Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [208]
He shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes off the file of men, now vanishing from our view behind a snow-topped outcropping.
“No,” he said, half under his breath. “No. Christians they may be, but …” He shook his head again, more decidedly. “No.”
There was no use arguing with him. I rolled my eyes in mingled frustration and resignation.
“How’s your back?”
He stretched gingerly, and halted abruptly in mid-motion, with a strangled cry as though he’d been skewered.
“Not so good, hm?” I said, sympathy well laced with sarcasm. He gave me a dirty look, eased himself very slowly back into his bed of crushed leaves, and shut his eyes with a sigh.
“You have of course thought of some ingenious way of getting down the mountain, I imagine?” I said politely.
He opened one eye.
“No,” he said, and shut it again. He breathed quietly, his chest rising and falling gently under his fringed hunting shirt, giving a brilliant impression of a man with nothing on his mind but his hair.
It was a cold day, but a bright one, and the sun was jabbing brilliant fingers of light into our erstwhile sanctum, making little blobs of snow drop like falling sugarplums around us. I scooped up one of these and gently decanted it into the neck of his shirt.
He drew in his breath through his teeth with a sharp hiss, opened his eyes, and regarded me coldly.
“I was thinking,” he informed me.
“Oh. Sorry to interrupt, then.” I eased myself down beside him, pulling the tangled cloaks up over us. The wind was beginning to lace through the holes in our shelter, and it occurred to me that he’d been quite right about the sheltering effects of snow. Only there wasn’t going to be any snow falling tonight, I didn’t think.
Then there was the little matter of food to be considered. My stomach had been making subdued protests for some time, and Jamie’s now voiced its much louder objections. He squinted censoriously down his long, straight nose at the offender.
“Hush,” he said reprovingly in Gaelic, and cast his eyes upward. At last he sighed and looked at me.
“Well, then,” he said. “Ye’d best wait a bit, to be sure yon savages are well away. Then ye’ll go down to the cabin—”
“I don’t know where it is.”
He made a small noise of exasperation.
“How did ye find me?”
“Tracked you,” I said, with a certain amount of pride. I glanced through the needles at the blowing wilderness outside. “I don’t suppose I can do it in reverse, though.”
“Oh.” He looked mildly impressed. “Well, that was verra resourceful of ye, Sassenach. Dinna worry, though; I can tell ye how to go, to find your way back.”
“Right. And then what?”
He shrugged one shoulder. The bit of snow had melted, running down his chest, dampening his shirt and leaving a tiny pool of clear water standing in the hollow of his throat.
“Bring me back a bit of food, and a blanket. I should be able to move in a few days.”
“Leave you here?” I glared at him, my turn to be exasperated.
“I’ll be all right,” he said mildly.
“You’ll be eaten by wolves!”
“Oh, I shouldna think so,” he said casually. “They’ll be busy with the elk, most likely.”
“What elk?”
He nodded toward the hemlock grove.
“The one I shot yesterday. I took it in the neck, but the shot didna quite kill it at once. It ran through there. I was following it, when I hurt myself.” He rubbed a hand over the copper and silver bristles on his chin.
“I canna think it went far. I suppose the snow must have covered the carcass, else our wee friends would have seen it, coming from that direction.”
“So you’ve shot an elk, which is going to draw wolves like flies, and you propose to lie here in the freezing cold waiting for them? I suppose you think by the time they get round to the second course, you’ll be so numb you won’t notice when they start gnawing on your feet?”
“Don’t shout,” he said. “The savages might not be so far away, yet.”
I was drawing breath for further remarks on the subject, when he stopped me, putting his hand