"Andre Norton - Breed to come" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

Furtig had seen pictures of them. It was part of the
regular scout training to be taught to recognize the
enemy. And, while a youngling could be shown one of
the Barkers, a Tusked One, or even a vile Ration in
the flesh, he had to depend solely upon such repre-
sentations of Demons for identification.

Long ago the Demons had gone from their lairs,
though they had left foul traces of their existence be-
hind them. The stinking sickness, the coughing death,
the eaten-skin illsтАФthese had fallen on the People too
in the past, for once they had been imprisoned in the
Demons' lairs. Only a small handful of them had
escaped.

The memory of such deaths had kept them away
from the lairs for many lifetimes. Gammage had been
the first to dare to return to live in the Demons' forsak-
en shells. And that was because his thirst for knowl-
edge had taken him there. Gammage came of a

BREED TO COME

strange line differing yet again from many of the Peo-
ple.

Absently Furtig brought his hand to his mouth,
licked the fur on it clean of an itch-causing leaf smear.
He was of Gammage's own clan line, and they were
noted for their boldness of curiosity and their dif-
ferences in body. In fact they were not too well re-


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garded. Once more his lips wrinkled, his tail twitched
a little. Warriors of his family did not find it easy to
take a mate, not even when they won in the Trials.
Their restlessness of spirit, their habit of questioning
old ways, of exploring, was not favored by any pru-
dent cave mother who wished security for future
younglings.

Such would look in the opposite direction when
Gammage's kin padded by. And Gammage himself,
awesome as he was, had little repute nowadays.
Though the clans were willing enough to accept the
infrequent, but always surprising, gifts which he had