"Baxter, Stephen - Huddle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

At night the wind was bitter, spilling off the flanks of the mountains, and they
huddled as best they could, their backs to the cold, their faces and bellies
together.

"We'll die," One-Tusk would whisper.

"We won't die," Night-Dawn said. "We have our fat."

"That's supposed to last us through the winter," hissed No-Sun.

One-Tusk shivered and moved a little more to leeward. "I wished to father a
child," he said. "By Ice-Cloud. I could not. Ice-Cloud mocked me. After that
nobody would couple with me."

"Ice-Cloud should have come to you, Night-Dawn. You are the Bull," No-Sun
muttered.

"I'm sorry," Night-Dawn said to One-Tusk. "I have fathered no children yet. Not
every coupling--"

One-Tusk said, "Do you really think it will be warm in the mountains?"

"Try to sleep now," said Frazil sensibly.

They were many days on the rising rock. The air grew thinner. The sky was never
brighter than a deep violet blue.

The mountains, at last, grew nearer. On clear days the sun cast long shadows
that reached out to them.

Night-Dawn saw a gap in the mountains, a cleft through which he could sometimes
see a slice of blue-violet sky. They turned that way, and walked on.

Still they climbed; still the air thinned.

They came to the pass through the mountains. It was a narrow gully. Its mouth
was broad, and there was broken rock, evidently cracked off the gully sides.

Night-Dawn led them forward.

Soon the walls narrowed around him, the rock slick with hard gray ice. His feet
slipped from under him, and he banged knees and hips against bone-hard ice. He
was not, he knew, made for climbing. And besides, he had never been surrounded
before, except in the huddle. He felt trapped, confined.

He persisted, doggedly.

His world closed down to the aches of his body, the gully around him, the search
for the next handhold.