The smaller marmot appears to look into my eyes and I have the horrible insight that my dead Highlander’s soul has roamed the plains, has leapt into this animal and now beseeches me through its eyes. Who is this departed boy and why can I not settle on his name?

“Ned—”

But in this body gape wounds my brother, Ned, did not suffer.

Ronnie? Ronnie of the drum, the Highlander I knew in Culloden!

Or did Ronnie drum for me here? Certainly Ronnie was one of the Highlanders who followed me through more than one battle….

This body is certainly not Elwyn’s, is it?

I hate that I can barely picture Elwyn anymore, his face, the sickening mutilation after the pounding he got in that shithole—not here—did I not lose Elwyn here? Surely it’s in fact Elwyn I see lying here, on the plains….

I have seen so many dead boys.

It occurs to me that the younger marmot is trying to communicate with me: “Yes but no,” say its eyes. “You have it right that I hold this young soldier’s soul for safekeeping. Come back tonight when no one else is here, and I’ll divulge to you his name.”

The marmot is real and warm and I know the boy is not. Or I’m fairly certain he is not….I am seeing a figment and not a man. Still…The other animal, the larger of the marmots and—I think—the older, concentrates on an apple at the entrance to its burrow and gives me no word, only a calm gaze that I also feel in some part of me I am meant to recognize. A marmot, I remember from my biology and Latin classes, is a mountain mouse.

Listen to your own goddamn animals, Sophie said.

—

I HARDLY SLEPT LAST NIGHT—I need rest and shade.

I climb the plains to the trees, which reach in a swath of loveliness all the way toward my Foulon. I know where to rest, where to dream a cooling dream that’ll take me out of this fever of the plains with their tour buses, soccer players, and the red-and-orange kite that sways loud as a blood moon, loud as my Redcoats. The modern sky hangs lurid and cruel as the palette of George Townshend, that worm among my brigadiers, the one who mocked me hardest.

Historians have not divined my army’s most potent weapon.

Generals of losing armies have never known it.