The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [663]
“What he did was to capture a number of the birds, and shut them up in cages lined with blotting paper.”
“What?” That waked me up a bit, if only to laugh. “Whatever for?”
“Well, not lined entirely, only on the floor,” he explained. “He put out a wee plate on the floor filled with ink and a cup of seed in the middle, so that they couldna feed without getting the ink on their feet. Then as they hopped to and fro, their footprints would show on the blotting paper.”
“Umm. And what, precisely, did that show—other than black footprints?”
The insects were beginning to find us, drawn by the musk of our heated flesh. A tiny zeeeeee by my ear prompted me to slap at the invisible mosquito, then reach for the gauze-cloth that Jamie had pushed back when he rose to find me. This was fastened to an ingenious mechanism—Brianna’s invention—fixed to the beam above the bed, so that when unrolled, the cloth fell down on all sides, shielding us from the bloodthirsty hordes of the summer nights.
I pulled it into place with some regret, for while it excluded mosquitoes, gnats, and the unnervingly large mosquito-hawk moths, it also unavoidably shut out some of the air and all sight of the luminous night sky beyond the window. I lay down again at a little distance on the bed; while Jamie’s natural furnace was a great boon on winter nights, it had its drawbacks in the summer. I didn’t mind melting in an inferno of blazing desire, if it came to that, but I had no more clean shifts.
“There were a great many footprints, Sassenach—but most of them were on one side of the cage. In all the cages.”
“Oh, really? And what did Sterne think that signified?”
“Well, he had the bright thought of putting down a compass by the cages. And it seems that all the night through, the birds were hopping and striving toward the southeast—which is the direction in which they migrate, come the fall.”
“That’s very interesting.” I pulled my hair back into a tail, lifting it off my neck for coolness. “But it’s not quite the time to migrate, is it, in late summer? And they don’t fly at night, do they, even when they migrate?”
“No. It was as though they felt the imminence of flight, and the pull of it—and that disturbed their rest. The stranger it was, because most of the birds that he had were young ones, who had never yet made the journey; they hadna seen the place where they were bound, and yet they felt it there—calling to them, perhaps, rousing them from sleep.”
I moved slightly, and Jamie lifted his hand from my leg.
“Zugunruhe,” he said softly, tracing with a fingertip the damp mark he had left on my skin.
“What’s that?”
“It’s what Sterne called it—the wakefulness of the wee birds, getting ready to leave on their long flight.”
“Does it mean something in particular?”
“Aye. ‘Ruhe’ is stillness, rest. And ‘zug’ is a journey of some sort. So ‘zugunruhe’ is a restlessness—the uneasiness before a long journey.”
I rolled toward him, butting my forehead affectionately against his shoulder. I inhaled, in the style of one savoring the delicate aroma of a fine cigar.
“Eau de homme?”
He raised his head and sniffed dubiously, wrinkling up his nose.
“Eau de chevre, I think,” he said. “Though it might be something worse. Is there a French word for skunk, I wonder?”
“Le Pew.” I suggested, giggling.
The birds sang all night.
108
TULACH ARD
October, 1772
JAMIE NODDED at something behind him, smiling.
“I see we’ve help today.”
Roger looked back to see Jemmy stumping along behind them, his small fair brow furrowed in fierce concentration, a fist-sized rock clutched to his chest with both hands. Roger wanted to laugh at the sight, but instead turned and squatted down, waiting for the boy to catch them up.
“Is that for the new hogpen, a ghille ruaidh?” he said.
Jemmy nodded solemnly. The morning was still cool, but the little boy’s