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  The walls withdrew from around me. I stood up, shook myself and went on.

  I felt as though I had crawled forever in a world of darkness and inward-curving walls when I heard something that made me freeze in mid-step. It was a whispering sound with a hard edge that reverberated within the pipe. I listened again, swiveling my ears backward, feeling the sound vibrate the hairs of my ear tufts. It came from behind me, a sibilant buzz I knew well. I had heard it once when I startled a big diamondback sunning on a rock. Now the musty snake-smell drifted to my nostrils and sweat from my paw pads slicked the pipe's interior.

  The rattler was behind me; I quickened my pace to gain distance. A dry sound, half crackle, half buzz, sounded again close to my tail. I scrambled and wiggled down the pipe in a frantic attempt to get away from the snake. And then I felt a change in the thick line that was fastened to my harness. Its surface seemed to change as it moved against my flank, becoming rough, like bark and then scaly.

  No longer were its motions the results of my pulling. The thing seemed to writhe with its own life. Had I been able to turn my head in the pipe, I would have bitten away the lashings that bound it to me. But I had no room, so I could only scuttle as fast as I could lay down my paws.

  The lashings and my harness changed and thickened. Through my fur I could feel scales emerging on the straps that rubbed against my body. I screamed in dread as they began to crawl, shifting and coiling about me as I ran. I felt the snake's chin glide through the fur on my side, then up over my back. I threw myself about in a frenzy, trying to smash the rattler's head against the walls of the pipe.

  The snake came on, undulating over my shoulders and down around my neck, the smell and feel of it driving me into maddened thrashing. I ripped scales off with my claws, tried to sink my teeth into the thing, but it only kept coming. A faint part of my mind wondered why it hadn't struck me with its fangs.

  And then I knew. I felt the snake's wedge-shaped head probing in my fur beneath my jaw, searching for the thong that tied the pouch of blue cornmeal around my neck. It slipped beneath the thong and twisted to break it. The pouch fell away and the snake with it.

  When the rattler's coils loosed, I gathered myself for a leap that would shoot me down the pipe. I could see a slight circle of daylight in the distance. My journey was nearly over. But I knew, with a certainty that was not mine, that if I abandoned the pouch of cornmeal, I would leave my task unfinished.

  I was shuddering so hard I could barely keep my footing. A part of me screamed in consuming panic, begging me to run toward the light. But I remembered the one who had sent me and knew I could not fail him.

  Instead of springing ahead, I backed up until I felt the rattler's coils against my hind legs. Scrabbling about with all four paws, I snagged something leathery, wrenched it away from the snake.

  A blow knocked me against the sides of the pipe and two fierce stabs of fire penetrated my flank. The rattler had struck. The poison burned outward from my hip, swelling and stiffening my hind leg. I grabbed the neck of the cornmeal pouch and fought my way toward the light, which wavered now before my eyes as my body became heavier and heavier. The snake kept its grip, pumping venom into me as I dragged it along. But I thought only of moving my three leaden feet and dragging the useless fourth as I kept my jaws clenched about the neck of the medicine pouch.

  And then, as I struggled toward it, the light seemed to flare, then dim. My yowl of dismay echoed down the pipe, but just as suddenly, the surface dropped from beneath my feet and I tumbled, still entangled in the snake's coils, its poison in my blood and nothing but black emptiness around me….

  I came to with a sudden start. The band of the hard hat still encircling my head felt so strange I wanted to claw it off. What were the wrappings about my waist and legs?

  I felt a hand shaking me. My head wobbled. "Dale!" Mike's voice hissed in my ear. "She's through! Hurry."

  Still discarding shreds of bobcat thoughts, I staggered to my feet. Mike had thrown aside the plywood and gone sprinting along the wooden catwalk that led to the other end of the dam. I pelted after him, wiping the black paint from my face as I ran. I didn't even try to make sense of what was happening, I just followed the Indian in his flapping white kilt.

  I saw him leap down into a nest of plywood forms and steel bars that awaited the next pour. That's where the coolant pipe emerged. When my boots hit the concrete near where Mike had dropped, I saw him stooping over the body of the bobcat. She had used her remaining strength to drag herself out of the pipe. I could see the trail of blue cornmeal grains running from the pouch around her neck back into the pipe and disappearing down its' depths.

