He dismissed her comment about Lizzie with nothing more than a shrug of agreement, though, concentrating on the tedious process of fire-making. The day had been warm and an hour of daylight remained, but the shadows under the trees were already blue; the night would be chilly.
“I’m going to have a look at the stream,” she announced, plucking a coiled line and hook from the small pile of effects Ian had unloaded from his bag. “It looked like there’s a trout pool just below the bend, and the flies will be rising.”
“Oh, aye.” He nodded, but paid her little attention, patiently scraping the pile of kindling a little higher before striking the next shower of sparks from his flint.
As she made her way around the bend of the little creek, she saw that it wasn’t merely a trout pool—it was a beaver pond. The humped mound of the lodge was reflected in still water, and on the far bank she could see the agitated judderings of a couple of willow saplings, evidently in the process of being consumed.
She moved slowly, a wary eye out. Beavers wouldn’t trouble her, but they would make a dash for the water if they saw her, not only splashing, but smacking the water with their tails in alarm. She’d heard it before; it was amazingly loud, sounding like a fusillade of gunshots, and guaranteed to scare every fish within miles into hiding.
Gnawed sticks littered the near bank, the white inner wood chiseled as neatly as any carpenter could do, but none was fresh, and she heard nothing nearby but the sigh of wind in the trees. Beavers were not stealthy; none was close.
With a cautious eye on the far bank, she baited the hook with a small chunk of cheese, whirled it slowly overhead, picked up speed as she let the line out, then let it fly. The hook landed with a small plop! in the middle of the pond, but the noise wasn’t sufficient to alarm the beavers; the willow saplings on the far bank continued to shake and heave under the assault of industrious teeth.
The evening hatch was rising, just as she’d told Ian. The air was soft, cool on her face, and the surface of the water dimpled and glimmered like gray silk shaken in light. Small clouds of gnats drifted in the still air under the trees, prey for the rising of the carnivorous caddis flies, stone flies, and damselflies breaking free of the surface, new-hatched and ravenous.
It was a pity that she hadn’t a casting rod or tied flies—but still worth a try. Caddis flies weren’t the only things that rose hungry at twilight, and voracious trout had been known to strike at almost anything that floated in front of them—her father had once taken one with a hook adorned with nothing more than a few knotted strands of his own bright hair.
That was a thought. She smiled to herself, brushing back a wisp of hair that had escaped from its plait, and began to draw the line slowly back toward shore. But there were likely more than trout here, and cheese was—
A strong tug came on the line, and she jerked in surprise. A snag? The line jerked back, and a thrill from the depths shot up her arm like electricity.
The next half hour passed without conscious thought, in the single-minded pursuit of finny prey. She was wet to mid-thigh, rashed with mosquito bites, and her wrist and shoulder ached, but she had three fat fish gleaming in the grass at her feet, a hunter’s sense of profound satisfaction—and a few more crumbs of cheese left in her pocket.
She was drawing back her arm to throw the hook again, when a sudden chorus of squeaks and hisses shattered the evening calm, and a stampede of beavers broke from cover, trundling down the opposite bank of the pond like a platoon of small, furry tanks. She stared at them open-mouthed, and took a step back in reflex.
Then something big and dark appeared among the trees behind the beavers, and further reflex shot adrenaline through her limbs as she whirled to flee. She would have been into the trees and away in an instant, had she not stepped on one of her fish, which slid under her foot like greased butter and dumped her unceremoniously on her backside. From which position she was ideally placed to see Rollo race from the trees in a long, low streak and launch himself in an arching parabola from the top of the bank. Graceful as a comet, he soared through the air and landed in the pond among the beavers, with a splash like a fallen meteor.
IAN LOOKED UP AT HER, open-mouthed. Slowly, his eyes traveled from her dripping hair, over her sopping, mud-smeared clothes, and down to the fish—one slightly squashed—that dangled from a leather string in her hand.
“The fish put up a good fight, did they?” he asked, nodding at the string. The corners of his mouth began to twitch.
“Yes,” she said, and dropped them on the ground in front of him. “But not nearly as good a fight as the beavers.”
“Beavers,” he said. He rubbed a knuckle meditatively down the bridge of his long, bony nose. “Aye, I heard them slapping. Ye’ve been fighting beavers?”
“I’ve been rescuing your wretched dog from beavers,” she said, and sneezed. She sank to her knees in front of the new-made fire and closed her eyes in momentary bliss at the touch of heat on her shivering body.
“Oh, Rollo’s back, then? Rollo! Where are ye, hound?” The big dog slunk reluctantly out of the shrubbery, tail barely twitching in response to his master’s call.
“What’s this I hear about beavers, then, a madadh?” Ian said sternly. In response, Rollo shook himself, though no more than a fine mist of water droplets rose from his coat. He sighed, dropped to his belly, and put his nose morosely on his paws.
