Daria on the Trail Part Eight Language Difficulties
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, not for profit. If you like it, please write a review.
Daria On The Trail*Daria On TheTrail* Daria On The Trail
Mr. Orrick and the other men returned in the early afternoon. Daria and the other women had just taken a communal potty break when Daria saw someone driving a covered wagon eastward driven by what looked like a familiar team of oxen. Daria counted the men who'd come back and decided that it was probably them.
"I think the men have returned," Daria said to Mrs. Trout.
"How can you tell?" said Mrs. Trout.
"The numbers match and the oxen look familiar," Daria replied. "There's also not much eastbound traffic."
Actually, there was some, she'd learned. Some would-be gold diggers gave up on the mines and headed home. A few families found the challenges of crossing the continent overland so disheartening that they gave up and headed back east.
The wagon rolled closer as Daria resumed schooling Jilla and Minti on elementary school level arithmetic. As it turned out, the girls already had some math savvy. The problem was that they knew their numbers in Westerosi Common, not in English, and Daria found herself drilling them with written and spoken problems in English and written ones using Arabic numbers. She tried to keep her problems on the practical side: running sums for a hypothetical trip to a store, calculating distances by adding miles traveled, trying to calculate the total weight of a typical covered wagon's cargo.
Daria discovered another problem. The pioneers used also used weights and measures like bushels and chains that had gone out of fashion. She found herself scrambling to learn those, too. After all, a teacher had to keep at least one step ahead of their students.
Daria's tutoring attracted the attention of a couple of the other women.
"I heard you teaching those girls in that Westerosi language," said Mrs. Peas.
"I do use some of their Common Tongue sometimes when I'm teaching them arithmetic," said Daria. "I mostly use English."
"They should learn English," said Mrs. Paley, "none of this foreign nonsense."
Bullshit, thought Daria. "They're learning English," she replied irritably. "I'm just using Andal to help fill in the gaps."
"You shouldn't speak it at all," said Mrs. Peas. "If they don't learn to speak English, they'll be left speaking their jibberish."
A charter member of the English-Only movement, Daria thought snarkily.
"I think they know that already," said Daria. "I'm trying to help them get up to speed when they start their schooling in Oregon."
"So where is Mr. Trout?" said Mrs. Paley. "Is he coming back or did he run off?"
Daria opened her mouth to reply when she heard a chorus of cheers and whistles of approval as well as a couple of shouts of "They've got it! They've got it!"
Mr. Trout's wagon rolled over to the Tuckers' wagon and stopped. Mr. Tucker and a couple of the older men opened the back of the Trouts' wagon and pulled out a new rear axle and wheels, both of them looking intact. After making some measurements, they went to work putting the new axle and wheels on.
At this point, there was little for the rest of the company to do except wait. The Trouts were an exception. Mrs. Trout resumed packing her kitchen supplies while Daria assisted and wondered if the recycled axles and wheels would fit and they could be underway again. An hour or so later they got their answer: it fit. Daria, Mrs. Trout, Willem, and the Trout children went back to work loading their wagon.
The Tuckers' wagon repaired and the oxen yoked, the wagon train resumed its journey westwards. They didn't get very far that day. They camped about three miles west at a spot Mr. Trout had noted while he was returning to the wagon train with the Tuckers' new axle.
They'd learned that they wouldn't have the campsite to themselves: there was another company camped not far away. Most of them looked like more Americans. Daria, along with the rest of the Trout family, wondered who they were and where they were from while she and the Trouts were unloading the wagon.
She and the other women found out who they were and from where they originated when they went to the Platte to fetch water for that evening's cooking. The Trout company's women greeted the others as they filled buckets with muddy, bug-laded Platte River water and asked them where they were from. They learned that most of them were mid-westerners, hailing from Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. A couple of the women were more reticent. Foreigners, maybe? Daria wondered what part of Europe they came from.
It wasn't until Daria overheard one of the women speaking to another that she realized that she'd guessed wrong. The women were talking in Andal. She wondered what to do about it, then decided to tell Mrs. Trout and let her make the first move.
"Ah, Kara," said Daria just after she'd poured some Platte River water into a coffee pot to boil. "I think that other company has some of your countrywomen. I overheard a couple of them speaking in Andal when I was getting some water."
"Really?" said Mrs. Trout. "Did you speak to them?"
"No," said Daria. "I thought it best to talk to you about it. I didn't know what to say to them."
"You were pretty straightforward with us," Mrs. Trout said with amusement.
"I was desperate," Daria replied.
Mrs. Trout chuckled. "True, but I do wish you had let them know we were here. They would have been heartened to know that they were not alone on the trail with you Yankees."
"What should I say to them if I see them again?" said Daria.
"Oh, something like "May the blessings of the Gods be upon you," replied Mrs. Trout. "Or, in your case, I guess you could say the blessings of God the Father be upon you."
"I could roll with that," Daria replied as Mrs. Trout smirked at her choice of the word "roll" in the Common Tongue. Daria didn't consider herself much of a believer, but on the rare occasions she'd prayed back in the nineties or the double-0s, she'd guessed that her prayers would get to the right mailbox. And after having Rikka as part of her family for the last six years, she'd come to believe that the Andal Father was the same guy as the God she'd grown up with.
"We'll probably see them again at Fort Laramie," she said. "I think the Fort is two or three days from here."
