A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [294]
“That much?” He glanced at her in surprise.
“Yes. I want to cut a notch here, to cut through to that bend—then I can put a small water-wheel here and get a good fall.” She leaned past him, pointing downstream. “The next-best place would be down there—see where the banks rise?—but this is better.”
“Aye, all right. Wait a bit, then.” He made his way back to the bank, scrambled up, and disappeared into the wood, from whence he returned with several stout lengths of fresh oak sapling, still sporting the remnants of their glossy leaves.
“We dinna need to get it out of the creekbed, aye?” he asked. “Only move it a few feet, so ye can cut through the bank beyond it?”
“That’s it.” Rivulets of sweat, trapped by her thick eyebrows, ran tickling down the sides of her face. She’d been digging for the best part of an hour; her arms ached from heaving shovelsful of heavy mud, and her hands were blistered. With a sense of profound gratitude, she surrendered the spade and stepped back in the creek, stooping to splash cold water on her scratched arms and flushed face.
“Heavy work,” her father observed, grunting a little as he briskly finished undermining the boulder. “Could ye not have asked Roger Mac to do it?”
“He’s busy,” she said, perceiving the shortness of her tone, but not inclined to disguise it.
Her father darted a sharp glance at her, but said no more, merely busying himself with the proper placement of his oak staves. Attracted like iron filings to the magnetism of their grandfather’s presence, Jemmy and Germain appeared like magic, loudly wanting to help.
She’d asked them to help, and they’d helped—for a few minutes, before being drawn away by the glimpse of a porcupine high up in the trees. With Jamie in charge, of course, they leaped to the task, madly scooping dirt from the bank with flat bits of wood, giggling, pushing, getting in the way, and stuffing handsful of mud down the back of each other’s breeches.
Jamie being Jamie, he ignored the nuisance, merely directing their efforts and finally ordering them out of the creek, so as not to be crushed.
“All right, lass,” he said, turning to her. “Take a grip there.” The boulder had been loosened from the confining clay, and now protruded from the bank, oak staves thrust into the mud beneath, sticking up on either side, and another behind.
She seized the one he indicated, while he took the other two.
“On the count of three . . . one . . . two . . . heave!”
Jem and Germain, perched above, chimed in, chanting “One . . . two . . . heave!” like a small Greek chorus. There was a splinter in her thumb and the wood rasped against the waterlogged creases of her skin, but she felt suddenly like laughing.
“One . . . two . . . hea—” With a sudden shift, a swirl of mud, and a cascade of loose dirt from the bank above, the boulder gave way, falling into the stream with a splash that soaked them both to the chest and made both little boys shriek with joy.
Jamie was grinning ear-to-ear and so was she, wet shift and muddy children notwithstanding. The boulder now lay near the opposite bank of the stream, and—just as she had calculated—the diverted current was already eating into the newly created hollow in the near bank, a strong eddy eating away the fine-grained clay in streams and spirals.
“See that?” She nodded at it, dabbing her mud-spattered face on the shoulder of her shift. “I don’t know how far it will erode, but if I let it go for a day or two, there won’t be much digging left to do.”
“Ye kent that would happen?” Her father glanced at her, face alight, and laughed. “Why, ye clever, bonnie wee thing!”
The glow of recognized achievement did quite a bit to dampen her resentment of Roger’s absence. The presence of a bottle of cider in Jamie’s creel, keeping cold amongst the dead trout, did a lot more. They sat companionably on the bank, passing the bottle back and forth, admiring the industry of the new eddy pool at work.
“This looks like good clay,