"Ken MacLeod - The Highway Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

My hand was fiddling with the cross-bolt, still deep in my parka
pocket, clinking against some change and a knife. A cat hissed at me from
an empty window of the old station, making me jump. Behind all the other
smells from the ruin—wet ash, cat piss, mould and weeds—there was the
faint whiff of disinfectant. Left by a hundred years of soaking floorboards
with Jeyes Fluid. It reminded me of school corridors and the Highway
offices.

I crossed the rusty tracks and found a fallen gate among sagging
fence-posts. An overgrown path led up into the hills. I followed it. I was glad
of my big boots. The grass hid slippery stones that could turn an ankle, no
bother. On the lower slopes I saw a few rabbits and here and there a
huddled flock of sheep that had gone wild. These feral sheep looked fierce
and alert, with thick wool and long legs. Not like farm sheep at all. Evolution
happens, man, whatever the Yanks say. Each flock was guarded by a
black-faced ram with yellow eyes that stared at me as I went past. It was
like being watched by Satan.

Every so often I looked back, taking in the view. After a bit the curve
of the hills hid the loch. I was up above the snowline in a world of black and
white. Frost and old snow and burnt heather. There was colour in only a few
places. Orange lichens on the rocks like spilled paint. A few green shoots
in a warm patch that caught the sun most of the day and where water
dripped from icicles on to the brown clumps of dead grass.

By ten o’clock I’d passed a couple of tiny frozen lochs and was
walking along a wee glen. There were hills to my right and left. Higher hills
filled the horizon ahead. The place is called the Attadale Forest. Like most
places called forests in the Highlands, it has no trees. Nothing grows higher
than the heather. The path had faded to a track that might have been made
by sheep. There were no sheep up this high, but the path had been trodden
not long ago. And that meant people. I was on the right track, you might say.

I wasn’t worried about wolves or bears. Back along the big glen of the
Carron they could be a problem, but not here. Not in this barren land. Even
though Attadale and Glen Affric a bit to the south were among the places
they’d been brought back to years ago. It was a big thing back then, around
the same time as wind power. Failed for the same reason, too. Climate
change. Everybody thinks of wolves in the Highlands but it’s down south
they’re more of a nuisance. In Glasgow they raid the bins.

On and up I went. After a bit I began to find clues that the path was
made by people after all. Like a tarred board that turned the middle of a
slope into a step. Stones stacked by the side to make a low wall, or spread
out along a metre or two that was soft underfoot.

A wisp of smoke stained the sky ahead of me. I sniffed the air and
smelled burning wood, with an odd chemical taste in the smell.