“Maybe he was only after fish, but the beavers didn’t see it that way. They ran from him on shore, but once he was in the water—” Brianna shook her head, and wrung out the soggy tail of her hunting shirt. “I tell you what, Ian—you clean those damn fish.”
He was already doing so, gutting one with a single neat slice up the belly and a scoop of the thumb. He tossed the entrails toward Rollo, who merely let out another sigh, and seemed to flatten against the dead leaves, ignoring the treat.
“He’s no hurt, is he?” Ian asked, frowning at his dog.
She glared at him.
“No, he isn’t. I expect he’s embarrassed. You could ask whether I’m hurt. Do you have any idea what kind of teeth beavers have?”
The light was nearly gone, but she could see his lean shoulders shaking.
“Aye,” he said, sounding rather strangled. “I have. They, um, didna bite ye, did they? I mean—I should think it would be noticeable, if ye’d been gnawed.” A small wheeze of amusement escaped him, and he tried to cover it with a cough.
“No,” she said, rather coldly. The fire was going well, but not nearly well enough. The evening breeze had come up, and was reaching through the soaked fabric of shirt and breeches to fondle her backside with ice-cold fingers.
“It wasn’t so much the teeth as the tails,” she said, shuffling round on her knees to present her back to the fire. She rubbed a hand gingerly over her right arm, where one of the muscular paddles had struck flat on her forearm, leaving a reddened bruise that stretched from wrist to elbow. For a few moments, she’d thought the bone was broken.
“It was like being hit with a baseball bat—er . . . with a club, I mean,” she amended. The beavers hadn’t attacked her directly, of course, but being in the water with a panicked wolf-dog and half a dozen sixty-pound rodents in a state of extreme agitation had been rather like walking through an automated car wash on foot—a maelstrom of blinding spray and thrashing objects. A chill struck her and she wrapped both arms around herself, shivering.
“Here, coz.” Ian stood up and skinned the buckskin shirt off over his head. “Put this on.”
She was much too cold and battered to refuse the offer. Retiring modestly behind a bush, she stripped off the wet things and emerged a moment later, clad in Ian’s buckskin, one of the blankets wrapped around her waist sarong-style.
“You don’t eat enough, Ian,” she said, sitting down by the fire again, and eyeing him critically. “All your ribs show.”
They did. He’d always been lean to the point of thinness, but in his younger years, his teenage scrawniness had seemed quite normal, merely the result of his bones outstripping the growth of the rest of him.
Now he had reached his full growth and had had a year or two to let his muscles catch up. They had—she could see every sinew in his arms and shoulders—but the knobs of his spine bulged against the tanned skin of his back, and she could see the shadows of his ribs like rippled sand underwater.
He raised a shoulder, but made no reply, intent on skewering the cleaned fish on peeled willow twigs for broiling.
“And you don’t sleep very well, either.” She narrowed her eyes at him across the fire. Even in this light, the shadows and hollows in his face were obvious, despite the distraction of the Mohawk tattoos that looped across his cheekbones. The shadows had been obvious to everyone for months; her mother had wanted to say something to Ian, but Jamie had told her to let the lad be; he would speak when he was ready.
“Oh, well enough,” he murmured, not looking up.
Whether he was ready now or not, she couldn’t say. But he’d brought her here. If he wasn’t ready, he could bloody well get that way fast.
She had—of course—wondered all day about the mysterious goal of their journey, and why she was his necessary companion. For a matter of hunting, Ian would have taken one of the men; good as she was with a gun, several of the men on the Ridge were better, including her father. And any one of them would be better suited than she to something like digging out a bear’s den or packing home meat or hides.
They were in the Cherokee lands at the moment; she knew Ian visited the Indians frequently, and was on good terms with several villages. But if it had been a matter of some formal arrangement to be made, surely he would have asked Jamie to accompany him, or Peter Bewlie, with his Cherokee wife to interpret.
“Ian,” she said, with the tone in her voice that could bring almost any man up short. “Look at me.”
His head jerked up, and he blinked at her.
“Ian,” she said, a little more gently, “is this to do with your wife?”
He stayed frozen for a moment, eyes dark and unfathomable. Rollo, in the shadows behind him, suddenly raised his head and let out a small whine of inquiry. That seemed to rouse Ian; he blinked and looked down.
“Aye,” he said, sounding quite matter-of-fact. “It is.”
He adjusted the angle of the stick he had driven into the earth by the fire; the pale flesh of the fish curled and sizzled, browning on the green wood.
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t speak—just broke off the edge of a piece of half-cooked fish and held it out to the dog, clicking his tongue in invitation. Rollo rose and sniffed Ian’s ear in concern, but then deigned to take the fish, and lay down again, licking the hot tidbit delicately before scooping it up with his tongue, gathering enough spirit then to engulf the discarded heads and fish guts as well.
Ian pursed his lips a little, and she could see the thoughts flickering half-formed across his face, before he made up his mind to speak.
“I did once think of marrying you, ye ken.”