"Charles Coleman Finlay - A Democracy of Trolls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finley Charles Coleman)

was somebody else's fault, then it wasn't hers.
Ragweed rooted idly in the dirt. "I'm hungry."
Windy sighed. She'd heard that a thousand times as well. She stood up. Doing
anything was better than doing nothing. "Come on. Let's go down to the turtle
shell. Maybe they'll be scared off. Maybe we'll find something to eat."
He clapped his hands. The crack echoed off the mountain walls, scattering
birds from the trees. "That's right!" he said. "All you need is some food,
then you'll put that baby down."
They walked down the familiar slope. They'd varied the path some every night
looking for new sources of food, but there were only so many ways to go.
Ragweed turned over logs and broke off pieces of stumps, but they were the
same logs and stumps he'd searched a dozen times before. They hadn't seen the
carcass of so much as a dead sparrow in two weeks; it had been a month since
they'd found that deer before the wild dogs got to it. Ragweed paused to snack
on a nest of termites, then a bunch of grubs and crunchy hundred-leg bugs
inside a stump. She waited for him to stuff his face. When they continued on
their way, he grabbed the lower branches of trees and chewed the leaves off
the ends. The rain moistened them up a bit so they didn't taste so chokingly
dry. The scent enticed Windy, but not enough to make her eat.
They arrived at the wide meadow beside the pond and Ragweed waded into the
water to slake his thirst. Windy's throat was terribly parched despite the
drippings she'd licked off the cave roof, so she followed him, holding the
baby out of the water as she bent down to take a drink.
Ragweed splashed over and rubbed his hands on her bottom.
"Thhppppt!" Water sprayed out of her mouth. "Stop that!"
"Nothing to interrupt us now," he leered.
She ignored him, bending to take another sip. He reached around and squeezed
her breast.
"Yow!" Windy hopped away with a splash, bared her teeth, and smacked him with
a backhanded swing.
"Hey!" he hollered. "What did I do?"
"That hurt." She turned away, sloshed out of the pond, and started her
three-legged gait through the woods without him. Her breasts ached like a bad
tooth. They'd been leaking all evening and she didn't know what to do. She
guessed they'd dry up in a few days, but right now she'd rather step in fire
than have him touch them.
Ragweed hurried to catch up. They crested the chestnut ridge where they'd sat
most nights through the late spring and summer. Mosswater had been the only
one brave -- or stupid -- enough to approach the turtle shell night after
night. But he was that way. He did something one time and then got stuck doing
it over and over even if it didn't work because he couldn't think of anything
else.
The rain-heavy breeze carried good scents. Windy smelled the fruit ripening on
the pear trees away down the valley. Off in the direction of the sunset,
toward the river, she thought she sniffed something dead, maybe drowned in
yesterday's flood. Small, but still a good meal if she'd been hungry enough to
go looking for it. She turned her head the other direction toward the little
hollow of land where the cave was. She smelled Mosswater strongly above all
else, and the faint scent of the lion, and goat's blood a couple days old. The
squash were ripening, and the corn, and the beans inside that little thorn