"Could someone go for you? Or do you trust anyone enough?"
He glanced down at me and smiled. "Well, there's you. Since ye didna kill me last night after all, I suppose I may trust you. But I'm afraid you couldna go to Lag Cruime alone. No, if necessary, Murtagh will go for me. But I may be able to arrange something else—we'll see."
"You trust Murtagh?" I asked curiously. I had no very friendly feelings toward the scruffy little man, since he was more or less responsible for my present predicament, having kidnapped me in the first place. Still, there was clearly a friendship of some kind between him and Jamie.
"Oh, aye." He glanced at me, surprised. "Murtagh's known me all my life—a second cousin of my father's, I think. His father was my—"
"He's a Fraser, you mean," I interrupted hastily. "I thought he was one of the MacKenzies. He was with Dougal when I met you."
Jamie nodded. "Aye. When I decided to come over from France I sent word to him, asking him to meet me at the coast." He smiled wryly. "I didna ken, ye see, whether it was Dougal had tried to kill me earlier. And I did not quite like the idea of meeting several MacKenzies alone, just in case. Didna want to end up washing about in the surf off Skye, if that's what they had in mind."
"I see. So Dougal isn't the only one who believes in witnesses."
He nodded. "Very handy things, witnesses."
On the other side of the moorland was a stretch of twisted rocks, pitted and gouged by the advance and retreat of glaciers long gone. Rainwater filled the deeper pits, and thistle and tansy and meadowsweet surrounded these tarns with thick growth, the flowers reflected in the still water.
Sterile and fishless, these pools dotted the landscape and formed traps for unwary travelers, who might easily stumble into one in darkness and be forced to spend a wet and uncomfortable night on the moor. We sat down beside one pool to eat our morning meal of bread and cheese.
This tarn at least had birds; swallows dipped low over the water to drink, and plovers and curlews poked long bills into the muddy earth at its edges, digging for insects.
I tossed crumbs of bread onto the mud for the birds. A curlew eyed one suspiciously, but while it was still making up its mind, a quick swallow zoomed in under its bill and made off with the treat. The curlew ruffled its feathers and went back to its industrious digging.
Jamie called my attention to a plover, calling and dragging a seemingly broken wing near us.
"She's a nest somewhere near," I said.
"Over there." He had to point it out several times before I finally spotted it; a shallow depression, quite out in the open, but with its four spotted eggs so close in appearance to the leaf-speckled bank that when I blinked I lost sight of the nest again.
Picking up a stick, Jamie gently poked the nest, pushing one egg out of place. The mother plover, excited, ran up almost in front of him. He sat on his heels, quite motionless, letting the bird dart back and forth, squalling. There was a flash of movement and he held the bird in his hand, suddenly still.
He spoke to the bird in Gaelic, a quiet, hissing sort of speech, as he stroked the soft, mottled plumage with one finger. The bird crouched in his hand, completely motionless, even the reflections frozen in its round black eyes.
He set it gently on the ground, but the bird did not move away until he said a few more words, and waved his hand slowly back and forth behind it. It gave a short jerk and darted away into the weeds. He watched it go, and, quite unconscious, crossed himself.
"Why did you do that?" I asked, curious.
"What?" He was momentarily startled; I think he had forgotten I was there.
"You crossed yourself when the bird flew off; I wondered why."
He shrugged, mildly embarrassed.
"Ah, well. It's an old tale, is all. Why plovers cry as they do, and run keening about their nests like that." He motioned to the far side of the tarn, where another plover was doing exactly that. He watched the bird for a few moments, abstracted.
"Plovers have the souls of young mothers dead in childbirth," he said. He glanced aside at me, shyly. "The story goes that they cry and run about their nests because they canna believe the young are safe hatched; they're mourning always for the lost one—or looking for a child left behind." He squatted by the nest and nudged the oblong egg with his stick, turning it bit by bit until the pointed end faced in, like the others. He stayed squatting, even after the egg had been replaced, balancing the stick across his thighs, staring out over the still waters of the tarn.