"Andre Norton - Cat Fantastic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

an agave, broke it, dusted the gel oozing from the leaf with powder and smeared the resulting concoction
on the gashes. I stiffened, expecting the fierce burning you get with iodine or other antiseptics, but all I felt
was a soothing coolness that gradually subdued the pain.
I expected him to bind up the wound with the rag, but he only smeared more of the agave on my leg and
told me to keep still until it dried, forming a thick film.
"Indian bandage," he said. "Sticks by itself until scab forms, then falls off."
I eyed him. Somehow, in that gentle way of his, the young Indian had dissolved the barrier of class and
color that should have separated him from me. I felt almost as if I should try to reestablish it. But I had no
pigeonholes, no places to put him; since I knew almost nothing about him. Two things were obvious; he
was trained as a healer, but for some reason, he was working construction.
"Who's your foreman?" I asked. "Isn't he going to be missing you?"
He named someone I'd never heard of.
"And what are you doing with a pet bobcat at a construction site?" I said, trying to reassert my status
above him in the hierarchy.
He scooped up Tonochpa, let her climb up his shoulder. "She is my partner," he said, as if it were
perfectly obvious. I watched as he clipped the end of her tether to a metal ring riveted to his overalls. He
made a clucking noise with his tongue. The bobcat clawed open the flap of his pack and crawled in. The
packflap lifted briefly to show two agate-colored eyes.
Mike told me he worked as a "cherry-picker" or high-scaler. Each day he lowered himself in a flimsy
bosun's chair from the canyon rim, with rock drill, crowbar and sometimes a load of dynamite. Though
most of the loose rock had been blasted and chipped from the walls of Black Canyon, scalers were still
hewing out the foundations for the inlet gate towers that would stand behind the dam.
That explained a lot about him. High-scalers were an ornery and independent lot, valued for their skills
and their disregard of danger. They could do pretty much as they pleased within certain limits and the
bosses looked the other way. Even if it came to having your own mascot along, I suppose.
"Do you really take her with you up there?" I asked, thinking I was reasonable in believing that hanging
from a cable in the midst of noise, blasting and confusion would be sheer hell for any creature, let alone
such a nervous and timid animal as a wild cat.
"She is my partner," he said again. "We trust each other."
She is my partner. It sounded so simple, so obvious and yet so strange to this white man's way of
thinking. My face must have betrayed my skepticism.
"Tonochpa keeps me from harm. Other high-scalers, they have accidents. Falls. Blow fingers, eyes, out
with explosives. Not me."
I'd done some reading on Indian anthropology. "Is Tonochpa your totem?"
Mike's smile was just a twitch at the corners of his mouth. He eyed me in that odd, indirect way.
"Because you try to understand, even if it is for the white man's purpose and in the white man's way, I will
share a secret with you."
He motioned me toward the bobcat, who seemed willing to accept my presence now. I approached, still
aware of my ragged trouser leg and the drying agave gel pulling my leg hairs. He chucked the cat under
the chin, making her raise her head. In the buff and gray fur at her throat, I saw a pair of oddly curved
short stripes, each with their ends nested in the concavity of the other's arc.
Mike ruffled the fur with a square, blunt thumbnail. "She had this marking when I found her as a
halfdrowned kitten after a flash flood. This symbol is the nakwatch, the sign of brotherhood among my
people."
I peered at the nakwatch marking, amused that the Indian would take such a thing so seriously.
"Touch it," he said. "You have earned the right." The right to make a damned fool of myself, I thought,
wondering why I didn't have the guts to send him on his way. I thanked my own version of a guardian
spirit that no one else was around the recording shack. I made a tentative poke at the bobcat, fearing she
would retaliate, but she only eyed me steadily with pupil slits that seemed to pulse to my heartbeat. When
I withdrew my finger, she ducked her head and washed the marking as if she took pride in it.