"Andre Norton - Warlock Trilogy - Storm over Warlock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

Within the half hour he had breakfast, too. A pair of limp skitterers, their long hind feet lashed together
with a thong of grass, hung from his belt. They were not particularly good eating, but at least they were
meat.

The three, man and wolverines, made their way up the stream to the valley wall and through a feeder ravine
into the larger space beyond. There, where the stream was born at the foot of a falls, they made their first
camp. Judging that the morning haze would veil any smoke, Shann built a pocket-size fire. He seared
rather than roasted the skitterers after he had made an awkward and messy business of skinning them, and
tore the meat from the delicate bones in greedy mouthfuls. The wolverines lay side by side on the gravel,
now and again raising a head alertly to test the scent on the air, or gaze into the distance.

Taggi made a warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had
only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform would fade into
the color of the earth on which he lay, every muscle tense.

A shadow swung across the hillside. Shann’s shoulders hunched, and he cowered again. That terror he had
known on the ledge was back in full force as he waited for the beam to lick at him as it had earlier at his
fellows. The Throgs were on the hunt . . .

2 : DEATH OF A SHIP

That sigh of displaced air was not as loud as a breeze, but it echoed monstrously in Shann’s ears. He could
not believe in his luck as that sound grew fainter, drew away into the valley he had just left. With infinite
caution he raised his head from his arm, still hardly able to accept the fact that he had not been sighted, that
the Throgs and their flyer were gone.
But that black plate was spinning out into the sun haze. One of the beetles might have suspected that there
were Terran fugitives and ordered a routine patrol. After all, how could the aliens know that they had
caught all but one of the Survey party in camp? Though with all the Terran scout flitters grounded on the
field, the men dead in their bunks, the surprise would seem to be complete.

As Shann moved, Taggi and Togi came to life also. They had gone to earth with speed, and the man was
sure that both beasts had sensed danger. Not for the first time he knew a burning desire for the formal
education he had never had. In camp he had listened, dragging out routine jobs in order to overhear reports
and the small talk of specialists keen on their own particular hobbies. But so much of the information
Shann had thus picked up to store in a retentive memory he had not understood and could not fit together.
It had been as if he were trying to solve some highly important puzzle with at least a quarter of the
necessary pieces missing, or with unrelated bits from others intermixed. How much control did a trained
animal scout have over his furred or feathered assistants? And was part of that mastery a mental rapport
built up between man and animal?

How well would the wolverines obey him now, especially when they would not return to camp where
cages stood waiting as symbols of human authority? Wouldn’t a trek into the wilderness bring about a
revolt for complete freedom? If Shann could depend upon the animals, it would mean a great deal. Not
only would their superior hunting ability provide all three with food, but their scouting senses, so much
keener than his, might erect a slender wall between life and death.

Few large native beasts had been discovered on Warlock by the Terran explorers. And of those four or five
different species, none had proved hostile if unprovoked. But that did not mean that somewhere back in the
wild lands into which Shann was heading there were not heretofore unknowns, perhaps slyer and as