"Resnick, Mike - The Light That Blinds, The Claws That Catch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

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He sleeps sitting down with his back propped against a tree, and dreams not of a stream but a wild, raging river. He is on an expedition, and his leg has abcessed and he is burning with fever, and he is a thousand miles from the nearest city. Tapirs come down to drink, and through the haze of his fever he thinks he can see a jaguar approaching him. He yells at the jaguar, sends it skulking back into the thick undergrowth. He will die someday, he knows, but it won't be here in this forsaken wilderness. Finally he takes a step, then another. The pain is excruciating, but he has borne pain before, and slowly, step by step, he begins walking along the wild river.
When he awakens it is almost dark, and he realizes that the exploration of the winding stream will have to wait for another day, that he must hurry back to his Alice before she begins to worry.

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Within a year she dies. It is not a disease or an illness, just the fading away of a fragile spirit in an even more fragile body. Roosevelt is disconsolate. He stops reading, stops walking, stops eating. Before long he, too, is on his deathbed, and he looks back on his life, the books he's written, the birds he's discovered, the taxidermy he's performed. There was a promise of something different in his youth, a hint of the outdoor life, a brief burst of political glory, but it was a road he would have had to walk alone, and he knows now, as he knew that day back when he almost lost her for the first time, that without his Alice it would have been meaningless.
_No,_ thinks Roosevelt, _I made the right choices, I walked the right road. It hasn't been a bad or an unproductive life, some of my books will live, some of my monographs will still be read -- and I was privileged to spent every moment that I could with my Alice. I am content; I would have had it no other way._

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And History weeps.

-The End-