"Dexter-HerdingInstinct" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dexter Colin)

SUSAN DEXTER

HERDING INSTINCT

HER MOTHER WAS A SHEEP-dog, the pride of her valley -- where a good working dog
was worth her weight in scarce silver coin. Sheep needed to range far to scour a
meal from the steep mountainsides that ringed the valley round, and a shepherd
needed legs more tireless than his own to bring a flock back safe to the fold
ere darkness fell and wolves were a certainty. Strong and clever was Mai's
mother, always guiding her charges home no matter how mountains and weather
tested her, and her first litter was eagerly awaited, as if she were a king's
wife brought to bed of royal heirs.

Mai was the seventh and the last-born, all of the pups wet and wiggling,
looking-- and squeaking-- quite like rats, save for the splashes of white on
their black or brown fur. The litter shared a warm nest of rags by the fireside
in the shepherd's tiny hut, shared also their mother's good milk, jostling about
to get as much of it and her attention as each could. Mai, forward and bold, was
always well fed, her brown and white body plump as a young coney's.

After a fortnight, six pairs of puppy eyes opened, showed a deep babyish blue
color, then settled to a wise brown, the same as their mother's. Mai's eyes,
however, opened and remained blue as the inside of an ice cave, paler than the
shell of a robin's egg. The shepherd at first feared her blind -- then, seeing
that notion proved unfounded by her obviously sighted play with her littermates,
feared far worse.

Six of the weaned puppies went to new homes after the Market Fair. Mai went for
a walk, tagging along behind the shepherd with nary a sheep in sight. They left
their valley, followed a river a little way, until they came to a cottage
builded of smooth river stones and sticky river mud, thatched with silver-green
river rushes. There was a man tending herbs in the dooryard, and the shepherd
spoke to him for a while, and showed Mai to him.

"You may be wrong," the wizard Corlinn said gently. "Sometimes a blue-eyed dog
simply has blue eyes."

"Her mother had proper brown eyes," the shepherd insisted, twisting his cap in
his hands.

"And the father!"

"That's what worries me, sir. Suppose some mountain spirit came upon her--"

The wizard dismissed the superstition, though he did not expect for a moment
that the shepherd would follow his will and do likewise. He bent to the puppy,
fondled her soft brown ears, which stood tall only to droop over at the tips.
She lowered them in pleasure at his notice, and wiggled all over. Unable to long