"Mitchell Smith - Snowfal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

SNOWFALL
BY
MITCHELL SMITH

┬й 2002 By Mitchell Smith

ISBN: 0-812-57933-X

Version 1.0



Ah, Warm Times, Warm Times!тАФ"Oh, Paradise Lost," as the poet says. Before the Spoiled Orbit of Jupiter.
Today, we copied our Rand McNally again, the highway map of ColoradoтАФwhere, I informed the children, we
reside... up here in the mountains just below what we call "the Wall," the edge of the ice.
I wish to Our Lord we could get a topographical to copy. The men are always going on about it, how useful it
would be. The highway map copy was fine for Warm-times, hundreds of years ago. Not much use to us, alas, except
for finding a few old-steel sites.
I've just finished reading our Aymond Chandler copybook again. We think we understand everything in these
old books. We copy them, and read them with our Webster's, take our first names from them, and learn how to write
and speak from them as if we lived in those times. But I think we misunderstand a great deal.тАФI don't believe this
Aymond Chandler work could only concern breaking laws, and people talking and driving their machine-cars in
the state of Map-California, which our Rand McNally shows to the west, against the Pacific sea.
There must be religious significance which we miss, and now will never know. This is likely true of our
Chandler, even our Hunting on the Continent of Africa book the men love so much.
My face hurt todayтАФold damaged nerve endings, just as Doctor Monroe said. How I miss that wonderful man.
I'm uncertain, faced with illnesses and injuries he used to meet smiling, and I have little faith.
How could Mountain Jesus allow a baby girl to wander into dog-lines, and be so bitten and torn? My father
used to call me "Precious-as-Paper," and "little Lark," after "Like the lark, which at the break of day ascending,
sings hymns at heaven's gate."
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DOCTOR CATANIA OLSEN
CHAPTER 1
Sam Monroe was leading a two-day hunt. He had three Olsens and William Weber with him.
The five men, all senior hunters except William, were the left hand of a two-hand hunt of the last winter herd. Six
other men, Olsen-Monroes and Richardsons, were playing right-hand, swinging wide to the west around the flank of
Alvin Mountain to hunt the stragglers as the caribou trailed by. They had taken the dogs and sleds with them.
Sam Monroe was a big man, like all the men in his family, with heavy shoulders and a thick, muscled belly. His
face was broad, deep-lined, and wind-beaten, burned the color of seasoned wood by more than forty-six years of
sunlight glaring off snow. His hair, mustache, and beard were cropped short and grizzled gray.
Old for a Trapper, he was still strong and enduring, so breathed easily after their long climb up the glacier's col.
Sam had never cared for slit-goggles, which, it seemed to him, made too narrow a world, so he left them in his parka
pocket and squinted into the brightness of late-afternoon sunlight on the snow, surveying the great river of ice.
The Trappers called this glacier "The Old Man." It cut across their hunt country from north to south, paralleling
the route of the great herds. Above the hunters, the glacier narrowed to only a mile or so as it shouldered its way
between the two mountain peaksтАФAlvin, to the west; Mount Geary rising even higher to the east.
The river of ice was frozen in immense curtains, laceworks thousands of feet high, draped and festooned one
upon the other as if a torrential mountain flood had suddenly been halted, stopped still in its race and rapids, and
turned instantly to stone, perfectly white, glittering now in June sunlight.
Its stillness was deceptive. Among those enormous cataracts of ice were blue-black crevasses so deep that a
large stone dropped into them soundlessly vanished, dwindled into darkness ... and was gone, with no echo heard of