"Эрнест Хемингуэй. Big two-hearted river" - читать интересную книгу автора

Part II

In the morning the sun was up and the tent was starting to get hot.
Nick crawled out under the mosquito netting stretched across the mouth of
the tent, to look at the morning. The grass was wet on his hands as he came
out. He held his trousers and his shoes in his hands. The sun was just up
over the hill. There was the meadow, the river and the swamp. There were
birch trees in the green of the swamp on the other side of the river.
The river was clear and smoothly fast in the early morning. Down about
two hundred yards were three logs all the way across the stream. They made
the water smooth and deep above them. As Nick watched, a mink crossed the
river on the logs and went into the swamp. Nick was excited. He was excited
by the early morning and the river. He was really too hurried to eat
breakfast, but he knew he must. He built a little fire and put on the coffee
pot.
While the water was heating in the pot he took an empty bottle and went
down over the edge of the high ground to the meadow. The meadow was wet with
dew and Nick wanted to catch grasshoppers for bait before the sun dried the
grass. He found plenty of good grasshoppers. They were at the base of the
grass stems. Sometimes they clung to a grass stem. They were cold and wet
with the dew, and could not jump until the sun wanned them. Nick picked them
up, taking only the medium-sized brown ones, and put them into the bottle.
He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were several
hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house. Nick put about fifty of
the medium browns into the bottle. While he was picking up the hoppers the
others warmed in the sun and commenced to hop away. They flew when they
hopped. At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when they landed, as
though they were dead.
Nick knew that by the time he was through with breakfast they would be
as lively as ever. Without dew in the grass it would take him all day to
catch a bottle full of good grasshoppers and he would have to crush many of
them, slamming at them with his hat. He washed his hands at the stream. He
was excited to be near it. Then he walked up to the tent. The hoppers were
already jumping stiffly in the grass. In the bottle, warmed by the sun, they
were jumping in a mass. Nick put in a pine stick as a cork. It plugged the
mouth of the bottle enough, so the hoppers could not get out and left plenty
of air passage.
He had rolled the log back and knew he could get grasshoppers there
every morning.
Nick laid the bottle full of jumping grasshoppers against a pine trunk.
Rapidly he mixed some buckwheat flour with water and stirred it smooth, one
cup of flour, one cup of water. He put a handful of coffee in the pot and
dipped a lump of grease out of a can and slid it sputtering across the hot
skillet. On the smoking skillet he poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. It
spread like lava, the grease spitting sharply. Around the edges the
buckwheat cake began to firm, then brown, then crisp. The surface was
bubbling slowly to porousness. Nick pushed under the browned under surface
with a fresh pine chip. He shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose
on the surface. I won't try and flop it, he thought. He slid the chip of
clean wood all the way under the cake, and flopped it over onto its face. It