  At first I thought Tonochpa was dead, then I saw her rib cage tremble. With a curse, Mike wrenched something from her flank. It was the desiccated corpse of a huge Western diamondback, the fangs in its flattened head tipped with bobcat blood.

  "Burn it," he said fiercely, as he gathered up Tonochpa and threw down the dried snakeskin. I bent, played the flame of my battered lighter under the long-dead rattlesnake. It startled me by catching fire like a piece of resin timber and crumbling into embers.

  Mike put the limp cat in his lap, He massaged her rib cage with his thumbs, his face tight with worry. "Little one," he moaned, "the snake was never alive, no poison runs in your blood." I stood beside him, not knowing what to do. I'd heard that some wild creatures were so highly strung that they could die of shock…

  Then he did something I didn't expect. Quickly he laid a piece of.his woven kilt-sash across her face, covered her muzzle with his lips and blew short shallow breaths through her nose and mouth. He did several cycles, each time pausing to pump her rib cage with his fingers and listening for signs that she would breathe on her own. The last time, I thought the moisture in his eyes would spill over into tears, but the wildcat gave a sudden jerk away from the cloth, opened her mouth in a huge gape, and inhaled.

  She kept breathing. Her ears twitched, then her eyes opened, fixing me with a baleful glare as if she knew my part in setting up this crazy adventure. At Mike's request, I retrieved both our clothes and his knapsack. He wrapped Tonochpa in my shirt and fed her something medicinal from a clay jar in his pack. Gently he untied the rope from her harness, handing the end to me. I touched the rope hesitantly, fearing it might sprout scales and writhe in my hand, but it only hung stiffly. A bundle of twisted fiber tied to a cable I could now winch through the dam—that's all it was. And I was an engineer again, someone whose realities consisted of hardware, measurements, and records.

  For an instant I wondered if the entire experience had just been some kind of hallucination. I certainly couldn't deny the presence of the rope in the conduit or the trait of blue cornmeal running out of the pipe's end. Tonochpa had completed my task. I wondered what else she had done. Mike stood, cradling the recovering bobcat in his arms, his eyes fixed on the line of cornmeal.

  Then he turned to me. "Black Canyon Dam is safe. My partner did her work well." His smile turned ironic. "Perhaps too well."

  I scratched my head under the hard hat meaning to ask him what the hell he meant by that, but he got in ahead of me. "Let's see if your white-man's magic agrees with mine," he said, holding Tonochpa in the crook of his elbow as he climbed out of the plywood bracings of the form. I followed, eager to see what my recorder tracings revealed.

  I stared at the charts with my mouth gaping. For the last hour, every trace looked like the output of a seismograph during an earthquake. But in the short interval following, the pens returned to the same solid baseline values I had seen before the changes of the last few weeks took place.

  "My God," I said, looking at Mike. "Now I have to believe."

  "The dam is whole. You are a medicine man, as I said. You and I and Tonochpa, we worked together to make the healing. We have done even more than that."

  I paused, staring at him. "What?"

  "The line of cornmeal that Tonochpa laid during her passage through the pipe will do more than ward off
evil magic. It will bind the dam together against all attempts to destroy it." He paused. "In truth, I did not want this to happen, but it was the price I have paid to save my uncle and his family." He paused and looked at me steadily. "Black Canyon Dam will never fall."

  It didn't matter whether I believed him or not. We had no way to undo what we had done, even if we wanted to. What mattered now was that I had my cable in place as the contract specified and I could hook up my instruments permanently and finish the job.

  There isn't much more to say, I guess. A week or so later, Mike told me he was leaving the site. Now that the preparation for the inlet tower foundations was done, the company was laying off all the high-scalers. I thought that was a pretty mean reward for all Mike had done for the dam, but as he pointed out, no one would ever believe such a wild tale anyway.

  "Things are happening as I said they would," he said philosophically the last time we met. "The dams provide work for me, nothing more. I'll go up to Washington, to that new Grand Coulee project."

  I stroked Tonochpa. She seemed pretty well recovered from her experience; all that remained were two round scars in a bare patch on her flank. "You taking her with you?" I asked.

