"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 5 - People Of The Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

People of the Sea takes place at the end of the Tioga glaciation, when
the rapidly changing climate generated unstable and unpredictable
weather patterns. The great animals that prehistoric peoples had
relied upon for food and shelter were swiftly disappearing. The
grasses, the trees, even the very ground beneath their feet, were
changing.

They must have been deeply frightened.. ..
Prologue

Not much had changed in the last century, Mary Crow Dog decided as she
studied the bland conference room in the Bureau of Land Management
district office. Just like all the others she'd been in, it had a
twelve-foot-long table with twenty chairs arranged neatly around the
sides, big windows on the northern wall and a coffeepot that smelled as
if it had been sitting on the burner for three days straight. A large
map representing southern California hung on the wall. White parts
were private land, yellow were BLM-administered public land and green
showed the national forests.

A century ago they would have had a map, too, hand drawn and smudged
with dirt and grease. But the faces of the government officials would
have looked a great deal like the ones she now saw: smugly superior,
thinly masked by a professionally artificial pleasantness. Instead of
the noonday sun, fluorescent light illuminated the meeting, and instead
of a fire ring, the long, wood-grain veneer table separated them.

As Mary opened her file, still more BLM personnel filtered into the
room, coffee cups in hand, note pads or manila folders under arms as
they talked softly among themselves-office small talk, to ease the
coming tension. Each studiously ignored her.

From the way they acted, their eyes darting uneasily, she had the
feeling that the decision had already been made, as it had been in the
old days. This meeting, like so many others, was for form only.

Patience, Mary. Endure. Maybe you're wrong.

She reached down, smoothing the brown twill skirt she'd
chosen to wear. A beaded buckle snugged the tooled-leather belt and
emphasized her slim waist. She struggled to keep that waist, as small
now as it had been when she danced competition in the powwows. Her
straight black hair was tightly braided, with two Shoshoni rose berets
holding it in place.

Throughout her life, she'd been driven, possessed by her passions of
the moment, whether dancing, protesting or, as now, monitoring Native
American cultural resources and religious sites. Though only
twenty-nine, she had already started to experience emotional
exhaustion.