Daria on the Trail Part Two

DISCLAIMER: I do not own either the Game of Thrones or A Song of Ice and Fire. Nor do I own Daria Morgendorffer. The former belongs to GRR Martin and Daria belongs to MTV Viacom. This story based on the real Oregon Trail and has little or nothing to do with the computer game of the same name. This work of fiction is written for my own amusement and ego gratification, not for profit. My thanks to UltimatePaladin for giving me the idea that inspired this story.

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Despite Daria's suspicions and the temptation to give in to panic, she knew that observation and keeping a clear head were the keys to survival. Fact: whether she had somehow fallen in either with re-enactors or with real Wild West pioneers, she had minimal survival skills and was alone out on the Great Plains without a car and probably far out of range of the nearest cell phone tower. And that was if she was in the twenty-first century.

Fact: the woman, at least, spoke Andal. Very few people could speak Andal in her world and she didn't think that many of them were pioneer role-players. She put aside asking the woman how the hell they got to the middle of the Great Plains for later. Getting a ride or having protection to the nearest town or fort was more important.

She decided that whether they were role-players or the real deal, they would probably stop by some town or fort along the way. Even if the Great Plains were still the wide open spaces, there were still farmhouses, settlements, gas stations, or other marks of civilization. If, on the other hand, this was the heyday of the Oregon Trail, they didn't have very many towns along or near the trail at this point, she remembered: Denver might or might not have existed (It was off the trail), Salt Lake City probably did (It was also off the trail), but there wasn't another town until Oregon proper. The nearest fort she remembered from reading up about the Oregon Trail was either Fort Kearny or Fort Laramie: both were twenty-first century historic sites. If she was in her time and in in her world, she could exit the charade once she got to the historic site, get a ride to the nearest town with a bus station, then make her way back to Boston and academia. If she was still in the twenty-first century, and it looked to becoming a bigger "If" every second as she took in the sights and sounds and smells surrounding her.

If this was the Oregon Trail way back when, she'd not only have to get some assistance, she'd need to make other decisions. The idea of being in mid-nineteenth century Nebraska was frightening enough: the thought of trying to make her way east to either St. Joseph, Council Bluffs, or Independence was even more fearsome. It wasn't called the Wild West for nothing, she thought sardonically. Maybe she ought to keep going west? Despite the fact that this wagon train was headed in what she thought was the wrong direction, it offered a measure of shelter and protection that she wouldn't have going all by herself. It also offered her an identity of sorts: that of a woman emigrating west to start a new life. She realized that she had the bare bones of a plan she could fill out later.

In the meantime she needed to deal with the here and now. She decided to speak to the woman she'd spoken to a few moments ago. She was trying to start a cooking fire with buffalo dung. Daria wrinkled her nose. Kiss the yogurt and croissants goodbye, Morgendorffer, she thought grimly. Breakfast is gonna be bacon and biscuits for a long, long time.

. "Ma'am," said Daria, "I'd like to ask you a very big favor."

"What sort of favor?" asked the woman.

"As incredible as this sounds, I'm out here by myself," said Daria. "I own nothing but a wool blanket, the clothes on my back, and what little I have in my purse."

"No money?" said the woman.

"That's complicated," said Daria, "I don't have very much. I'll tell you later."

"I'll ask my husband," said the woman. The woman walked off to talk to a large man who was busy yoking a couple of oxen, pausing first to talk to a couple of children.

The children stared at Daria in curiosity. Who was this strange woman?

One of the girls walked up to her and said "Hello, I'm Minti. Who are you?"

Daria gave the best smile she could, hoping that she wouldn't scare the kid to death. "My name is Daria Morgendorffer," she replied in slow, careful Andal. She remembered talking to some of the mothers from Westeros who'd crossed over in her world. They not only liked to ask for names but also tended to ask you where you're from. Roll with it, Morgendorffer, she told herself. "I was born in Texas but I grew up in Maryland."

Both girls were amazed that she spoke Andal. The other girl introduced herself as Jilla. Jilla asked her if she had any sisters. Daria told her that she had a younger sister named Quinn and that her family was fostering a girl from the Crownlands named Myrcia. They also had a brother named Kennard; he was busy helping their father yoke the oxen.

The large man came over a short time later.

"Greetings," he said. "My wife said that you wanted to talk to me."

"Greetings," said Daria. I'd better be real polite, she thought. "May the God or Gods show their blessings on you."

"Kara has the right of it. You speak Andal," said the man. "What did you want to talk about?"

"My name is Daria Morgendorffer. I am out here on the Great Plains by myself with only a wool blanket and the clothes on my back," said Daria. "No wagon, no animals, no provisions. I'd like to travel with you all until we reach Fort Laramie or perhaps further."

"I think we can feed another mouth at least as far as the holdfast," he said.

"Thank you," said Daria, "I appreciate it."

"The Mother asks us to be kind to her daughters when we can," said Orrick, as if quoting some saying Daria supposed he learned at a Sept back in his homeland. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm busy. I'm the Captain of this company and we'll have to get moving shortly." And with that Mr. Orrick set off to look over his animals and wagons as well as those of the other members of the company.

