Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [210]
I rolled off in a tangle of cloaks and discarded buckskins, while Jamie cursed and snatched for his pistol.
He flung aside the branches with a swoosh, pointing the pistol upward.
From the top of the rock above, several heads peered over, all grinning. Ian, and four companions from Anna Ooka. The Indians murmured and snickered among themselves, seeming to find something immoderately funny.
Jamie laid the pistol down, scowling up at his nephew.
“And what the devil are you doin’ here, Ian?”
“Why, I was on my way home to keep Christmas with ye, Uncle,” Ian said, grinning hugely.
Jamie eyed his nephew with marked disfavor.
“Christmas,” he said. “Bah, humbug.”
The elk carcass had frozen in the night. The sight of ice crystals frosting its blank eyes made me shudder—not at the sight of death; that was quite beautiful, with the great dark body so still, crusted with snow—but at the thought that had I not yielded to my sense of uneasiness and gone out into the night searching for Jamie, the stark still life before my eyes might well have been entitled “Dead Scotsman in Snow” rather than “Frozen Elk with Arguing Indians.”
The discussion at last concluded to their satisfaction, Ian informed me that they had decided to return to Anna Ooka, but would see us safely home, in return for a share of the elk meat.
The carcass had not frozen solidly through; they eviscerated it, leaving the cooling entrails in a heap of blue-gray coils, splotched with black blood. After chopping off the head to further lessen the weight, two of the men slung the body upside down from a pole, its legs tied together. Jamie eyed them darkly, obviously suspecting that they meant to give him the same treatment, but Ian assured him that they could manage a travois; the men were afoot, but they had brought one sturdy pack mule to carry any skins they took.
The weather had improved; the snow had melted altogether from the exposed ground, and while the air was still crisp and cold, the sky was a blinding blue, and the forest coldly pungent with the scents of spruce and balsam fir.
It was the smell of hemlock, as we passed through one grove, that reminded me of the beginning of this hegira, and the mysterious band of Indians we had seen.
“Ian,” I said, catching up to him. “Just before you and your friends found us on the mountainside, we saw a band of Indians, with a Jesuit priest. They weren’t from Anna Ooka, I don’t think—do you have any idea who they might have been?”
“Oh, aye, Auntie. I ken all about them.” He wiped a mittened hand under his red-tipped nose. “We were following them, when we found you.”
The strange Indians, he said, were Mohawk, come from far north. The Tuscarora had been adopted by the Iroquois League some fifty years before, and there was a close association with the Mohawk, with frequent exchanges of visits between the two, both formal and informal.
The present visit held elements of both—it was a party of young Mohawk men, in search of wives. Their own village having a shortage of marriageable young women, they had determined to come south, to see if suitable mates might be found among the Tuscarora.
“See, a woman must belong to the proper clan,” Ian explained. “If she is the wrong clan, they canna be marrit.”
“Like MacDonalds and Campbells, aye?” Jamie chimed in, interested.
“Aye, a bit,” Ian said, grinning. “But that’s why they brought the priest wi’ them—if they found women, they could be married at once, and not have to sleep in a cold bed all the way home.”
“They’re Christians, then?”
Ian shrugged.
“Some of them. The Jesuits have been among them for some time, and a good many of the Huron are converts. Not so many among the Mohawk, though.”
“So they’d been to Anna Ooka?” I asked, curious. “Why were you and your friends following them?”
Ian snorted, and tightened the muffler of squirrel skins around his neck.
“They may be allies, Auntie, but it doesna mean Nacognaweto and his braves trust them. Even the other Nations of the Iroquois League are afraid of the Mohawk—Christian or no.”
It