"Chad Oliver - The Winds of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

were gone. The sign on the road outside of town claimed almost a thousand residents, but most of them
must have been of the invisible variety.
But he watched the curls of blue smoke rising in the air and sensed the warmth behind the glass
windows of the Chuck Wagon, where a tired girl was putting plates of ham and eggs on an old scarred
counter. He saw three oldsters already swapping lies in front of the ramshackle post office, and he was
honest enough to envy them their life.
His car hummed out of town, crossed the bridge, and sped into the morning along the Gunnison
River. The Gunnison was blue and inviting, framed by snow-capped mountains and bordered by dense
green brush and reddish strips of gravel. He opened the window and could hear the icy water chuckling
and gurgling by the road. He knew the Gunnison, though; it was swift and deep and rugged. Wes cut off
from the main road a mile outside of Lake City and drove over a dirt trail until he came to a small winding
creek that tumbled down out of the mountains. He took the car as far as he could, and then parked it in
the brush. He opened the door and climbed out.
There was only one sign that a man had ever been in this spot beforeтАФan empty, dirt-streaked jar
that had held salmon eggs lying by a rock. He had tossed it there himself a week ago.
He smiled, feeling the years fall away like discarded clothing. He felt his heart eager in his chest, and
his mind filled with warm, faraway images: a boy shooting tin cans on the Little Miami River in Ohio,
building rock-and-clay dams on back yard creeks, snagging a sleepy catfish from a green river island тАж
He locked the car, gathered up his gear, and hit the path with a long, springy stride. He grinned at a
jay squawking across the sky, caught just a glimpse of a doe fading into the brush ahead of him. The path
angled upward through a valley of green and gold, choked with grass and flowers, and then climbed
along the white-flecked stream into the mountains.
The trail was rough and little used, but he stuck with it. For the most part, he kept the stream on his
right, but he had to cross it twice when the rocks and brush cut him off. The water was glacially cold and
his tennis shoes squished when he walked. He knew there were trout in the creek, fanning their fins in the
ripples and hovering in the black, shaded pools. There were enough of them so that he could count on
getting seven or eight if he spent the day at it, and probably two of them would be pretty good rainbows.
But today he wanted to do better than that. There was a tiny lake, fed by melting ice, up above timber
line, and there the golden native trout were sleek and hungry, far from the hatcheries and the bewildered
fish that were dumped into the more accessible streams and caught before they knew where they were.
The lake was almost fourteen thousand feet up, so most of the boys with the fancy equipment left it
alone.
Wes climbed steadily, knowing he would be dog-tired before he got back down again, and not
caring. His doctor's mind told him his body was in good shape, and he was reassured. The sun was still
playing tag with grayish streaks of cloud, but he could feel his face burning a little in the thin air.
Around him, he was aware of magnificent scenery without looking at it directly: cool pines and stands
of graceful aspens, their slender white trunks like cream in the sun. A miniature jungle of ferns and hidden
insects, and a soft wind rustling through the trees. Once, the mournful cry of a wolf far above him.
If only a man could come here and live, he thought. If only he could forget his security and the string
of runny noses that were his patients.
 And then the trapping whisper of reason: You'd freeze in the winter, Jo would hate it, where
would your kids go to school if you had any kids тАж ?
It was eleven o'clock when he got above the timber line, and even the stately spruces were behind
him. The path twisted through rocks and dark clumps of brush with startling green leaves. The stream
was only some three feet across here, but fast and cold as it rushed with a sibilant shhhhhhh down from
the lake.
The lake itself, when he finally reached it at twenty minutes past eleven, was nothing much to look at,
unless you happened to be a fisherman. It was a flat pond, almost circular, perhaps one hundred and fifty
feet across. The sun was almost directly overhead, and the water appeared dark green; the few spots
that were rock-shadowed looked black. There was still ice on the peak that rose behind the pool,