"BretHarte-ADriftFromRedwoodCamp" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harte Bret)

one who at that supreme moment was weakly incapable.

Such was the reputation and such the antecedents of the man who,
on the 15th of March, 1856, found himself adrift in a swollen
tributary of the Minyo. A spring freshet of unusual volume had
flooded the adjacent river until, bursting its bounds, it escaped
through the narrow, wedge-shaped valley that held Redwood Camp.
For a day and night the surcharged river poured half its waters
through the straggling camp. At the end of that time every vestige
of the little settlement was swept away; all that was left was
scattered far and wide in the country, caught in the hanging
branches of water-side willows and alders, embayed in sluggish
pools, dragged over submerged meadows, and one fragment--bearing up
Elijah Martin--pursuing the devious courses of an unknown tributary
fifty miles away. Had he been a rash, impatient man, he would have
been speedily drowned in some earlier desperate attempt to reach
the shore; had he been an ordinary bold man, he would have
succeeded in transferring himself to the branches of some
obstructing tree; but he was neither, and he clung to his broken
raft-like berth with an endurance that was half the paralysis of
terror and half the patience of habitual misfortune. Eventually he
was caught in a side current, swept to the bank, and cast ashore on
an unexplored wilderness.

His first consciousness was one of hunger that usurped any
sentiment of gratitude for his escape from drowning. As soon as
his cramped limbs permitted, he crawled out of the bushes in search
of food. He did not know where he was; there was no sign of
habitation--or even occupation--anywhere. He had been too
terrified to notice the direction in which he had drifted--even if
he had possessed the ordinary knowledge of a backwoodsman, which he
did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered state, seeing a
squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he
made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away.
But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain
impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow of
the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously.
The purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed
from it a certain strength and intuition. He limped through the
thicket not unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and
there to peer out through the openings over the marshes that lay
beyond. His sight, hearing, and even the sense of smell had become
preternaturally acute. It was the latter which suddenly arrested
his steps with the odor of dried fish. It had a significance
beyond the mere instincts of hunger--it indicated the contiguity of
some Indian encampment. And as such--it meant danger, torture, and
death.

He stopped, trembled violently, and tried to collect his scattered
senses. Redwood Camp had embroiled itself needlessly and brutally