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

while living in that white world. But a spirit had spoken to him.
A true and ancient spirit.
Deep within his innermost being he knew that intellect and education, even the white
education, had been his first guides on this ordeal.
He thought how, as Charles Hobuhet, he had begun this thing. He had waited for the full
moon and cleansed his intestines by drinking seawater. He had found a land otter and cut
out its tongue.
Kuschtaliute -- the symbol tongue!
His grandfather had explained the way of it long ago, describing the ancient lore.
Grandfather had said: 'The shaman becomes the spirit-animal-man. God won't let animals
make the mistakes men make.'
That was the way of it.
He had carried Kuschtaliute in a deer scrotum pouch around his neck. He had come into
these mountains. He had followed an old elk trail grown over with alder and fir and cotton
wood. The setting sun had been at his back when he had buried Kuschtaliute beneath a
rotten log. He had buried Kuschtaliute in a place he never again could find, there to become
the symbol tongue.
All of this in anguish of spirit.
He thought: It began because of the rape and pointless death of my sister. The death of
Janiktaht ... little Jan.
He shook his head, confused by an onslaught of memories. Somewhere a gang of
drunken loggers had found Janiktaht walking alone, her teenaged body full of spring
happiness, and they had raped her and changed her and she had killed herself.
And her brother had become a walker-in-the-mountains.
The other self within him, the one which must be reasoned with and understood, sneered
at him and said: 'Rape and suicide are as old as mankind. Besides, that was Charles
Hobuhet's sister. You are Katsuk.'
He thought then as Katsuk: Lucretius was a liar! Science doesn't liberate man from the
terror of the gods!
Everything around him revealed this truth -- the sun moving across the ridges, the
ranges of drifting clouds, the rank vegetation.
White science had begun with magic and never moved far from it. Science continually
failed to learn from lack of results. The ancient ways retained their potency. Despite sneers
and calumny, the old ways achieved what the legends said they would.
His grandmother had been of the Eagle Phratry. And a bee had spoken to him. He had
scrubbed his body with hemlock twigs until the skin was raw. He had caught his hair in a
headband of red cedar bark. He had eaten only the roots of devil's club until the ribs poked
from his flesh.
How long had he been walking in these mountains?
He thought back to all the distance he had covered: ground so sodden that water oozed
up at each step, heavy branches overhead that shut out the sun, undergrowth so thick he
could see only a few body lengths in any direction. Somewhere, he had come through a
tangled salmonberry thicket to a stream flowing in a canyon, deep and silent. He had
followed that stream upward to vaporous heights ... upward ... upward. The stream had
become a creek, this creek below him.
This place.
Something real was living in him now.
Abruptly, he sensed all of his dead ancestors lusting after this living experience. His mind
lay pierced by sudden belief, by unending movement beneath the common places of life, by
an alertness which never varied, night or day. He knew this bee!