“Ah,” Ian said, properly appreciating the importance of this. Her father’s rifle was a very fine one, a long rifle from Pennsylvania, he’d told her. Plainly he was prepared to wait as long as it took—and was probably a lot more stubborn than the bear, she thought, with a small interior gurgle.

“Ye may as well go on,” Jamie said, looking up at them. “It may be a wee while.”

“I could probably shoot it from here,” Bree offered, judging the distance. “I can’t kill it, but a load of bird shot might make it leave.”

Her father made a Scottish noise in response to this, and a violent gesture of prevention.

“Dinna try it,” he said. “All ye’ll do is maybe madden it—and if I could get down that slope, yon beast can certainly get up it. Now away wi’ ye; I’m getting a crick in my neck talkin’ up at ye.”

Bree gave Ian a sidelong glance and he gave her back the ghost of a nod, acknowledging her reluctance to leave her father shoeless on a ledge no more than twenty feet from a hungry bear.

“We’ll bear ye company for a bit,” he announced—and before Jamie could object, Ian had grasped a stout pine sapling and swung himself down onto the cliff face, where his moccasined toes at once found a hold.

Brianna, following his example, leaned over and dropped her fowling piece into her father’s hands before finding her own way down, more slowly.

“I’m surprised ye didna have at it wi’ your dirk, Uncle Jamie,” Ian was saying. “Bear-Killer, is it, that the Tuscarora called ye?”

Bree was pleased to see that Jamie had regained his equanimity and gave Ian no more than a pitying look.

“Are ye maybe familiar with a saying about how a man grows wiser wi’ age?” he inquired.

“Aye,” Ian replied, looking baffled.

“Well, if ye dinna grow wiser, ye’re no likely to grow older,” Jamie said, leaning the gun against the cliff. “And I’m old enough to ken better than to fight a bear wi’ a dirk for a deer’s carcass. Have ye got anything to eat, lass?”

She’d quite forgotten the small bag over her shoulder, but she now took it off and groped inside, removing a small packet of bannocks and cheese supplied by Amy Higgins.

“Sit down,” she said, handing this to her father. “I want to look at your leg.”

“It’s no bad,” he said, but he was either too hungry to argue or simply conditioned to accept unwanted medical treatment by her mother, for he did sit down and stretch out the wounded leg.

It wasn’t bad, as he’d said, though there was a deep puncture wound in his calf, with a couple of long scrapes beside it—these presumably left as he’d hastily pulled his foot out of the bear’s mouth, she thought, feeling a little faint at the vision of this. She had nothing with her of use save a large handkerchief, but she soaked this in the icy water from the rivulet that flowed down the cliff face and cleaned the wound as well as she could.