Across the Great Barrier by Wrede Patricia C

Author:Wrede, Patricia C. [Wrede, Patricia C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Published: 2011-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

16

THE ROCK FELT AS LIGHT IN MY HAND AS THE ACTUAL BIRD WOULD have been, could I have held it. Carefully, I brushed the last few bits of dirt from the stone feathers. The legs and feet were broken off, but the rest of the bird was perfect. The pointed part that had caught my eye was the tip of the tail feathers poking out of the dirt. The bird’s head was tilted, as if it was looking down at something. Two of the wing feathers weren’t quite lined up right, just like a real bird that hadn’t closed its wings all the way when it landed.

“Professor Torgeson!” I called. “I think you should see this.”

“I found it!” Champ yelled at almost the same time. “Look, Professor!”

He was closer to the professor than I was, so by the time I reached them, they were both bent over his find. He held the head of the squirrel. One ear was chipped off; except for that, it was as finely detailed as the paw and the bird. The squirrel’s teeth were bared as if it was going to attack something. I wondered what the whole statue would look like if we ever found enough parts to put it together.

The professor was just as excited about my swallow as she was about the squirrel head, but she told us not to dig around on the slope anymore. She said the excavators would want it to be undisturbed, and we should look through the dam instead, since that was already all mixed up.

Inside of an hour, we’d both found a heap of broken statue bits. All of them seemed to be bits of animals, and all of them were perfectly detailed. Most of them were too small to tell what the whole statue had been of, but there were a few that were obvious: a duck’s head, a deer hoof, and a whole shrew. Some of them had obviously been magical animals — there isn’t anything else that looks quite like a slitherrat — but for the most part we couldn’t be sure whether the bits we were looking at had come from statues of natural animals or magical ones.

Finally, the professor told us to stop. “We’ve already piled up more than we can reasonably carry back to Promised Land, let alone haul along all the way to Mill City,” she pointed out. “We’ll sort through this and choose the best specimens, and leave the rest for the excavators.”

So we sat around the pile of broken statues, hunting for the best bits. Champ and I worked quickly, but the professor went more and more slowly and examined each piece more and more carefully. I could see she was looking for something; she was acting the same way she had when she thought up the business about the mirror bug traps, but hadn’t told anyone what she thought because she hadn’t checked it yet.

“I wonder why anyone would make so many statues way out here,” Champ said after a while.

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