"George A. Stewart - Earth Abides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart George A)

He felt no premonitions of death. Rather, the whole matter still seemed to
him just a nuisance. People had kept telling him that he should not go into
the mountains by himself--"Without even a dog!" they used to add. He had
always laughed at them. A dog was constant trouble, getting mixed up with
porcupines or skunks, and he was not fond of dogs anyway. Now all those
people would say, "Well, we warned you!"

Tossing about half-feverishly, he now seemed to himself to be composing a
defense. "Perhaps," he would say, "the very danger in it appealed to me!"
(That had a touch of the heroic in it.) More truthfully he might say, "I
like to be alone at times, really need to escape from all the problems of
dealing with people." His best defense, however, would merely be that, at
least during the last year, he had gone into the mountains alone as a
matter of business. As a graduate student, he was working on a thesis: *The
Ecology of the Black Creek Area.* He had to investigate the relationships,
past and present, of men and plants and animals in this region. Obviously
he could not wait until just the right companion came along. In any case,
he could never see that there was any great danger. Although nobody lived
within five miles of his cabin, during the summer hardly a day passed
without some fisherman coming by, driving his car up the rocky road or
merely following the stream.

Yet, come to think of it, when had he last seen a fisherman? Not in the
past week certainly. He could not actually remember whether he had seen one
in the two weeks that he had been living by himself in the cabin. There was
that car he had heard go by after dark one night. He thought it strange
that any car would be going up that road in the darkness, and could hardly
see the necessity, for ordinarily people camped down below for the night
and went up in the morning. But perhaps, he thought, they wanted to get up
to their favorite stream, to go out for some early fishing.

No, actually, he had not exchanged a word with anyone in the last two
weeks, and he could not even remember that he had seen anyone.

A throb of pain brought him back to what was happening at the moment. The
hand was beginning to swell. He loosened the tourniquet to let the blood
circulate again.

Yes, as, he returned to his thoughts, he realized that he was out of touch
with things entirely. He had no radio. Therefore, as far as he was
concerned, there might have been a crash of the stockmarket or another
Pearl Harbor; something like that would account for so few fishermen going
by. At any rate, there was very little chance apparently that anyone would
come to help him. He would have to work his own way out.

Yet even that prospect did not alarm him. At worst, he considered, he would
lie up in his cabin, with plenty of food and water for two or three days,
until the swelling in his hand subsided and he could drive his car down to
Johnson's, the first ranch.