"Frank Herbert - Soul Catcher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

He could feel slow tension spreading upward from those moccasins. Janiktaht was here
with him in this room, her hands reaching out from the elk leather she had shaped. Her
voice filled the darkness with the final screech of her anguish.
Katsuk took a deep, calming breath. It was not yet time.
There had been fog in the evening, but it had cleared at nightfall on a wind blowing
strongly from the southwest. The wind sang to Katsuk in the voice of his grandfather's flute,
the flute in the pouch. Katsuk thought of his grand-father: a beaten man, thick of face, who
would have been a shaman in another time. A beaten man, without congregation or
mystery, a shadow shaman because he remembered all the old ways.
Katsuk whispered: 'I do this for you, grandfather.'
Each thing in its own time. The cycle had come around once more to restore the old
balance.
His grandfather had built a medicine fire once. As the blaze leaped, the old man had
played a low, thin tune on his flute. The song of his grandfather's flute wove in and out of
Katsuk's mind. He thought of the boy sleeping out there in the cabin -- David Marshall.
You will be snared in the song of this flute, white innocent. I have the root of your tree in
my power. Your people will know destruction!
He opened his eyes to moonlight. The light came through the room's one window, drew a
gnarled tree shadow on the wall to his left. He watched the undulant shadow, swaying
darkness, a visual echo of wind in trees.
The water continued its drip-drip-drip across the hall. Unpleasant odors drifted on the
room's air. Antiseptic place! Poisonous! The cabin had been scoured out with strong soap by
the advance work crew.
I am Katsuk.
The odors in the room exhausted him. Everything of the whites did that. They weakened
him, removed him from contact with his past and the powers that were his by right of
inheritance.
I am Katsuk.
He quested outward in his mind, sensed the camp and its surroundings. A trail curved
through a thick stand of fir beyond the cabin's south porch. Five hundred and twenty-eight
paces it went, over the roots and boggy places to the ancient elk trace which climbed into
the park.
 He thought: That is my land! My land! These white thieves stole my land. These hoquat!
Their park it my land!
Hoquat! Hoquat!
He mouthed the word without sound. His ancestors had applied that name to the first
whites arriving off these shores in their tall ships. Hoquat -- something that floated far out
on the water, something unfamiliar and mysterious.
The hoquat had been like the green waves of winter that grew and grew and grew until
they smashed upon the land.
Bruce Clark, director of Six Rivers Camp, had taken photographs that day -- the publicity
pictures he took every year to help lure the children of the rich. It had amused Katsuk to
obey in the guise of Charles Hobuhet.
Eyes open wide, body sweating with anticipation, Katsuk had obeyed Clark's directions.
'Move a little farther left, Chief.'
Chief!
'That's good. Now, shield your eyes with your hand as though you were staring out at the
forest. No, the right hand.'
Katsuk had obeyed.
The photographs pleased him. Nothing could steal a soul which Soul Catcher already