"MacLeod, Ian R - Tirkiluk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

great deal of it is still lost between us. She seems to speak with affection for
the tribe, and ignores my attempts to discover why she was left here when they
moved on.

November 12

The bay is now solid ice, and the weather has cleared. Earlier, I stood outside
with Tirkiluk, pointing out the brightest stars, the main constellations,
naked-eye binaries. She recognized many stellar objects herself, and gave them
names -- and myths or stories that were too complex for our pidgin conversation
to convey. The Inuit are deeply familiar with the night sky.

Everything is incredibly clear, although somehow the idea of measurement and
observation seems out of place. There's an extraordinary sense of depth to the
Arctic sky. Really sense the distance between the stars.

One of the oddest things for me: is the almost circular movement of the heavens,
and the loss in the low horizon of stars like Alkiad, although in this dazzling
darkness, many others have been gained. Counted fourteen stars in the Pleiades
when my usual record is eleven, and Mu Cephei glows like a tiny coal. There is
still some degree tilt to the stellar horizon. Aquila (which Tirkiluk calls
Aagyuuk and has some significance for her that she tries to but can't explain)
has now set entirely.

November 20

The gales have returned, and Tirkiluk and I now share the hut. Much to her
puzzlement, have rigged up one of the canvas awnings across the roof beam, which
makes for two very awkward spaces instead of a single moderately awkward one.
She sleeps curled up on a rug on the floor. When I lie awake listening to the
wind and the ice in the bay groaning, can hear her softly snoring.

November 22

Must say that, despite reservations about her personal habits, I welcome her
company, although I realize that I came here fully expecting -- and wanting --
to be left on my own. But she doesn't intrude, which I suppose comes from living
close to many other people in those stinking little tents. We can go for hours
without speaking one hardly noticing that the other is there, so in a sense I
don't feel that I really have lost my solitude. Then at other times, we both
become so absorbed in the slow process of communication that yesterday I forgot
to go out and knock the ice off the transmitter wires, and nearly missed the
evening transmission.

She told me an Inuit story about the sun and the moon, who came down to earth
and played "dousing the lights" -- a self-explanatory Inuit sex-game of the kind
that so shocked the early missionaries. But the sun and the moon are brother and
sister, and in the steamy darkness of an Eskimo hut, they unwittingly broke the
incest taboo. So when the lamps were re-lit, the moon in his shame smeared his
face with lantern soot, and the sun set herself alight with lantern oil, and the