Saul Pierce
December 10, 2009 12:26 PM
An Owl on the Way to Oregon by Saul Pierce
OOC: Originally posted to InsaneJournal. BIC:
Saul had only played the computer game 'Oregon Trail' once. He'd found it a little boring, and he only used a computer when he could get to a public library anyway, and libraries weren't really a place Saul sought out unless he was expecting an email. But the one thing he remember most from it was the little mini-game for fording a river.
It was the part of this trip that both most excited him and worried him. There were bridges now, of course, but that would be cheating, and he wanted to do this right. So when he and Elly reached the first water channel too deep and wide to just have the oxen slog through, he went over what he remembered about caulking a wagon to float it across. He also made sure his wand was ready and on hand, in case of an emergency, but that would be cheating too, and only to be used in a worst case scenario.
The game hadn't really gone into what the oxen were supposed to do, but fortunately this river was shallow enough that they could just walk across it and keep their head over the water, so he wasn't yet going to need to test the theory that cattle could swim.
His carpentry skills proved to be good enough that there were only a few small leaks and the wagon floated well enough. They were about halfway across when the owl showed up and looked like it wanted to land on the wagon. The balance was precarious enough that it fortunately seemed dubious about doing so. But as soon as they scraped bottom on the other side, it settle down on the wooden bench Saul had just jumped off of to start herding the cattle back to get them yoked up again.
It was another twenty minutes after that before he and Elly got everything sorted enough that he could give the owl his attention. So still wet from when he jumped into thigh deep water (and promptly slipped on the slick rocks of the riverbed - not to mention wrestling with recalcitrant oxen - he may as well have swum, too), he managed to find one of the owl treats he'd brought along to bribe any owls his family sent him and dried his hands on the canvas bag they were held in. Only then did he carefully detach the envelope from its leg.
"Hey, my RATS scores," he told Elly, and tore it open with far less care now that he knew what it contained. He skipped directly to the letter grades, noting one U, two As, an E, and an O. "Dude! I got an O!" he exclaimed, in utter surprise, but when he looked over to see what it was in, he was less stunned. "Divinations. Figures," he grinned at the girl EE who was possibly his very bestest friend. "Only class I'm good at is the one they didn't actually teach me. But, hey, an E in History, too!" he noticed next, and nearly fell off the wagon from the shock of that. "Guess that oral part really helped." He'd talked for hours about history, and hadn't even embellished anything, in deference to Professor Flatt. And the questions had actually been interesting, so he'd even been excited about it, too. Thank Merlin there hadn't been a time limit on that part; he'd monopolized his proctor for the rest of the day and some of the evening, winding down only when he got too hungry to keep going.
He took a few seconds more to sort out how his U and As had fallen out. "Passed Charms and DADA, too. Didn't quite make it for Transfigurations." He handed Elly the letter, in case she wanted to see for herself. "I did way better than I thought I would," he concluded, grinning and feeling downright brilliant. "Only failed the one test, and that was a U."
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Saul Pierce
An Owl on the Way to Oregon
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