"Tom Easton - Mood Wendigo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

I wish I had been right. Keith was a lanky boy, tall, a forward on the school basketball team. Ronny was
shorter, sturdier, a soccer player. Both had family, friends, girl friends, good prospects. Keith, in fact,
already had a scholarship for college. They had a lot to lose, but they were eager. Danger was just a
myth, and they wouldn't miss this trip for worlds.

They didn't, of course. I didn't believe in any danger myself, so I didn't try to talk them out of it, and
Lydia made it sound like a lark. All the way up there, the four of us and the gear crowded into my old
station wagon, she waved her camera and ran on about the splash a picture of a real, live wendigo would
make.

We loaded the car on Thursday night and left town shortly after noon on Friday. When we met in the
town hall lot, I was surprised to see Lydia in dungarees and a red-checked wool shirt. It was so unlike
her that, even though the rest of us were dressed similarly, she seemed to stand out. But the clothes were
suitable for the trip, and I soon stopped noticing them.

It took us half an hour to reach the foot of Pork Hill, and another two hours to hump the gear to the top.
The hill wasn't big, no more than eight hundred feet high, but it was steep and wooded and there was no
path. The going was slow until we reached the top, where the trees disappeared. Pork Hill was one of
those rocky knobs scattered over the state of Maine, its top scraped clean by glaciers and still inhabited
only by lichen, moss, blueberry bushes, and a few stunted birches.

We pitched the tent in a mossy hollow between boulders, and the boys went back down the hill to gather
firewood. There were plenty of fallen branches there, and though we had the stove, a fire was a
comforting thing to have at night. Even small mountains can get chilly after dark.

By suppertime, the woodpile was large enough to last a week. We had all taken time to explore the
hilltop, too, following Lydia as she sought some clue to what a wendigo might be, some trace of
something strange. We found nothing but glacial scours and animal droppings and a few weathered
shotgun shells, though Lydia was hardly discouraged. As she said when the boys were finally kindling
their fire, "It is a traveler, they say. Maybe it never stops here."

I said something which I now wish I hadn't. Though it probably didn't change a thing. "Then you'll have to
move quickly to get a picture of it. It won't be waiting for you."

"I suppose I will," she said, fingering the camera on its strap around her neck. She bent, then, to the
totebag she had brought and extracted a flash, one of those electronic ones that don't need bulbs. "I'd
better be ready."

We ate -- hamburgers and potato salad and coffee and bakery pie -- and sat around the fire staring,
satisfied for the moment by the mystery of its flames. Only Lydia turned her head now and again to the
darkness, straining to see what she waited for. But there was nothing but the odor of earth and growing
things, the sight of stars like raindrops on a windshield. The air turned chill enough for sweaters, and we
listened to the chirps and buzzes of insects, the lazy notes of sleepy birds, the small croaks of tree frogs,
and the rare crackling of brush as some animal -- deer, coon, rabbit, coyote, even a wild house cat --
passed within hearing.

We talked, of what it meant to be a mayor or a teacher or a student, of sports and fishing and hunting, of
politics and taxes. We told no ghost stories, though. I suppose that must have been because our mission
was too much like such a tale. It would have been tempting fate to describe horrors and frights, and fate
never needed tempting.