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

"I think so. I've watched the Bull."

"All right."

She turned her back, looking over her shoulder at him, and reached for her
genital slit.

But now a fat arm slammed into his back. He crashed to the ice, falling
painfully on his penis, which shrank back immediately.

It was the Bull, his father. The huge man was a mountain of flesh and muscle,
silhouetted against a violet sky. He hauled out his own penis from under his
graying fur. It was a fat, battered lump of flesh. He waggled it at Night-Dawn.
"I'm the Bull. Not you. Frazil is mine."

Now Night-Dawn understood the choice his mother had set out before him.

He felt something gather within him. Not anger: a sense of wrongness.

"I won't fight you," he said to the Bull. "Humans shouldn't behave like this."

The Bull roared, opened his mouth to display his canines, and turned away from
him.

Frazil slipped into the water, to evade the Bull.

Night-Dawn was left alone, frustrated, baffled.

As winter approached, a sense of oppression, of wrongness, gathered over
Night-Dawn, and his mood darkened like the days.

People did nothing but feed and breed and die.

He watched the Bull. Behind the old man's back, even as he bullied and assaulted
the smaller males, some of the other men approached the women and girls and
coupled furtively. It happened all the time. Probably the group would have died
out long ago if only the children of the Bull were permitted to be conceived.

The Bull was an absurdity, then, even as he dominated the little group.
Night-Dawn wondered if the Bull was truly his father.

...Sometimes at night he watched the flags of night dawn ripple over the
mountains. He wondered why the night dawns should come there, and nowhere else.

Perhaps the air was thicker there. Perhaps it was warmer beyond the mountains;
perhaps there were people there.

But there was little time for reflection.