"Mike Resnick - Lucifer Jones - A Jaguar Never Changes Its Stripes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

He pulled out a flask, took a swig, and handed it to me. “You still ain’t told me what you’re doing here,”
said Clyde.

“Mostly I been concentrating on being lost and starving to death,” I admitted.
“For a minute there I thunk we might be working for the same side,” he said.

“I don’t want to appear unduly ignorant, Clyde,” I said, “but who’s on the jaguar’s side?”

“Come on back to my camp and I’ll tell you all about it,” he said. “Dinner should be just about through
cooking by the time we get there.”

“What kind of grub you got? I asked.

“Deer, tapir, alligator, and sloth,” said Clyde.

“You traveling with an ice box?”

“Shot ‘em all this morning,” he replied. “Takes a lot of meat to feed a safari with five trackers, ten
gunbearers and twenty skinners.”

“Twenty skinners?” I repeated.

“Well, nineteen. One up and run off with a headhunter’s daughter.”

“Should I presume from the fact that you’re traveling with nineteen skinners and no veterinarians that you
ain’t capturing nothing for zoos and circuses on this safari?” I said.

He nodded. “This time I’m after jaguars.”

“I think they’re an endangered species.”

“Pretty much so,” he agreed.

“Ain’t it against the law to hunt endangered species?” I asked.

“They wasn’t endangered when I got here,” he said with more than a little trace of pride.

“So why are you denuding the countryside of jaguars?” I asked. “Have they been killing all the
livestock?”

He laughed. “You see any farms around here, Lucifer?”

“Then what leads you to come all the way out here to hell and gone, just to shoot jaguars?”

“It’s political,” he said.

“Jaguars got the vote?” I asked.

“It’s really complicated,” he said. “I’ll tell you while we eat. In the meantime, what have you been doing