"A. E. Merritt - Dwellers in the mirage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

had called him Tsantawu. From the first we had recognized spiritual
kinship. By the ancient rites of his people we had become
blood-brothers, and he had given me my secret name. known only to the
pair of us, Degataga--one who stands so close to another that the two
are one.

My one gift, besides my strength, is an aptness at languages. Soon I
spoke the Cherokee as though I had been born in the Nation. Those years
in college were the happiest I had ever known. It was during the last
of them that America entered the World War. Together we had left
Dartmouth, gone into training camp, sailed for France on the same
transport.

Sitting there, under the slow-growing Alaskan dawn, my mind leaped over
the years between . . . my mother's death on Armistice Day . . . my
return to New York to a frankly hostile home . . . Jim's recall to his
clan . . . the finishing of my course in mining engineering . . . my
wanderings in Asia . . . my second return to America and my search for
Jim . . . this expedition of ours to Alaska, more for comradeship and
the wilderness peace than for the gold we were supposed to be seeking--

A long trail since the War--the happiest for me these last two months of
it. It had led us from Nome over the quaking tundras, and then to the
Koyukuk, and at last to this little camp among the spruces, somewhere
between the headwaters of the Koyukuk and the Chandalar in the
foothills of the unexplored Endicott Range. A long trail . . . I had the
feeling that it was here the real trail of my life began.

A ray of the rising sun struck through the trees. Jim sat up, looked
over at me, and grinned.

"Didn't get much sleep after the concert, did you?"

"What did you do to the ancestors? They didn't seem to keep you awake
long."

He said, too carelessly: "Oh, they quieted down." His face and eyes
were expressionless. He was veiling his mind from me. The ancestors had
not quieted down. He had lain awake while I had thought him sleeping. I


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made a swift decision. We would go south as we had planned. I would go
with him as far as Circle. I would find some pretext to leave him
there.

I said: "We're not going north. I've changed my mind."