"Doranna Durgin - Wolverine's Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Durgin Doranna)

Chapter 1
"Hssst," Gwawl said, drawing Kelyn's attention from the bright cave entrance. He lurked in a dark nook,
hunched over a sputtering, smelly fat candle.

"What?" Kelyn's voice echoed loudly in the cave. Unimpressed by his dramatics, she propped her staff
against the entrance rock, but took only a single step inward. Her toes and her nose told her well enough
what they'd find here. Bats. Stinky bat guano. Nothing to keep their voices limited tohssst and whispers.
Now, if there had been small bones crunching beneath her toes, that would be something else. Rock cat,
from which to run, or holed-up nightfox to stalk. Catching the fox in its lair was the easiest of the many
difficult ways to obtain nightfox pelt.

"Come look," Gwawl said in normal tones, but tinged with disappointment at her unwillingness to turn the
moment more exciting.

Any regret Kelyn might have felt dissipated with the substance squishing between her toes as she joined
Gwawl in his nookтАФa set-back with an unusually flat surface for the back wall, a solid slab of upthrust
rock with enough air currents playing around it to keep the candle on the verge of snuffing out.

In the wildly uneven light, Kelyn saw what had drawn Gwawl's attention. She crowded in close to
himтАФshoulder to adolescent shoulder, thigh to thigh, unself-conscious about it as were they all. Gwawl,
Iden, Mungo, Frykla, Huon . . . and Kelyn. A hunting pack, a training pack, living the mountain summers
together to learn survival, to forge the bonds of trust that would carry them through life in the tremendous,
craggy Keturan mountains.

"Someone's been here," Gwawl said in grand pronouncement.

Kelyn looked at the roughly sketched creature on the cave. "Grant me more of your wisdom, Gwawl."

He scowled, and gave her a far from gentle shove. Even prepared for it, Kelyn still found herself sitting in
bat guano. She kept her curses silent. Gwawl would regret it . . . later. For now she was just as intrigued
as he by the discovery, and she carefully climbed to her feet, wiping her hands on the rough knit of his
sleeveless tunic.

He ignored her, and pointed at the creatureтАФsmeared, it seemed, in a paint made of blood and ash and
charcoal. "Do you think it was him? Doesn't it look like a wolverine?"

It did. "Maybe," she said.
"It makes sense, why there's only the one. They say he hunted alone, never trusted anyone in his pack."

That's what they said. Kelyn relieved him of the candle, suddenly disinterested. Or perhaps too
interested to trust herself. When it came to her father, she was never sure just which it was. "Let's go."

"NoтАФwaitтАФKelyn! Let's get the others!"

Kelyn moved past the nook and deeper into the cave, having found the steep slanting passage that
caused the air current. "We'll get them," she said. "But give them a chance to find rockrabbit first, if you
want evening meal. Besides . . ." she hesitated, giving her concentration over to her toes as she negotiated
a sudden drop. "Besides, maybe that's not a wolverine at all. Maybe it's an ugly turtle, and we'll find
what's left of the painter just down this way. Maybe it washis blood in the paint."