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

All of this in anguish of spirit.

He thought: It began because of the rape and pointless death of my sister. The death of
Janik-taht . . . little Jan.

He shook his head, confused by an onslaught of memories. Somewhere a gang of drunken
loggers had found Janiktaht walking alone, her teen-aged 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!

He said: "You are Kwatee, the Changer."