A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [89]
He gave me a bleak look.
“If it gets any firmer, I’ll faint from a lack of blood to the heid. Dinna forget the eggs, Sassenach.”
It was late afternoon, but plenty of light left for the job, thank goodness. My surgery was positioned to take advantage of morning light for operations, though, and was dim in the afternoons, so I set up an impromptu theater of operation in the dooryard.
This was an advantage, insofar as everyone wished to watch; Indians always regarded medical treatment—and almost anything else—as a community affair. They were particularly enthusiastic about operations, as these held a high degree of entertainment value. Everyone crowded eagerly around, commenting on my preparations, arguing with each other and talking to the patient, whom I had the greatest difficulty in discouraging from talking back.
Her name was Mouse, and I could only assume that she had been given it for some metaphysical reason, as it certainly wasn’t suited either to appearance or personality. She was round-faced, unusually snub-nosed for a Cherokee, and if she wasn’t precisely pretty, she had a force of character that is often more attractive than simple beauty.
It was certainly working on the males present; she was the only woman in the Indian party, the others consisting of her brother, Red Clay Wilson, and four friends who had come along, either to keep the Wilsons company, offer protection on the journey—or to vie for Miss Mousie’s attention, which seemed to me the most likely explanation of their presence.
Despite the Wilsons’ Scottish name, none of the Cherokee spoke any English beyond a few basic words—these including “no,” “yes,” “good,” “bad,” and “whisky!” Since the Cherokee equivalent of these terms was the extent of my own vocabulary, I was taking little part in the conversation.
We were at the moment waiting for whisky, in fact, as well as translators. A settler named Wolverhampton, from some nameless hollow to the east, had inadvertently amputated one and a half toes a week before, while splitting logs. Finding this state of things inconvenient, he had proceeded to try to remove the remaining half-digit himself with a froe.
Say what you will regarding general utility; a froe is not a precision instrument. It is, however, sharp.
Mr. Wolverhampton, a burly sort with an irascible temper, lived on his own, some seven miles from his nearest neighbor. By the time he had reached this neighbor—on foot, or what remained of it—and the neighbor had bundled him onto a mule for transport to Fraser’s Ridge, nearly twenty-four hours had passed, and the partial foot had assumed the dimensions and appearance of a mangled raccoon.
The requirements of the cleanup surgery, the multiple subsequent debridements to control the infection, and the fact that Mr. Wolverhampton refused to surrender the bottle, had quite exhausted my usual surgical supply. As I needed a keg of the raw spirit for my ether-making in any case, Jamie and Ian had gone to fetch more from the whisky spring, which was a good mile from the house. I hoped they would return while there was still enough light to see what I was doing.
I interrupted Miss Mousie’s loud remonstrance with one of the gentlemen, who was evidently teasing her, and indicated by means of sign language that she should open her mouth for me. She did, but went on expostulating by means of rather explicit hand signals, which seemed to be indicating various acts she expected the gentleman in question to perform upon himself, judging from his flushed countenance, and the way his companions were falling about with hilarity.
The side of her face was puffed and obviously tender. She didn’t wince or shy away, though, even when I turned her face farther toward the light for a better view.
“Toothache, forsooth!” I said, involuntarily.
“Ooth?” Miss Mouse said, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“Bad,” I explained, pointing at her cheek. “Uyoi.”
“Bad,” she agreed. There followed a voluble exposition—interrupted only by my inserting my fingers into her mouth periodically—which I took to be an explanation