"Mitchell Smith - Snowfal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

its fall ending.
"They ran down the ridge." Sam Monroe pushed back his parka hood and stood leaning on his bow.
"More'll be along." Jim Olsen was a tall bony man with a thin, fierce face. He was eleven years younger than Sam,
and preferred to lead the hunts he went on.
And the truth is, Sam thought, the bastard is a good hunter. He had a momentary vision of himself, older, his
knees stiffened, trailing along behind the others while Jim Olsen led them. He imagined the men turning to look back
down the trail at him trying to catch up... shaking their heads, saying to each other, "Why doesn't the old man stay
home?"
"We're not going to wait up here, hoping they'll herd high. We'll go down for outrunners." Sam pulled up his
parka hood. He was dressed, like the others, in dark-brown caribou hides cut and sewn into soft trousers, and a
loose-fitting parka trimmed with wolf and lynx. His high moccasins were lined with fur and double-soled with elk
leather, piss-tanned and boiled.
He led them over the east ridge at a trot. As they crossed it, the Wall loomed into view behind Mount Alvin's
peak. Blue-white in the distance, the Wall ran across the mountain range west to east, horizon to horizon.
 ***
The Olsen-Monroes and other families of the Range had been told—by travelers stopping by to beg a hunt, and
by Salesmen come to trade old-steel, southern paper, or copybooks for fur— that the ice-wall ran from the Atlantic
Sea, thousands of map-miles to the east, all the way past the Range to the Pacific Sea, where people in water-boats
hunted swimming seals.
The Wall was almost a mile high. The Trappers hunted along its base in the winter, sometimes, before the spring
thaw. Then it became too dangerous. Clouds gathered along its rim, and storms crashed and thundered down the
cliffs, so fools prayed to Weather to spare them, forgetting their copy-Bible.
In the three weeks of summer, great pieces of the Wall broke free and toppled from it, so the earth shook.
Sometimes waterfalls poured down from the crest and foamed high surf in flooding lakes. These cataracts stopped
toward the end of August, when all froze and became silent again.
Over the glacier ridge and down the flank of Mount Alvin, Sam led the hunters through late afternoon, never
stopping to rest. After a while, the five Trappers left deep snow for thin snow, then thin snow for granite, and finally
left that, and went down into the spruce and hemlock that forested the base of the mountain.
They made good time through these dark-green woods. Old snow and spruce needles crunched softly beneath
their moccasin boots as they trotted along in single file. They carried yew longbows, each almost as long as its owner
was tall, in their left hands. Thick hemlock branches plucked at the full quivers strapped to their backs, and caught at
their arms and legs as they passed.
Even in deep green shade, the men could see the scattered tracks and occasional dung droppings that a small
group of caribou had left when they split from the great herd to feed.
When he paused and bent to test it, the dung was still warm in Sam's fingers.
They trotted, almost silently, for another little while, then stopped. Standing still, the Trappers could hear
through a rising breeze the very faint, soft, clicking sounds of moving caribou. The men silently braced and strung
their heavy bows, then slid long arrows from their quivers. The arrows were perfectly made, strictly straight, and well
polished. They were fletched with goose flight-feathers—edge-tinted in trade powder-paint with each Trapper's family
colors—and tipped with broad hunting-heads filed from fine-hammered steel. Each arrow was banded in a hunter's
personal pattern of narrow stripes, painted with evergreen sap and rock ochre.
Their bows ready, arrows nocked to strings of twisted thread-stripped tendon, the five men spread out and
moved quietly down through the trees. The breeze was slightly stronger now as daylight dimmed, and they moved
only when its slow chill gusts came through, so their sounds became the wind's sounds. At last they reached the
border of a small clearing, deep in soft old snow and dotted with sprigs of seedling spruce.
The caribou were there. A branch-antlered buck, a younger buck in velvet, and a doe and her fawn were grazing
along the clearing's other edge.
Sam stood watching the animals from a screen of hemlock. He saw a flicker of motion to his right, a distance
along the clearing's edge. Shit. It would be William, for sure. The boy is shaking that branch as if there were August
blueberries on it!