Daria on the Trail Part Seven I Need More Practice
DISCLAIMER: George RR Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire and owns all rights. Daria is the creation of MTV and I don't own it either. This story is based on the real Oregon Trail, not the video game.
This story was inspired by an idea from UltimatePaladin
I am writing this story for my own amusement and ego gratification. If you like it, please write a review.
Daria On The Trail*Daria On TheTrail* Daria On The Trail
The Northerner was gone when Mrs. Trout awoke Daria the next morning.
"Good morning, Daria," she said.
"Good morning," said Daria. "Where is Mr. Snow? Is he still here? I'd love to talk to him some more."
"He's not here," said Mrs. Trout. "He left before I woke up. Orrick tried to persuade him to be a trail guide but he told Orrick that he had to take his furs to St. Joseph. Orrick said that he had a message he wanted us to pass along to you. Mr. Snow said that you spoke the Common tongue well, particularly for a Yankee girl. Not many of your folk do."
"Want some breakfast?"
"Please," said Daria.
"We're going to be busy today," she continued. "Orrick said that Mr. Snow saw a broken wagon up ahead. Its rear axle was still intact. If it' still there, he and some of the other men will take it apart and put its rear axle on Mr. Tucker's wagon." She put some bacon and bread on Daria's plate. Daria glanced at the wagon and sighed. There was a lot of stuff in the wagon. True, she'd only help unload part of it, but there was a lot more that would have to come out.
A few minutes later, Jilla and Minti reappeared from wherever they'd been. Shortly afterward, so did Kennard and Willem, and together they all began to unload the wagon. It was hard work. Daria had helped unload the wagon several times, but this was the first time she and the Trouts had completely unloaded it. By the time they were done, her muscles were aching in protest.
Orrick came back to where Daria and the Trouts had just finished unloading the wagon. "Good," he said. "We'll cover our goods with a tarp and pray that it doesn't rain,"
Orrick then turned to Daria and looked at her speculatively. "Daria, do you know how to yoke oxen?" he said.
That was a trick question. Daria already knew the answer. "No, I don't," she said.
"Daria, I think it's time that you learn how," said Mr. Trout.
It was a memorable experience, traumatic enough that it took two weeks for her to look back on her attempt and laugh at any of it. Fortunately, she had help: Willem. Willem had to show her how to lasso the ox and then put the yoke on the critter. It was anything but easy: the yoke was heavy and even with Willem's help, Daria had difficulty setting the yoke on the oxen's necks. Worse yet was that she had an audience: not just the Trouts, but some of the wagon train's other men and women. The chuckles and guffaws didn't help: but despite the fact that she wanted to drop the yoke and stalk off to be alone, she kept at it, partly not to lose face, and also because it was a survival skill she suspected that she needed to learn.
When it was done, the younger Trouts and a couple of teenaged boys were grinning at her. She decided to count to ten. When that was done she counted to twenty. "I'm not going to ask how well I did," she said. "I think I need more practice."
"You do," Mr. Trout replied, "but at least you know it. You should have seen some of the Greenhorns back in Westport. They'd never yoked an ox in their lives." He chuckled in remembrance.
"Thanks," said Daria. At this point she'd take any positive reinforcement she could get.
The wagon emptied and the oxen yoked, Mr. Trout and several men tossed the Tuckers' broken axle into the back of the wagon and started west. Willem and Kennard accompanied them: Daria hoped they'd get to the abandoned wagon in time and that its axle would be a match. Despite her short stay with the Trouts, she'd learned that abandoned wagons didn't last long on the trail: they were ripe targets for other emigrants to strip for usable parts and to break up for firewood.
A couple of the boys continued to hang around after Mr. Trout had left. A couple of them introduced themselves to her: they'd seen her around the wagon train and wondered who she was. Daria learned that Biblical names were popular among most of the American emigrants. Daria also learned that a tall red-headed boy was named Jethro Miller, another was named Joshua Wilson, another was named John Gaines. That the wagon train had at least three J's was funny; she tried to keep a straight face and not think of the guys who followed Quinn around back in Lawndale. She hoped for their sakes that they didn't start following her around: there was even less for them following her around than for the original Three Js following her sister.
The boys wandered off and it looked like Daria might have a bit of free time. She then remembered that she'd told Mr. and Mrs. Orrick that she'd help the kids learn English. Despite the fact that she lacked Mrs. Orrick's and the farm wives' talent for kid-wrangling, Jilla and Minti fell in behind her and they started wandering around, first around the camp, then further away. Every now and again, Daria would stop and introduce herself to some of the other women, then ask questions. Daria wasn't just visiting; this was also a vocabulary exercise. And not just for the Trout girls either: Daria suspected she needed the practice too: there were a lot of ideas and concepts that had fallen by the wayside over 150 years that she needed to know about. Every so often during the last couple of days, Daria kept hearing that voice in her head saying "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."
The excursion was productive, and not just for vocabulary-building and introductions. Daria wanted to learn how much English the girls knew. She quickly learned that Jilla had already learned a lot of English before they started on the trail, not just vocabulary, but also grammar. Minti was further behind but Daria expected that she'd be fluent well before she was an adult. Jilla and Minti told her that English spelling was crazy: Daria agreed with both of them but told them that that was the way it was and that they were all stuck with it.
Daria and the girls returned by 11:30 guessing by the height of the sun. Daria wryly realized that she might be the only person in the wagon train who knew exactly what time it was: she'd left a cheap but highly functional and waterproof digital watch in her handbag when she'd fallen asleep in Boston and it had stayed there when she and her handbag had been transposed from Turn-of-the-Millennium Boston to the Nebraska Territory of 1859. They'd had a little excitement as they returned from a short walk towards the Platte: a lone rider on horseback galloping past them at what Daria thought was breakneck speed. The rider was going too fast for Daria to get more than a brief glimpse of him: young, male, dusty. After he passed, she realized that she just gotten a glimpse of the real Pony Express.
Author's Notes:
In this fiction, the dimensional porthole connecting Kansas Territory and the Riverlands of Westeros has been open for about nine years. A treaty between the United States and the Seven Kingdoms allowing trade and travel between the two worlds was signed and ratified in 1852 and wagon trains started leaving the Santa Fe trail and heading through the porthole for the much more lucrative markets of the Riverlands.
On the other side of the Porthole (Or the Arch, as the Westerosi called it), word of cheap land along the American frontier and gold further west inspired thousands of Westerosi to come through the Arch and either settle in such places as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory or take their chances as gold-seekers in California or as farmers in the Oregon Country.
Unfortunately, the 1850's had two major Cholera outbreaks, which killed thousands not only behind the line of American settlement, but also out on the Overland Trail, slowing emigration from Westeros as word of the epidemics came back through the Arch.
The first wave of Westerosi emigrants was a mixture of gold-seekers on the one hand and second and third sons of lesser nobles and richer smallfolk seeking lands of their own. As the 1850's wore on the farmers far outnumbered the gold-seekers.
Many Americans have mixed feelings about the Westerosi. The Westerosi have different religions, different customs, and many of them spoke English poorly, if at all, when they came through the Arch. Slavery having been outlawed in the Seven Kingdoms for centuries, many of them are anti-slavery as well, something that does not please politicians and voters from slave states.
