The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [486]
“I should think Tsatsa’wi well-equipped to deal wi’ such a creature, by the looks of it,” Jamie said, nodding at the Indian’s necklace of claws, and touching his own chest in indication. He smiled at Tsatsa’wi, who evidently gathered the meaning of the compliment and smiled broadly back. Both men bowed slightly to each other over the cups of tea, in token of mutual respect.
“Aye,” Peter agreed, licking droplets of liquid from the corners of his mouth, and smacking his lips in approval. “He’s a bonnie hunter, is Tsatsa’wi, and in the usual course o’ things, I expect he and his cousins might manage well enough. But it seems as how this particular bear is just that wee bit above the odds. So I says to him as perhaps we’ll come and tell Mac Dubh about it, and maybe as Himself would spare the time to go and sort the creature for them.”
Peter lifted his chin to his brother-in-law, and nodded toward Jamie, with a proprietorial air of pride. See, said the gesture. I told you. He can do it.
I suppressed a smile at this. Jamie caught my eye, coughed modestly and set down his cup.
“Aye, well. I canna come just yet awhile, but perhaps when the hay is in. D’ye ken what’s the nature of this problematical bear, Peter?”
“Oh, aye,” Peter said cheerfully. “It’s a ghost.”
I choked momentarily on my own tea. Jamie didn’t seem too shocked, but rubbed his chin dubiously.
“Mmphm. Well, what’s it done, then?”
The bear had first made its presence known nearly a year before, though no one had seen it for some time. There had been the usual incidents of depredation—the carrying away of racks of drying fish or strings of corn hung outside houses, the stealing of meat from lean-tos—but at first the townspeople had regarded this merely as the work of a bear slightly more clever than the usual—the usual bear being completely unconcerned as to whether he was observed in the act.
“It would only come at night, ye see,” Peter explained. “And it didna make a great deal o’ noise. Folk would just come out in the morning and find their stores broken into, and not a sound made to rouse them.”
Brianna, who had seen Mrs. Bug’s unceremonious exit and come up to investigate the cause, began humming softly under her breath—a song to which memory promptly supplied the words, “Oh, he’ll sleep ’til noon, but before it’s dark . . . he’ll have every picnic basket that’s in Jellystone Park . . .” I pressed a napkin to my mouth, ostensibly to blot the remains of the tea.
“They kent it was a bear from the first, aye?” Peter explained. “Footprints.”
Tsatsa’wi knew that word; he spread his two hands out on the table, thumb to thumb, demonstrating the span of the footprint, then touched the longest of the claws hung round his neck, nodding significantly.
The townspeople, thoroughly accustomed to bears, had taken the usual precautions, moving supplies into more protected areas, and putting out their dogs in the evening. The result of this was that a number of dogs had disappeared—again without sound.
Evidently the dogs had grown warier, or the bear hungrier. The first victim was a man, killed in the forest. Then, six months ago, a child had been taken. Brianna stopped humming abruptly.
The victim was a baby, snatched cradle-board and all from the bank of the river where its mother was washing clothes toward sunset. There had been no sound, and no clue left save a large clawed footprint in the mud.
Four more of the townspeople had been killed in the months since. Two children, picking wild strawberries by themselves in late afternoon. One body had been found, the neck broken, but otherwise untouched. The other had disappeared; marks showed where it had been dragged into the woods. A woman had been killed in her own cornfield, again toward sunset, and partially eaten where