  He grinned. "There are some fine big mountain wildcats up in Washington. Maybe Tonochpa will find herself a mate, hey?"

  He opened his knapsack, the bobcat jumped in and he trudged off across the construction site, disappearing into the rolling dust. That was the last I saw of him.

  Well, Black Canyon's holding up mighty well for a dam its age. Holding back more water and putting out more power than its designers ever thought it would. You know, I have a sneaky feeling that Mike was right. The lake might silt up, but the dam will never crumble. Perhaps in a few million years people will dig it up out of the sediments and asked how the hell a man-made thing lasted so long. Well, you and I will know, won't we?

  Borrowing Trouble

  by Elizabeth H. Boyer

  "You are the sorriest excuse for an apprentice I've ever encountered!" roared the Meistari, blinking through the soot floating around him. "Imbecile! You nearly incinerated us all! I swear I can't tolerate another eighty-nine years of your presence in my school! The next traveling tradesman I see, I'm going to sell your articles of apprenticeship to him and be rid of you, Agnarr Henstromsson!"

  Agnarr sneezed and commenced righting the blackened crucibles, spilling more of the materials inside as he did so. The brazier was still smoking and stinking, and sinister little orange flames lapped out hungrily for another taste of the Meistari's cloak.

  "I can't fathom what went wrong," Agnarr said anxiously. "Perhaps a word in the wrong place, or it's possible those troll bones were still a bit damp…"

  "It's nothing so small as a mistake!" the wizard snorted, and the rest of the apprentices all sniggered smugly and exchanged winks and nudges and grins. "It's general incompetence! It's a total lack of aptitude for magic! I'm sick of being blown up and set on fire! I'll never make a fire wizard of you, Agnarr! I rue the day I ever set eyes on you at that hiring fair! Your clan chieftain must have been ecstatic to get rid of you, and at an exorbitant price, at that. I never expected to be cheated by the Galdur clan!"

  Agnarr drew himself up indignantly at this insult to the clan known for producing the most and best wizards in the Alfar realm. "You weren't cheated," he declared, pushing back the shreds of his charred hood. "I was born to be a wizard, and I'm going to be one. Let me try this experiment one more time. The third time is always lucky for me."

  "By the remains of my beard, no!" bellowed Bjarnadr, his eyes bulging with rage. "You've had all the chances you're going to get! You're a failure! Get out! I don't want to lay eyes upon you again! I wash my hands of you!"

  Agnarr measured the distance to the door in a quick glance and haughtily glared back at Bjarnadr. "Very well, but I think you're giving up much too soon," he declared. "One of these days you'll be sorry, when I'm a better wizard than you. I intend to join the Fire Wizards' Guild and fight the Dokkalfar, rather than teach a lot of boring, useless nonsense to a bunch of thick-headed, snotty-nosed little apprentices!"

  He almost made it through the door before a sizzling dart of flame caught up with him, setting his breeches ablaze. Bjarnadr bellowed something after him, but he was halfway to the horse trough to extinguish his trousers and didn't catch all of it, but he supposed it was more words to the effect that his presence was no longer desired in Bjarnadr's magic school and what ill effects his return might have upon his person.

  Agnarr sighed and heaved himself out of the horse trough. Sacked again, and he'd have to sew up the burn holes in his pants. Sacking Agnarr was getting to be a regular ritual with Bjarnadr, one which the other apprentices enjoyed immensely, especially the younger ones. Spoiled brats, all of them, bestowed with gifts and talents they had not earned or deserved, while he, Agnarr, had to struggle so desperately to control the smallest fire-raising spell.

  Worse yet, a closer inspection revealed that his breeches weren't going to tolerate another scorching from Bjarnadr. There was nothing left to repair, so the only alternative was to visit the laundry-drying lawn and steal a pair from one of the other apprentices.

  Already the bright side of the situation was occurring to Agnarr as he pulled on his stolen pants and contemplated his situation. Here he was, liberated in the middle of the day, out in the sunshine while the other seven scholars were grinding off their noses over tedious spells and smelly experiments. Another glorious holiday lay before him, while Bjarnadr's temper cooled. Usually it took only a day or two until the Meistari had regained his composure and was in the humor to try again. After all, Agnarr was a son of the clan Galdur, the wizards' clan. Somewhere in that unprepossessing and inept lump of potential, there was a magnificent talent waiting to be discovered and taught.

