"Smith, Wilbur - Ballantyne 04 - The Leopard Hunts In Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

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This small wind had travelled a thousand miles and more, up from the
great wastes of the Kalahari Desert which the little yellow Bushmen
call "the Big Dry." Now when it reached the escarpment of the Zambezi
valley, it broke up into eddies and backlashes amongst the hills and
the broken ground of the rim.

The bull elephant stood just below the crest of one of the hills, much
too canny to silhouette himself on the skyline. His bulk was screened
by the new growth of leaves on the msasa trees, and he blended with the
grey rock of the slope behind him.

He reached up twenty feet and sucked the air into his wide, hair-rimmed
nostrils, and then he rolled his trunk down and delicately blew into
his own gaping mouth. The two olfactory organs in the overhang of his
upper lip flared open like pink rosebuds, and he tasted the air.

He tasted the fine peppery dust of the far deserts, the sweet pollens
of a hundred wild plants, the warm bovine stench of the buffalo herd in
the valley below, the cool tang of the water pool. at which they were
drinking and wallowing. these and her scents he identified, and
accurately he judged the proximity of the source of each odour.

However, these were not the scents for which he was searching. What he
sought was the other acrid offensive smell which overlaid all the
others. The smell of native tobacco smoke mingled with the peculiar
musk of the flesh-eater, rancid sweat in unwashed wool, of paraffin and
carbolic soap and cured leather the scent of man; it was there, as
strong and close as it had been in all the long days since the chase
had begun.

Once again the old bull felt the atavistic rage rising in him.
Countless generations of his kind had been pursued by that odour. Since
a calf he had learned to hate and fear it, almost all his life he had
been driven by it.

Only recently there had been a hiatus in the lifelong pursuit and
flight. For eleven years there had been surcease, a time of quiet for
the herds along the Zambezi. The bull could not know nor understand
the reason, that there had been bitter civil war amongst his
tormentors, war that had turned these vast areas along the south bank