"Andre Norton - Darkness and Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

But as the salty sweat stung across his lips and burned in his blistered palms he could see
that the current, though taking them downstream, was slowly nudging them toward the
opposite bank.
Sun rays reflected by the water made them both warm and thirsty, and Lura gave
small whines of self-pity all the rest of the hour. Still, she grew accustomed enough to the
new mode of travel to sit up and watch keen-eyed when a fish rose to snap at a fly. Once
they slipped past a mass of decayed wreckage which must have been the remains of a
boat, and twice swept between abutments of long-vanished bridges. This had been a
thickly settled territory before the Blow-up. Fors tried to imagine what it had looked like
when the towns had been lived in, the roads had been busy with traffic, when there had
been boats on the riverтАФ
Since the current was taking them in the general direction of the route eastward he did
not struggle too quickly to reach the other side. But when a portion of their shaky raft
suddenly broke off and started a separate voyage of its own, he realized that such
carelessness might mean trouble and he worked with the pole to break the grip of the
current and reach the shore. There were bluffs along the river, cutting off easy access to
the level lands behind them and he watched anxiously for a cove or sandbank which
would give them a fair landing.
He had to be satisfied with a very shallow notch where a landslide had brought down
a section of the bank containing two trees which now formed a partial barrier out from
the shore. The raft, after much back-breaking labor on his part, caught against these,
shivered against the pull of the water, and held. Lura did not wait, but was gone in a
single leap to the solid footing of the tree trunks. Fors grabbed up his belongings and
followed, none too soon, as the raft split and whirled around, shaking into pieces which
the river carried on.
A hard scramble up the greasy clay of the bank brought them into open country once
more. Grass grew tall, bushes spread in dusty blotches across the land tamed by centuries
of the plow and the reaper.
Lura let him know that it had been too long since their last meal and she intended to
do something about supplies. She set off across the faint boundaries of the old fields with
grim purpose in every line of her graceful feline body. Grouse scuttled from underfoot
and there were rabbits everywhere, but she disdained to notice such small game. She
pushed on, with Fors half a field behind her, toward a slope which was crowned with a
thick growth of trees.
Halfway up she paused, the tip of her tail quivered, the pink rosette of her tongue
showed briefly between her teeth. Then she was gone again, fading away into the tall
grass as silently and effortlessly as the breeze might pass. Fors stepped back into the
shade of the nearest tree. This was Lura's hunt and he must leave it to her.
He looked out over the waving grass. It seemed to be some form of stunted grain, not
yet quite ripe, for it had a seed head forming. The sky was blue with small white clouds
drifting across it as if the storm winds had never torn them, although at his feet lay a
branch splintered and broken by yesterday's wind.
A hoarse bellowing brought him out of his half dream, bow in hand. It was followed
by the spitting squall which was Lura's war cry. Fors began to run up the slope toward the
sound. But hunter's caution kept him to such shelter as the field afforded so he did not
burst rashly out onto the scene of the combat.
Lura had tackled big game! He caught the sun flash on her tawny fur as she leaped
away from an inert red-brown body just in time to escape the charge of a larger beast. A
wild cow! And Lura had killed her calf!
Fors' arrow was already in the air. The cow bellowed again and tossed her wickedly