#smart ducks

@apennywasted

Ask Huey and he’d say he had many hobbies. He liked to go exploring, he liked to make maps, he liked to go out and try to identify the fauna, he liked not-so-minor chemistry experiments in the kitchen, and he liked learning languages, too. 

But not, like, Spanish. He was leaning spanish in school and sure, learning things was fun, but spanish was... well, it wasn’t going to get him out of any magic-based binds, now was it? It was an every day kinda language. Huey wanted to learn dead languages. Ancient languages, the kind that only bog-people spoke. 

So naturally, he was learning Gaelic. And naturally, he was gonna go to Uncle Seamus if and when he had any problems.

At the library he had managed to find an old, gnarly looking book that his great uncle had assured him was definitely Scots Gaelic, and he had taken to reading it whenever he had a spare minute (which, if you were Huey, was practically never - so many hobbies, so little time). It was pretty slow going, though. He wasn’t even quite sure what the book was about, or if it was a book at all - could be someone’s diary, or something, from the way it sounded.

Sitting at the table of the farmhouse, Huey looked up at Seamus as he walked into the room, slipping forward onto the edge of his seat. “Hey, Uncle Seamus - what does falbh dàirich fhèin mean? As in--” He looked down at the book, reading aloud from it, “ falbh dàirich fhèin, thu seann radan? I looked it up online but... nothing.”