Those ideas came from the elders, who also helped as they could, cooking meals, bring around water to keep the dust from choking those working under the mesh of canvas, hide and cloth tents and awnings covering the exposed ground. Half the villagers moved to the valley below to plant crops, hunt for the diggers, and be there when more fossils were found. And so they could say they saw the first of the metal beasts the necromancer would raise from the bones of her chosen subjects.
One of the young and two of the elders proved to be fair artists with charcoal and paper, enough so that under Ivan and Elisa's instructions, and if checked on the mapping of bones. When it came to reconstruction of how they may have come to lie as they did, the tribal folk were perhaps far better. Elisa even asked if the young woman wished to apprentice with her, to the youth and the elders' delight. Her art, guided by the experience with animals the hunters and elders had, led to some of the best art she had seen, so much that she broke out precious comte crayons and pastel chalks, and asked some one to send for a painter from town, to work with the girl.
But there were problems still. Like the morning they found the cougar in the pit, feasting upon a freshly killed mule deer, forcing them to let it eat its fill, before chasing it off with flapping blankets and other noise items, a bugle proving most effective. Another night they found the bison herd seeking a wallow, and spent the hours normally slept in with torches and using the steam from the wagon's boiler vented through hoses to keep the herd from the dig, which would have ruined it.
Then there were the three days of fear, when the sky lit up even under the sun with bands of dancing lights. Elisa's control over the dig was almost lost. A band of the tribes thought that this sign from the gods meant the dig had violated the trust of man with the land. Twice she and the guards stopped people from burying the pit. The camp was on edge and breaking into fractions, not aided by the near constant glow of Saint Elmo's Fire that graced the wagon and all metal items as the light storm grew above them. For those used to being around metals, this was not an unusual occurrence, but to the tribes, who still used flint, antler and bone by choice, the glows upon iron and other metals seemed to speak of evil spirits and dark events. This was the bane, even among the 'civilized' of a necromancer, that the excited charges upon metals would mark them out for others as making pacts with the Dark One. When the night the sky burned, and then was answered to the south with pockets of glow hours later days into the storm, for Elisa, things got better. Pockets of bright light on the horizon spread to consume the whole of he horizon with a line of blazing orange, red and yellow. A sign they all feared, that of wildfire. And most now accepted that the sky storm had been a warning to prepare, not a strike against the dig by the spirits of the sky.
Now some of the improvements she had made came to the fore, the wagon carried pumps she had designed to improve the moving of water through hoses, and the water mill one of the whites who had stopped to set up along the side valley, lifted out water with some quick changes. High above the hill, knowing the time of long dry spells would come during the dig season, Elisa's persuasions on the elders achieved a new idea in the west, one just coming to fore amid the rising buildings of the east, that of the water tower to catch rain and hold it for later use, While only one storm's worth of water was in it, every bit they had could be used.
Now the winds began to rise, from the calm summer night to the same fitful fronts that preceded a thunderstorm. But the air flowed south, seeking the fire, not fleeing as before the lightning and rains. It was obvious they had time come the dawn when the braves crossing the Elkhorn to check the closeness of the fire returned with word that it appeared to be coming from the distant railroad along the Platte's north bank. This gave them time, as the fires were fifty to sixty miles away. Until the elders told of wildfires in the past that raced that distance in a single day.
It was the miller who had the idea to save the encampment and fields. He approached the elders and Ivan with the idea. Being a man of the west who had returned east only to learn the miller's arts, he knew to make the idea be one the native folk might embrace through linking to the actions of an animal.
"Do beaver lodges ever catch fire? I can make a quick dam on the stream, if you let me, and with some work, create an island for the village to be upon, saving the crops, as well as keeping us all safe." When the elders started at the idea, he pushed one. "Like the beavers' dams, I will make it low, but of stone, so it will create at most a small pond, leaving the crops on the island, we can drain it afterwards, and rebuild it if needed. It will only make a six foot rise behind it, less than many of the beaver dams I have seen in some streams."
This started a short argument, that ended with the arrival of a wagon train from the south, fleeing the fire. These folks had sought safety by racing away from the fires, which one claimed to have seen starting up.
"The devil's glow lit up the wires of that damned Morse, until Satan tossed out the sparks, at the height of the lightstorm, when lightning leapt from the wires down to the rails, the switches, anything of metal. It was scary. I saw three men killed near an engine, as the lighting kept striking it, over and over. Still was happening when I fled, by then the sparks and strikes to metal out away from the grades had lit the fires." He stopped to take a drink of the water the caravan sought after racing across land for two days, splashing face and neck as well as throat with it. "Half of Fremont's station was gone, met a rider heading to Omaha from further east, he said Columbus Crossing for the Loup River was totally destroyed, some fool having run a line of the Morse wire through town."
Two wagons of the train were of stonemasons, and when they were told of the dam, they mentioned a place the noted that looked like it held limestone nearby, not the best material, but quick to quarry. A heated conference later, and the masons were digging stones with the fossil hunters carving a channel to east and west of the low rise in the valley the new encampment and most of the fields lay upon. Work began fast, and without the care shown at the dig. By sundown, the first blocks of stone were laying down on either side of the stream, to mark the footings of the dam. They laid slabs and blocks through the night, as the glow on the sky came closer, and smoke began to shroud the stars in thin veils, tough at times only the bright wanderers of the astrologers' charts still shown through.
The loss of some crops was worrying to the Elder's, but Elisa promised to pay for replacements, as Ivan pointed out the fire would destroy all the crops otherwise. The third day, as another light storm erupted, behind the orange haze the sky wore, faint curtains with only hints of color shown, as most metal items took on some glow, shocking those who touched or even passed too close to them. The fire topped the far ridge, the winds now roared around them, but the dame was mostly done.
Elisa prayed to Bog that the Elkhorn was wide enough to hold the flames back, but the cottonwoods that lined that river were fickle things. They marked where water was, even as sometimes their root drank all their was in the channel, or dried into tinder for the flames of the wild lands. They had done all they could, even lowering the protections of the dig, and covering it with a thick layer of dirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment