"David Zindell - Shanidar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

side of the lead dog with his huge mittens. He adjusted the load three times before he had it to
his liking, taking pains that the sacks of dog meal were balanced and tightly lashed to the wooden
frame. Then he was off, whistling in a curious manner as he glided around the corner of the
cetic's shop and disappeared into the cold."

The tearoom felt cold as I said these words. I noticed that the young man was pursing his narrow
lips tightly as he fiddled with his coffee. All at once, he let out his breath in a puff of steam
that seemed to hang in the air. "But that isn't the end of your story, is it, Cutter? You haven't
told the moral: how poor Goshevan died on the ice brokenhearted and disavowing his dream."

"Why is it you young people always want an ending? Does our universe come to an end or does it
fold in upon itself? Are the Agathanians at the end of human evolution or do they represent a new
species? And so on, and so on. Is there any end to the questions impatient young men ask?"

I took a quick gulp of the bitter kvass, burning my lips and throat so that I sat there dumbly
sucking in the cold air like an old bellows. "No, you are right," I gasped out. "That is not the
end of my story."

"Goshevan drove his dogs straight out onto the frozen Starnbergersee. Due west he went, running
fast across the wind-packed snow for six hundred miles. He came to the first of the Thousand
Islands and found mountains shrouded in evergreen forests where the thallows nested atop the steep
granite cliffs filling the air for miles with their harsh cawings. But he found no Alaloi, and he
urged his dogs carefully across the crevasses of the Fairleigh ice-shelf, back out onto the sea.

"Fifteen islands he crossed without finding a trace of a human being. He had been gone sixty-two
days when the crushing, deadly silent cold of deep winter began yielding to the terrible storms of
midwinter spring. During a snow so heavy and wet that he had to stop every hundred yards to scrape
the frozen slush from the steel runners of his sled, his lead dog, Yuri the Fierce, pulled them
into a crevasse. Though he dug his boots into the sloppy snow and held on to the sled with all his
strength, the pendulating weight of Yuri, Sasha and Ali as they swung back and forth over the lip
of the ice was such that he felt himself being slowly dragged into the crevasse. It was only by
the quick slashing of his hunting knife that he saved himself and the rest of his team. He cut the
harness from which his strongest dogs dangled and watched helplessly as they tried to dig their
black claws into the sides of the crevasse, all the while yelping pitifully as they fell to the


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ice below.

"Goshevan was stunned. Though the snow had stopped and he was within sight of the sixteenth and
largest of the Thousand Islands, he realized he could go no farther without rest. He erected his
tent and fed the dogs from the crumbly remnants of the last bag of food. There came a distant
hissing that quickly grew into a roar as the storm returned, blasting across the Starnbergersee
with such ferocity that he spent all that day and night tending the ice-screws of his tent so that
he wouldn't be blown away. For nine days he lay there shivering inside his sleeping sack as the
wind-whipped ice crystals did their work. By the tenth day, the batteries to his heated kamelaika
were so low that he threw them in disgust against the shredded, useless walls of his tent. He dug
a cave in the snow and pulled the last two of his starving dogs into the hole so that they might