"James Patrick Kelly - Luck" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

Luck
James Patrick Kelly

Thumb sat on a rock, soothing his sore feet in the river, in no hurry to get home. The stories the shell
people had told filled him with foreboding. Meanwhile, he was certain that the spirits had taken Onion's
soul down into the belly of the earth while he'd been gone. The sun was still two hands from the edge of
the sky. There was plenty of time before dark. Before he reached the summer camp of the people.
Before they would tell him his lover was dead. While he tried not to think of her, a dream found him.

In his dream, a great herd of mammoths tracked down from the stony northern hills through the pine
forest all the way to the river. There were five and five and five and five mammoths…and then more,
more than Thumb could have ever counted, even if he used the fingers and toes of all of the people. They
were huge, almost too big to fit in the eye of his mind. They trampled trees like tall grass, dropped turds
the size of boulders.

Old Owl told a story about the spirit who became a mammoth. He called the beast a furry mountain of
meat. Owl had been the last to see a mammoth, years ago when he was just a boy. The rest of the
people knew mammoths only from the drawings in the long cave.

An animal the size of a mountain-how could that be?

When Thumb's herd of mammoths reached the river, they dipped their trunks into the water. In a dream
moment, they drank the river dry. Turtles scrambled into the reeds for shelter. Fish flopped in the mud
and died.

After her last baby had been born dead, Onion flopped on her mat like a fish.

Ruc-ruc-ruc-ruc-rud

The dream turned to smoke at the sound. Thumb leapt up and almost fell into the river. His feet had gone
numb in the cold water and he couldn't feel the ground beneath them. He pulled on his boots, snatched
his spear, fit it to his throwing stick.

Ruc-ruc-rucl

The rambling came from upriver, around the bend. Thumb had never heard anything like it. An earth
sound, like the crack of a falling tree or a boulder crashing off a cliff, except it was wet and hot and alive.
A sound that only an animal could make.

He crept deeper into the thicket before he started upriver. Hunting courage pounded in his chest. He
strained ear and eye and nose after the quarry. He was ready to jump over the sky. It was hard to make
himself go quietly but he parted branches and slid through the leaves.

Man. Come out, man.

The whisper rasped inside his head. He felt it on the tip of his nose, on the hair of his scalp, at the root of
his cock and on the bottoms of his tingling feet. It had to be the whisper of a spirit. This was his luck then,
whether good or bad. He had no choice. He must obey. Thumb rose up and pushed through the
undergrowth toward the water. He knew that he might be about to have his soul stripped from his body.
The thought did not much bother him. If Onion were really dead, he would be with her in the belly of the