winter months, Professor Jeffries found things for me to do.
Best of all, William had talked his father into one more year at the Mill City upper school, before he was to go East to prepare for college. All summer, I hadn’t dared ask when he’d be leaving. And then, there he was on the first day of school. My face must have shown what I was thinking, because he snorted the way his father did when he thought someone was being foolish.
