"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 3 - People Of The Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

I 'we got to do it! A man doesn't forget a promise made to Power.
Better that his warm flesh stop a keenly tipped dart than that he
return empty-handed, violating the vow he'd made on his soul before
Thunderbird and Bear.

Even as he stalked the child, the anguish in Bright Moon's eyes haunted
him, goading him to try his best. Together they'd carried their last
daughter up the rocky, windblown trail and laid her body on the ridge,
top, where her soul could soar free and rise to Thunderbird. There,
crouched in the wet cold of the spring night, he'd rested his hand on
his wife's shoulder and looked up at the twinkling lights that filled
the night sky. The souls that Thunderbird took up to the Camp of the
Dead made their camp fires just as men did. "I can't bear any more,"
Bright Moon had cried. "What will become of us? What?"

Afterward he had led her down from the windswept ridge, aware of the
angry bite of the coming spring storm. He remembered that feeling of
hollowness he'd had as he'd ducked into the lodge. He'd stared around,
seeing the place where his children had lived--and experienced an
emptiness of the soul. Two of his infant sons had died mysteriously in
the night, their bodies turned blue. One of his daughters had been
bitten while trying to stop a dog fight, and the wound had gone bad;
evil had sneaked in to cause pus and corruption. She'd died in fever.
Another daughter had lasted five seasons before a silver bear caught
her picking berries. The bear's hide still covered Bright Moon and him
on cold nights--little solace for a dead daughter. Last of all had
been Willow Hoop. She'd been the strong one, the one who would become
the slim young woman who would marry well, the one who would find a
strong young man and give them grandchildren to teach and enjoy in
their old age.

Then one spring day Willow Hoop had taken a foolish chance. She'd run
out on the spring-rotten ice of the Bug River while chasing after a
scrambling jackrabbit. Where she'd gone through the ice, the water ran
black and silent.
Only by luck had they retrieved her body from a snag downstream.
Otherwise--and Sage Ghost shuddered to think it she might have lost her
soul down there in the black water, and it might have turned to evil
and haunted the camps of the people on long winter nights.

In those miserable days after his daughter's death, the world had lost
its color. The wind had bitten with colder teeth and the clouds had
dulled in the blustery sky. Laughter and hope had disappeared. Grief
had wilted his spirit. Bright Moon's eyes had eaten at him, raw wounds
from which her tortured soul leaked.

So it doesn't matter if the Earth People catch me. I had to come .. .
had to try to take the child. To have done nothing would have been to
live with the emptiness inside .. . to watch Bright Moon's soul dying
bit by bit from grief.