Well, now I got my ride, Daria thought. Sort of. She knew from her studies that travel on the Overland Trail was quite different from how it was depicted on movies and television. It was slow. A wagon train was likely to only go ten to twenty miles a day, and travel across the Great Plains literally took weeks or even months. Most people walked alongside their wagons on the trail instead of riding in them. There were few, if any, Indian attacks and the greatest dangers facing travelers were disease, accidents with animals and wagons, and drownings at the major river crossings.

She walked back to the woman, who was still cooking breakfast.

"Ma'am," said Daria. "Your husband said that it was all right for me to travel with you."

"Welcome to our household," said the woman. "You can put your blanket inside the wagon."

"Thank you," said Daria.

"Have you had any breakfast?" said the woman.

"No, ma'am," said Daria.

No plate or silverware, Daria thought grimly. She'd have to do something about that if she could. Maybe she could scrounge something along the way: people going west did a lot of dumping to lighten their wagon loads. Maybe someone would dump a plate, fork and a knife.

After eating a breakfast of bacon and biscuits, washed down with a strange-tasting tea, Daria helped Kara cover over the campfire and finish reloading the wagon. It was now early light. The Orricks were ready to go. Daria looked around and saw that the other people in the company were also ready to go. Someone blew a horn, and the wagons began moving.

It wasn't quite the scene from a great Hollywood epic: if it had been, it would have included a panoramic view of the landscape, a wide shot of the wagon train, close-ups of the leading actors, and an orchestral soundtrack. As it was, Daria was at ground-level standing beside a covered wagon driven by two yoke of oxen.

Daria's guess that these were re-enactors took more hits as they moved along. She thought about how much land would be needed to allow re-enactors to have a truly realistic re-enactment of the Oregon Trail without such things as the occasional paved road, barbed wire fence, or cattle crossing. They'd have to have not just hundreds of acres, but thousands of acres to be able to pull it off. She decided that you'd have to be at least a mega-billionaire to be able to host a wagon train without some bit or other of the early twenty-first century peeping in. The less sign of the twenty-first century, the more she worried. Suppose this is the Nineteenth Century and I'm stuck here, a panicky voice said in her head. She pressed it down, telling herself that panicking wouldn't do her any good. She then thought of her mother: how would Mom handle this? Mom might be a workaholic, but she had an inner core of steel. Suppose Mom was weighing the evidence to decide whether she had a presentable case, she told herself. She'd weigh her arguments and the strength of the evidence before making any conclusions.

Was this really the Wild West, she thought. Possibly, she told herself. She could wait to find out, she decided, she didn't need to say yes or no. Right now her biggest concerns were going to be keeping up with the wagon train and not getting run over. That part didn't look that hard: oxen moved slowly.

Since she didn't have to make up her mind immediately, she decided to indulge herself by enjoying the spectacle around her. This was much better than a Hollywood movie. It was like she'd been caught in the middle of a John Ford Western, except that she was surrounded by scenes and camera angles the Hollywood director would never use.

One of the Orrick girls, Minti, walked up to her. "How is it you speak Andal?" she said. "Most Yankees don't."

Daria decided to tell the girl some, but not all of the truth. "My uncle took in an orphan girl from Westeros several years ago," she said, "I learned a lot of it from her." That Myrcia Waters and her mom magically appeared in Mountain Home in 1994 and that her mom was murdered shortly afterwards wasn't something this girl needed to know.

"You don't speak it right," said the girl.

"I don't claim to," said Daria. "I'm an American. I grew up speaking English."

"So what are you doing here?" said the girl.

"I'm not sure," Daria replied. And that was the whole truth.

Daria wondered about the date. The grass was still green and hadn't been burnt brown by the blazing sun. She guessed that it was either very late spring or early summer. Whatever month this was, it was drying out and the animals and wagons were kicking up a lot of dust. Daria suspected that Mr. Orrick's wagon train wasn't the only one on the road right now. She idly wished for goggles or even her old eyeglasses; she'd gotten a lazik operation over a year ago and no longer needed eyeglasses while driving or outdoors.

If the trail was dusty, it wasn't so dusty that she couldn't see the scenery. She noted that there was a river over to her right, which was probably the Platte, at least if this was the Overland Trail way back when. There was another trail on the other side of the river and at least one wagon train on it.

She decided to step away from the trail and the dust to see if she could get a better look. There was enough space between the road and the river that she could step away from the trail and a breeze blowing from the north. That might help her get her bearings.

"Excuse me," she said. She looked both ways ran several steps to get ahead of the wagon nearest her, then ran across its path and over to its side.

There, better, she thought.

She looked around to get a better view. There were what looked like a couple of stone mounds off to the east, nothing much except the Platte and grassland to the north, but to the west there was a mound with a tall cylindrical stone spire ahead of her. She gulped. She recognized it: she'd seen drawings and photographs of it in books and on the internet. That was Chimney Rock, a famous landmark along the Oregon Trail, and it lacked fencing, power lines, or other twentieth- or twenty-first century trimmings.

Oh, boy, she thought. I'm definitely back in the Wild West era.