Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [145]
“Droch àite,” she murmured, glancing out of the corner of her eye at the silent mounds. A bad place. “Djudju.” She scowled, and made a small, quick gesture with her hand, some sign against evil, I thought.
“Is it a graveyard?” I asked Myers, who had circled back to see why we had stopped. The mounds were not evenly spaced, but were distributed around the edge of the clearing in a pattern that didn’t look like any natural formation. The mounds seemed too large to be graves, though—unless they were cairns, such as the ancient Scots built, or mass graves, I thought, uneasy at the memory of Culloden.
“Not to say graveyard,” he replied, pushing his hat back on his head. “ ’Twas a village once. Tuscarora, I expect. Those rises there”—he waved a hand—“those are houses, fallen down. The big ’un to the side, that will have been the chiefs longhouse. It be taken no time atall, the grasses come over it. From the looks, though, this ’un will have been buried a time back.”
“What happened to it?” Ian and Jamie had stopped, too, and come back to look over the small clearing.
Myers scratched thoughtfully at his beard.
“I couldn’t be sayin’, not for certain sure. Might be as sickness drove ’em out, might be as they were put to rout by the Cherokee or the Creek, though we be a mite north of the Cherokee land. Most likely as it happened during the war, though.” He dug fiercely into his beard, twisted, and flicked away the remnants of a lingering tick. “Can’t say as it’s a place I’d tarry by choice.”
Pollyanne being plainly of the same mind, we rode on. By evening, we had passed entirely out of the pines and scrubby oakland of the foothills. We were climbing in good earnest now, and the trees began to change; small groves of chestnut trees, large patches of oak and hickory, with scattered dogwood and persimmon, chinkapin and poplar, surrounded us in waves of feathery green.
The smell and feel of the air changed, too, as we rose. The overwhelming hot resins of the pine trees gave way to lighter, more varied scents, tree leaves mingled with whiffs of the shrubs and flowers that grew from every crevice of the craggy rocks. It was still damp and humid, but not so hot; the air no longer seemed a smothering blanket, but something we might breathe—and breathe with pleasure, filled as it was with the perfumes of leaf mold, sun-warmed leaves, and damp moss.
By sunset of the sixth day, we were well into the mountains, and the air was full of the sound of running water. Streams crisscrossed the valleys, spilling off ridges and trickling down the steep rock faces, trailing mist and moss like a delicate green fringe. When we rounded the side of one steep hill, I stopped in amazement; from the side of a distant mountain, a waterfall leapt into the air, arching a good eighty feet in its fall to the gorge far below.
“Will ye look at that, now?” Ian was openmouthed with awe.
“ ’Tis right pretty,” Myers allowed, with the smug complacence of a proprietor. “Ain’t the biggest falls I’ve seen, but it’s nice enough.”
Ian turned his head, eyes wide.
“There are bigger ones?”
Myers laughed, a mountain man’s quiet laugh, no more than a breath of sound.
“Boy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
We camped for the night in a hollow near a good-sized creek—one big enough for trout. Jamie and Ian waded into this with enthusiasm, harrying the finny denizens with whippy rods cut from black willow. I hoped they would have some luck; our fresh provisions were running low, though we still had plenty of cornmeal left.
Pollyanne came scrambling up the bank, bringing a bucket of water with which to make a new batch of corn dodgers. These were small oblongs of rough cornmeal biscuit made for traveling; tasty when fresh and hot, and at least edible the next day. They became steadily less appetizing with time, resembling nothing so much as small chunks of cement by the fourth day. Still, they were portable, and not prone to mold, and thus were popular