"Small War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

"That's a registered SPCA game protector number," announced one who had been consulting an index. "What do you bet there's a man inside?"

"CEASE AND DESIST!" called the amplified Coast Guardsman voice. "THIS IS DECLARED AN ILLEGAL RIOT. FURTHER AGGRESSIVE ACTS WILL NOT BE PERMITTED." The barrel floated for an instant, settling, then turned over and sank. The Coast Guard crew caught it in a rescue net, hoisted it on deck and puzzled at the lock until a shuddering, dripping, blue young man managed to open it from the inside. Everyone present was given a summons for rioting without a Small War license. The wet people were taken back to the mainland.

Three miles away the giant whaler sank slowly, small lifeboats being lowered and circling it.

Ten miles away the whale tribe: bulls, cows and babes, alarmed by the shooting, were on their way, swimming deep and fast, to safer waters.

The Small Wars weren't over; the Small Wars had only recently begun.

But this engagement had come to an end.



The penis of the great sperm whale is nearly nine feet long. It is the mightiest organ in the history of the earth.

Divers who have witnessed the mating of Leviathan speak of it in tones of awe. Big Earl Carruthers, in the Seven Seas bar in New Orleans, vowed that after seeing the gentle giants make love, he couldn't get it up himself for two weeks. I once watched a courtship while standing watch on the U.S.S. Opportune in the arctic. For two hours an eighty-foot cow teased a bull a few tons larger than herself. She would roll over and over on the surface, then dive into the green depths with him a fluke's length behind. We would stand breathless, our mouths unconsciously open in the bitter air, trying to guess where they would breach next. No sound but the sharp cry of an occasional tern and the groan of icebergs rolling over in their sleep.

Then the cry: "There! There! Off to starboard!"

And out of the deeps, like birthing mountains, the great gray shapes exploded, arching completely clear of the water in leaps so graceful it made the soul ache, sinking back in fountains of spray.

The bull got so frustrated that he came over and rubbed himself back and forth along the length of the ship, his crusted hide causing sandpaper sounds to boom through our hull.

Then the cow, having decided she was ready, lured him away and they sank together, bodies spiraling around one another, into the privacy of the Greenland whale fisheries.



—ROGER LOVIN