  In the meantime, Agnarr would make himself scarce, lying low until he could waylay an apprentice and inquire into the condition of Bjarnadr's temper. It did give him a bit of uneasiness to note that with each sacking, Bjarnadr's temper seemed to take longer to recover. Next time, he told himself sternly, he would try harder to do exactly what the Meistari told him, no matter how ridiculous and elementary it seemed, instead of trying to find shortcuts. Shortcuts were his downfall in every case. He would begin to work a spell, with the appropriate words, gestures, and magical apparatus, but all of a sudden a brilliant idea would pop into his head. Sometimes it was a seemingly ingenious shortcut; sometimes it was a hilarious practical joke obtained by twisting the words of the spell just slightly.

  Given his Galdur heritage and great latent talent, he had no choice except to give in to inspiration. Once or twice the results had indeed been spectacular successes and he had conjured wonderful elemental creatures of wind, fire, earth, and water, or he worked some witty shape-shifting spell upon one of his fellow apprentices that made everyone laugh. Unfortunately, the failures had outnumbered the successes far too many times and they were, of course, in the manner of all failures, absolutely dazzling in their awfulness, thereby eclipsing any good Agnarr had ever done in his entire lifetime, and thus raising Bjarnadr's doubts about Agnarr's future as a wizard.

  In these times of duress, Agnarr departed Bjarnadr's moss-covered ruined fortress which housed the magic school and took up a temporary abode at Finn's inn, some five miles on the other side of Geltafell. Old Finn was always glad of more help and set him to work at scything hay or digging potatoes or putting up endlessly fallen stone fences or any one of the innumerable chores essential for the husbandry of creatures as troublesome and stupid as sheep.

  Young Finn, however, hoisted one black eyebrow and grunted, "Sacked again? That's the fifth time, isn't it?"

  "I haven't been keeping count," muttered Agnarr, pretending to be in a great hurry to go pick ticks off the sheep.

  "You'd better buckle down, lad, or you'll be picking ticks off sheep's bellies for the rest of your life," went on Young Finn with an admonitory gleam in his eye. "And that would
be a great waste now, wouldn't it?"

  It was enough to make Agnarr think he might have to find some other place to lie up while Bjarnadr was in one of his foul humors.

  Toward evening, during the long hours of northern twilight, when the trolls were roaring and grunting in the rough heights of Geltafell, a cart came rolling into the inn yard, drawn by a monstrous shaggy black ox with wicked curling horns. Agnarr went out reluctantly to stable the beast, while the two Finns rather warily made the traveler welcome. He was tall and lean and well-cloaked and hooded about, but in spite of his secretive manner, Agnarr sensed magical powers emanating from the stranger. Perhaps the stranger sensed something about Agnarr also; he glanced at him sharply and said, "Mind your step around that ox, or he'll hook you a good one. He kicks like a demon, too."

  The stranger availed himself of the plentiful food and drink offered by Finn's wife, warmed himself briefly near the fire, then, announced that he preferred to sleep in his wagon, which was enclosed against the weather and perfectly comfortable. Agnarr felt powerfully compelled to follow him outdoors, on the pretext of seeing if the stable was securely locked up for the night. When he was well away from the house, the stranger stopped and waited for Agnarr to approach him.

  "Well? What is it you wish?" the stranger asked. "You're simply burning for something, aren't you? Is it a necromancer's ring you want, to put under the tongue of a corpse so it will tell you the future? Rune sticks, with almost every spell you can imagine on them, for summoning storms, trolls, giants, or for finding treasure? Secret names of all elements and the beasts of the earth, cloaks of invisibility, swords of power, belts of strength, boots that will take you anywhere in a stride—a veritable enchanted wardrobe awaits you in my wagon. And the philters, potions, distillations, extracts, and liquors—"

  Agnarr was shaking his head as the list went on, until the stranger broke off sharply, "What's the matter? You haven't got any money to pay? Well, good night then."