"James Herbert - Soul Catcher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert James)

". . . the fish eyes like gray skimmed milk that stare at you out of things which are
alive when they shouldn't be."

This is the observation of someone who is capable of great things, as great as any
achievements in our Western mythology.

***
It had begun when his name still was Charles Hobuhet, a good Indian name for a Good
Indian.

The bee had alighted, after all, on the back of Charles Hobuhet's left hand. There had
been no one named Katsuk then. He had been reaching up to grasp a vine maple limb,
climbing from a creek bottom in the stillness of midday.

The bee was black and gold, a bee from the forest, a bumblebee of the family Apidae. It's
name fled buzzing through his mind, a memory from days in the white school.

Somewhere above him, a ridge came down toward the Pacific out of the Olympic Mountains
like the gnarled root of an ancient spruce clutching the earth for support.

The sun would be warm up there, but winter's chill in the creek bottom slid its icy way
down the watercourse from the mountains to these spring-burgeoning foothills.

Cold came with the bee, too. It was a special cold that put ice in the soul.

Still Charles Hobuhet's soul then.

But he had performed the ancient ritual with twigs and string and bits of bone. The ice
from the bee told him he must take a name. Unless he took a name immediately, he stood in
peril of losing both souls, the soul in his body and the soul that went high or low with
his true being.

The stillness of the bee on his hand made this obvious. He sensed urgent ghosts: people,
animals, birds, all with him in this bee.

He whispered: "Alkuntam, help me."

The supreme god of his people made no reply.

Shiny green of the vine maple trunk directly in front of him dominated his eyes. Ferns
beneath it splayed out fronds. Condensation fell like rain on the damp earth. He forced
himself to turn away, stared across the creek at a stand of alders bleached white against
heavy green of cedar and fir on the stream's far slope.

A quaking aspen, its leaves adither among the alders, dazzled his awareness, pulled his
mind. He felt abruptly that he had found another self which must be reasoned with,
influenced, and understood. He lost clarity of mind and sensed both selves straining
toward some pure essence. All sense of self slipped from his body, searched outward into
the dazzling aspen.