This time, Mama gave me a stern look. “Eff, you should wait until someone is quite finished speaking before you jump in with your comments.” She waited a moment, but I knew well enough not to open my mouth again. Once she was satisfied that I wasn’t going to interrupt, she went on, “But if you and Lan had been the only reasons we had for moving—if your father hadn’t been pleased and excited by the thought of trying out his ideas for teaching practical magic at a brand-new school that has no traditions to overturn, and if he hadn’t liked the notion of setting his stamp on an institution that will be teaching young magicians for the next hundred years and more—then we wouldn’t be going. Not even for you.” She smiled. “So you should be very glad that your father does feel that way shouldn’t you?”
Well, when she put it like that, I could see that wild horses couldn’t have kept Papa in Helvan Shores when there was something like this waiting. Only—“If Papa wanted to go West so much, how come it took him a whole year to make up his mind?” I asked.
“Because it’s a hard thing to leave a place where you’ve lived most of your life, where your brothers and sisters and parents still live, where some of your children will stay behind,” Mama said. “It’s a hard thing to risk what you know and are sure of, just for the possibility of something better. Even when it’s a pretty strong possibility, and something that’s a whole lot better.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Mama bent and kissed my forehead. “You don’t understand now, but if you remember what I said, you’ll understand someday.”
She was right. I didn’t understand then, but I do now.
CHAPTER 3
THE NEXT MONTH AND A HALF WAS A BUSY TIME. EVERYTHING IN THE house had to be cleaned and wrapped up and packed in crates and shipped off to the North Plains Territory. It seemed as if no one had a minute to spare for anything but cleaning and packing. Hugh tried to sneak all his schoolbooks into the very first box, so that he wouldn’t have to do lessons for a month, but Papa found them and took them out again.
Then there were the aunts and uncles and cousins, who all came by at one time or another to marvel at what Papa was doing—or shake their heads over it, depending. All except Aunt Janna and Uncle Earn, that is. They didn’t come next nor near the house the whole time we were getting ready to leave.
The rest of the aunts and uncles more than made up for the two of them, though. The uncles all wanted to talk with Papa about the West and business opportunities and political questions. The aunts wanted to talk to Mama about living so much nearer to the frontier. Some of the aunts tried to commiserate with Mama, as if she must dislike the idea of moving West. Mama soon straightened
“I heard there are great beasts, the size of a house, that can stamp you flat as paper!” Cousin Bernie said.
“Those are mammoths,” Robbie told him. He’d been doing extra reading on the North Plains ever since he found out we’d be living there, and he enjoyed showing off his new knowledge to the rest of us. “They used to be all over North Columbia, but when the first settlers came from the Old Continent, they killed all the ones in the East. Well, almost all. Peter said he saw a man once who’d caught one and tamed it and rode it like a horse.”
“You can’t ride a thing as big as a house!” Cousin Bernie said with magnificent scorn.
“They do it with elephants in India,” Hugh said. “They don’t ride them the way you’d ride a horse; they strap a sort of carriage seat to the elephant’s back, and four or five people can sit in it at once and ride.”
“I bet a mammoth could carry ten people!” Robbie said with enthusiasm.
“Maybe twenty!” Bernie said, abandoning his objections in favor of such an interesting alternative. “Maybe you can catch one, Robbie!”
“It would have to be a small one,” Robbie said thoughtfully. “Young, I mean. So you’d have time to train it up.”
“Catching even a small one would be hard,” Jack put in. “Since they’re so big.”
“You could do it if you dug a big pit, and it fell in,” Bernie said.
“How would you get it out again?” Robbie objected. “They’re awful heavy. You’d have to get someone with lots of magic to do it. Maybe more than one.”
“Have you got a better idea?” Bernie said.
I could see the boys were going to spend the rest of Cousin Bernie’s visit arguing about mammoth traps, so I left and went upstairs. Mama and Aunt Tilly were visiting in the parlor, and I didn’t want to have to sit straight and be quiet while they went on about what to take for housekeeping and what to leave behind.
Things went on like that for the whole month, and then, suddenly, all our belongings were gone and it was time for us to leave as well. Mama helped me pack a trunk all my own, and pasted a silhouette of me on it that she’d cut out of black paper, so that everyone would know it for mine. Then there was an enormous party, with Grandfather and all the aunts and uncles and cousins, even Uncle Earn and Aunt Janna, though they came late and left early.
We boarded the train the next morning. The trip was the kind of thing you remember forever. There were so many of us, even without Diane and Charlie and Peter and Frank and Sharl and Julie, that we took up almost half a car. The train company had separate boarding areas for men and women, so Papa took Hugh and Jack and Robbie and Lan one way, and Mama took Rennie, Nan, Allie, and me the other.
The train station was loud and confusing. Mama set Rennie and Hugh to help mind the younger ones, because they were the oldest. Of course Rennie complained that Jack and Nan should be helping, too, and Mama pointed out that Jack and Nan weren’t old enough for childminding, and Jack, especially, was as likely to get into trouble as the childings he’d be watching. Rennie pouted and said she wished she’d stayed with Uncle Stephen after all. Papa told her it was too late for that and to behave. After that, she just sulked quietly.
I didn’t mind Rennie. I spent most of the trip looking out the window, watching the land change. First, there were plowed fields and small villages, then big rolling mountains that the train had to wind through like a snake because it couldn’t just climb up and down like a mule or a horse. Then there were midland cities, bigger than Helvan Shores, almost as big as the great ports on the East Coast, but bare of trees and full of dust.
Whenever the train stopped at a station, we would get off and run up and down the platform to stretch our legs. Hugh wanted to explore, but Mama wouldn’t let him. She said there wasn’t enough time, and the train wouldn’t wait for him if he got lost and was slow coming back. Even at the meal stops, when all the long-riding passengers were let off for an hour to eat in the little dining room at the train station, Mama insisted that he stay close.
In between stops, Papa told us about the North Plains Territory. Mill City was right at the edge of the Great Prairie, on the Mammoth River. To the east were forests of oak and maple and pine, and the farms that men were carving out of them despite the haunts and greatwolves and Columbian boars that lived in them still. To the west were the plains, the wild country where great herds of mammoths and bison trampled everything in their path, woolly rhinoceroses with horns on their noses as long as a grown man’s arm made the earth shake when they charged, and steam dragons and spectral bears hunted anything that moved.
On the far side of the plains were mountains, sharp and high, that no one had seen but a few explorers. Papa said that at least ten expeditions had tried to find a way through them to the Pacific Ocean, but only three men had ever come back alive, and they were stark out of their heads. There was a monument in the capital to Lewis and Clark, who headed the first group that went missing, back in 1804. It was more than wild country; it was unknown.
I loved listening to Papa’s stories, but it made me wonder what Mill City would be like, being right at the edge of the wild like that. I could see the country changing around us as the train carried us farther west. The stops were farther apart, and when we got off the train to run, the platforms were shorter. Then the train plunged into the woods, and we watched the trees stream past the windows, ancient and dark and frightening despite the sunlit slash the railroad company had cleared through their midst to run the trains. I stared out the window at it for an hour, and fell asleep still staring.
