#endless time loop

Continuation of this

“Did you enjoy talking with Mrs. McNeil? She has two centuries of stories and ties to these mountains and before that, she said her family is of Scottish origin! Can you imagine?” Lamb shook his head in delight. “Scotland isn’t so unlike these Carolinian mountains. I bet her ancestors felt very much at home here. And the stories she was able to tell! Did you hear her recount the story of when this entire ridge went to war for one woman? The legend is that the woman still lives in the cave we’re headed to! How fascinating it is! I do hope we are able to find something left of importance from the original settlers here. And I think—”

Uncle Lamb rambled on as we trudged the two miles up into the mountains to the cave he was set on finding. The entire journey, the knife seemed to burn in my pocket. I couldn’t stop from touching the handle or patting my side to feel it there, safe and sound.

“Here we are! Look at this Claire! It seems this could have once been a storage area.” Lamb flitted from side to side, buzzing with the excitement of a child at play.

“Yes! Yes! Oh my dear Claire! I found something, truly! Yes!”

Rolling my eyes with a smile, I followed back to where he was in the cave. “What is it, Uncle?”

“A cask of, what I believe to be, whiskey! This looks like it has survived the centuries. There’s no tell tale smell of a distillery for miles. We’ve found part of Mrs. McNeil’s legend! Seems the witch did live here or somewhere abouts. Perhaps her husband was a whiskey maker.”

Rolling the barrel carefully out into the light, Uncle Lamb examined everything from the lack of rotting on the barrel rungs to the style in which it was sealed and crafted.

“I thought the old woman said that she wasn’t a witch, but a healer who lived here?”

“Is that what she told you?” Lamb questioned, not looking up from his journal. “My dear, a female healer in those days was almost always considered a witch! The fact there isn’t a prominent story of a witch burning on this mountain is incredibly rare.”

“I just don’t think the woman was a witch.” My thumb stroked the handle of the knife as I said this.

Uncle Lamb twisted the barrel for a different angle in his sketches and unearthed a carving.

“Uncle!” I gasped, pulling the knife from my pocket and holding it up to the side of the barrel. “Look! Look!” I pointed frantically between the knife’s carved initials and the letters carved on the side of the whiskey cask.

Mde by: Jms. AMM Fraser, Fraser’s Ridge, Smer Btch 1778

His eyes went wide, going back and forth from the knife in my hand to the rung with the carved signature. The closer we began to examine the cask the more indentations were found all over the bottom section of the barrel, each scratched out when the barrel was obviously reused.

Jms. Fraser had the most, followed by a CE Fraser, F.Fraser, M. Fraser, R.Mac, B.Mac, and a GermJem FraMac dating back as far as the 1760s. I wanted to know who these people were. What were their actual names instead of just the partial names and initials.

“Uncle, I bet this Jms. Fraser is the one who made this knife for the CE Fraser! Are there records we can find to find out who these people are and where they came from?” I asked, more enthusiastically than expected.

Laughing, Uncle Lamb put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve never seen you so excited before my dear! Yes, yes I’m sure we can find some records and if these are the original settlers we may even find something leading us back to Scotland!”

“Uncle,” I laughed. “You’re probably one of the only Englishmen who finds it exciting and wants to go to Scotland!”

The local library was open the following day and I was bouncing with excitement. I couldn’t wait to search and look for the Fraser’s who created the knife—which was a heavy weight in my pocket—and what happened to them.

“Come on, Uncle!” I cried as Lamb slowly meandered around the coffee shop around the corner from the library.

“Patience, my dear!” he chuckled, before finally settling on a chair with his newspaper. “It’ll be good for you to wait and enjoy the satisfaction of finding your answers.”

I groaned, flopping down into the chair beside him. “But I want to go now! I need to know what happened to them. I just… I have to know!”

Uncle Lamb quirked an eyebrow at me and grinned.

“Let’s go then,” he said, tucking the paper under his arm and placing his pipe back into his satchel.

The resources were minimal and dusty.

My heart sank as I saw the menial books containing records.

“Fraser, you said?” the clerk asked, lazily.

“Yes!” I bounced, hoping she’d pull a volume or two out for us to see.

“This way then.” She pointed towards a door I hadn’t noticed before. “The Fraser’s were one of the founding families of this area. We don’t have quite the extensive research that the state would have or even city hall, but we do have ledgers and sanctions tucked away. Be sure to put anything you touch back the way you found it.” She eyed us from behind her coke-bottle glasses. “We take pride in our collections and do not wish to lose anything.”

“You’ll have no problem from us, my dear,” Lamb reassured her, ushering me inside.

I spun in a circle taking it all in. It was a small room, no bigger than the bathroom at the hotel, but from ceiling to floor were bookshelves covered in old leather bound books. The one spot that wasn’t covered was a small window on the northern wall, just enough light to illuminate the room without direct exposure to the precious books inside.

“Well love, have at it! Let’s find your Fraser’s!”

The books all had some descendant or mention of a Fraser family, but was it my Fraser family? I didn’t know. An hour into our search, I finally found a James Fraser.

“Uncle!” I called. “Look here! James MacKenzie Fraser,” I read aloud, “Do you think this is him? The man who made the knife and the whisky cask?”

“I do believe it may very well be. Let’s see what else we can find on him, yes?” Uncle Lamb’s eyes twinkled in excitement as he pulled another musty ledger forward intent on the search.

This is one thing about Uncle Lamb and his hair-brained adventures that I love; when he’s found something interesting, he never gives up on discovering the person or item’s full history. The library in rural North Carolina, did not do much to help us find more of Mr. Fraser’s past. It lead us on a chase through the entire state and up the eastern seaboard of the United States. James Fraser was mentioned countless times as a man working for the state and as a wanted man. Army enlistments, battles fought at, and even public hearings where he made himself enemies, but not one ledger or book recounted where his tale originated, or that of his wife. At least that was until we found an old recounting from Lord Tyron.

‘...On the 12th Day of August, I granted a man pardon and land in the wilds of the western most part of the colony. Mr. James MacKenzie Fraser and wife Claire of Broch Morda, Scotland, will be in the King’s Service and hereby exempt of taxes laid on the land while in the service.’

“Broch Morda! Uncle where is this place?”