The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [673]
“Mmphm,” Ian said, and his face lighted with an expression of profound satisfaction. “I knew ye weren’t a fairy, Auntie Claire!”
UNABLE TO STAY AWAKE much longer, Ian had finally retired, yawning, though pausing in his flight toward bed to seize Rollo by the scruff of the neck and immobilize him while I removed Adso from the cupboard, fluffed to twice his normal size and hissing like a snake. Holding the cat by his own scruff to avoid being disemboweled, I had carried him out of harm’s way, up to our bedroom, where I dumped him unceremoniously on the bed, turning at once to Jamie.
“What happened next?” I demanded.
He was already lighting a fresh candle. Unfastening his shirt with one hand and thumbing the book open with the other, he sank down onto the bed, still absorbed in the reading.
“He couldna find any of his friends. He searched the countryside nearby for two days, calling, but there was no trace. He was verra much distraught, but at last he thought he must go on; he was in need of food, and had nothing but a knife and a bit of salt with him. He must hunt, or find people.”
Ian said that Tewaktenyonh had given him the book, enjoining him to bring it to me. It had belonged to a man named Otter-Tooth, she said—a member of my family.
An icy finger had touched my spine at that—and hadn’t gone away. Little ripples of unease kept tickling over my skin like the touch of ghostly fingers. My family, indeed.
I had told her that Otter-Tooth was perhaps one of “my family,” unable to describe the peculiar kinship of time-travelers in any other way. I had never met Otter-Tooth—at least not in the flesh—but if he was the man I thought he was, then his was the head buried in our small burying-ground—complete with silver fillings.
Perhaps I was at last going to learn who he had really been—and how on earth he had come to meet such a startling end.
“He wasna much of a hunter,” Jamie said critically, frowning at the page. “Couldna catch so much as a ground-squirrel with a snare, and in the middle of summer, forbye!”
Fortunately for Otter-Tooth—if it was indeed he—he had been familiar with a number of edible plants, and seemed extremely pleased with himself for recognizing pawpaw and persimmon.
“Recognizing a persimmon is no great feat, for God’s sake,” I said. “They look like orange baseballs!”
“And they taste like the bottom of a chamber pot,” Jamie added, he not caring at all for persimmons. “Still, he was hungry by that time, and if ye’re hungry enough . . .” He trailed off, lips moving silently as he continued his translation.
The man had wandered through the wilderness for some time—though “wandering” seemed not quite right; he had chosen a specific direction, guided by the sun and stars. That seemed odd—what had he been looking for?
Whatever it was, he had eventually found a village. He didn’t speak the language of the inhabitants—“Why ought he to think he should?” Jamie wondered aloud—but had become extraordinarily distraught, according to his writing, at the discovery that the women were using iron kettles to cook with.
“Tewaktenyonh said that!” I interrupted. “When she was telling me about him—if it’s the same man,” I added, pro forma, “she said he carried on all the time about the cooking pots, and the knives and guns. He said the Indians were . . . How did she put it?—they needed to ‘return to the ways of their ancestors,’ or the white man would eat them alive.”
“A verra excitable fellow,” Jamie muttered, still riveted to the book. “And with a taste for rhetoric, too.”
Within a page or two, though, the source of Otter-Tooth’s strange preoccupation with cooking pots became somewhat clearer.
“I have failed,” Jamie read. “I am too late.” He straightened his back, and glanced at me, then went on.
“I do not know exactly when I am, nor can I find out—these people will not reckon years by any scale I know, even had I enough of their tongue to ask. But I know I am too late.
Had I