"Alice Hoffman - Second Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Alice)

trappers had to carry flashlights and leave lanterns hung on their
snowmobiles in order to find their way back. Most of these men never
poached enough to get caught by the rangers, and anyone looking for them
would have had a difficult time. In the spring, moss appeared overnight
and covered any footprints completely by morning.

In winter, no one but a maniac or an experienced hunter would venture
into the forest. For those men who didn't fear the woods, there was
little chance of legal action against them. Trapping was, after all, a
criminal act without a witness. There was no one to hear a shotgun
fired, or the peculiar cry made by a fox when a piece of cyanide-laced
lamb takes effect.

The men who found him were an uncle and nephew who had worked the forest
for more than ten years and who were not nearly as greedy or cruel as
some of their neighbors. They worked in silence, not with poisoned meat
but with steel traps, and they were always particularly careful to stay
together, even when it made sense to split up, since they had seen,
several times, huge paw prints, three times as big as a dog's. In these
mountains all sorts of things were said on winter nights, some to be
believed, some not.

A man they knew, over in Cromley, had a wolf-skin rug on his living room
floor, head and all. He told everyone he'd shot the wolf, a male of
more than a hundred and ten pounds, head-on, but his wife had let it
slip that he'd simply found it the spring before, dead of natural
causes, preserved all winter long by the cold. Wolves were rare, even
this far north, you could probably count on your fingers the ones that
had come down from Canada and stayed.

Still, their tenuous presence made for good talk and real fear.

An old trapper who hadn't been caught once in sixty years of making a
living liked to scare some of the boys who were just starting out by
swearing that it was possible for some wolves to become human. He'd
seen it himself on a night when there was an orange hunter's moon. A
wolf was crouching down with the pack one minute and standing on two
feet like a man the next. That happened with old trappers
sometimes--they had killed more animals than they could number and, now
that they were senior citizens who couldn't eat anything but oatmeal,
they suddenly started to have some kind of funny regret that mixed them
up so badly they didn't even notice people were laughing at them.

The uncle and his nephew didn't listen to stories and they didn't take
foolish chances. As far as they were concerned, they weren't breaking
the law so much as taking care of their families. They were interested
in deer for the meat, foxes and raccoons for their skins, but they got
much more than that on the last day of December. This was the season
when the sky turned black at four-thirty and the cold made breathing
painful and sharp. They were inspecting the traps they had left out the