"Dozois Gardner - A Cat Horror Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

DOZOIS GARDNER

A CAT HORROR STORY

DARKNESS. THE SMELL OF grass, and wet earth, and fog. The night moved through
the clearing like a river. A few distant pinpricks of stars overhead, faint and
far and pale. Somewhere down the hill, the grass rustled as a mouse fled through
it, but the People were not hunting tonight.

Eyes gleamed in the night. Occasionally, a tail would thump the ground, once,
twice, and then fall still. Very occasionally -- an act of bravado -- one of the
People would slowly, ostentatiously, lick a paw. Then stop.

You could smell the excitement in the wet air, the uneasiness, the fear.

The wind brought the distant sound of a dog barking, and the ears of the People
pricked forward instinctively, but, on this night of all nights, there was
certainly no time for dogs.

Somewhere down below, in one of the human lairs at the foot of the hill, you
could hear a human[1] calling for one of the People in that shrill mixture of
human talk, strange wet noises, and oddly garbled and nonsensically
out-of-context phrases of the True Tongue that humans used to try summon the
People who were lair-mates with them, but none of the People were interested in
Food tonight, even the fattest or the hungriest of them, not even when the human
made an enticing rattling noise with a Food. Opening-Stick against a Cold Round
Thing of Food. After a while, the human ceased his plaintive calls, and there
was silence again, except for the human sounds riding the night air: doors
slamming, voices, the annoying clamoring and shrieking of the Noisy Dead Things
with which the humans insisted on cluttering the lairs, the growling of the Fast
Dead Things which the humans kept as slaves and actually encouraged to swallow
them! (although they made the Things spit them up again later) . . . but the
People were used to those sounds, and ignored them.

At last, when the sharp smells of excitement could get no stronger, when their
eyes could grow no wider or wilder, and when their tails were beginning to lash
with impatience with a noise like a strong wind slashing through the branches of
trees, the full moon rose, immense and pale and round, its pockmarked face
pitiless and remote and cold, and that creel orb was reflected full and bright
in all the watching eyes of all the People who waited below.

One of the People stretched and yawned, showing all his teeth. His name was
Caeser[2], and he was known as a good hunter, and a fierce defender of his
territory. In fact, he had a bloody feud of long duration and rich tradition
going with Jefferson, whose territory adjoined his own, but Jefferson sat
quietly beside him now, and did no more than turn a slightly disdainful glance
at Caeser's display of teeth. This was no time for fighting, or mating, or for
territoriality. The Hunter Light, the Death Light, The Night Face,