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

Sam decided not to wait. He stepped out from behind the brush as he drew his longbow, touched the arrow's
feathers to his cheek, and released.
His bow pulled ninety Warm-time pounds, and the long arrow sprang from it humming. Across the clearing, the
young buck had only time to come alert before the broadhead struck him, chopped into his chest, and knocked him
down.
An instant later, Sam heard a bow-string twang behind him. Jim Olsen, he thought, and the arrow flashed across
to take the older buck through the throat as the doe and her fawn leaped and landed running, crashing away through
the evergreens.
The Trappers ran to the fallen bucks, drawing long double-edged knives from their belts. Sam and Jim, by
custom, cut their own kills' throats, and touched their foreheads with bloody fingers. Then the bucks were strung up
into branches by their heel tendons, and the men gathered round and butchered them. They tied off the bowels, drew
out the guts, bellies, livers, spleens, gall, lungs, and hearts.... Then rumps, hams, ribs, and loins were butchered out
and wrapped with the innards in the fresh hides, to make heavy bundles for carrying.
"William," Sam said, but smiling, since they'd taken so much
good meat, "—when are you going to learn to be still in the woods?"
The Olsens nodded, and William said, "I was still." Younger than the other men, stocky, and with lighter-colored
hair, William Weber ate so much that in the summer weeks he had fat on his body.
"Never still and never quiet," Jim Olsen said. "You fart loud enough to scare the herds away." The men laughed.
William, his face red, started to answer, and an arrow struck him in the back.
Very much as the caribou had, he gave a little jump and started to run. But Sam seized him as he staggered near,
and dove with him into the evergreens as Jim and the other two Olsens jumped into cover beside them.
For a moment, they all crouched silent in the greenwood brush, arrows nocked to their bowstrings.
William groaned and tried to sit up, and the shaft stuck into the small of his back moved as if it were driving
deeper into him. Jim leaned over to hold William still, and get a better look at the arrow. It was slender, painted black
with pitch, and fletched with owl feathers.
"Tribesmen," Olsen said. "That's a Cree arrow."
"Why?" Tom Olsen spoke softly. He was young, not much older than William. "They've come down before, and
they never hurt anybody!"
 Now they have, Sam thought. Pitch arrows, short wood-and-sinew bows. Soft puffs of fur around the string just
below the bow-tips, to muffle the twang of the shot. And more than one of them out there, to take on five Trappers.
Jim was staring at him, waiting for a decision.
"All right. Pick William up and let's get out of here."
The three Olsens—Jim, Tom, and a cousin named Chapman— took William's bow and quiver, then lifted him up
and slid quickly back into the denser forest behind them. Sam stayed, down on one knee, his longbow held horizontal
and half-drawn, watching for a Cree to show himself.
But nothing human stirred across the clearing, only small branches shifting in the breeze gusting down from the
glacier ridge. The big blotches of caribou blood were freezing dark red in the snow beside the bundles of meat....
William had left smaller drops of his blood behind, still warm and bright in the failing light.
Sam looked along the clearing's opposite edge once more, then stepped quickly into the woods and trotted after
the others. Now, William was leaving no blood trail, but the scuffling track of the men who carried him was easy to see,
even in gathering darkness under the trees.
Carrying William, they would not be able to run from the Crees—or hide from them, either.
Jim had found as good a place as possible for cover in the forest, a space between two big fallen trees. Struck
and split by lightning a few years before, they rested almost side by side in the snow.... Jim and the other two Olsens
had laid William down between these logs and crouched beside him, waiting for Sam or the Crees, whoever caught up
with them first.
Tom Olsen, watching the forest up-slope, saw Sam coming, waved him in, and kept watching.
Sam slid over the near snow-covered log and crouched low beside Jim. Behind them, William Weber lay still.
"See any?"
"No," Sam said. "But I guess they'll be along, unless they just wanted the meat."