"Whitley - Strieber - The Wild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

He had camped and hiked and canoed. The wilderness haunted him. Wolves haunted him. Freedom
haunted him.

It was an October Saturday, the third of the month. Cindy held a copy of the Times in her hands, twisting
it until the ink was smeared. Bob ate the last of Kevin's Cracker Jacks.

"Look at that," she said.

"What?"

"That wolf is watching us."

She was right: it was staring past the children, the men and women, the candy-apple stand, the popcorn
vendor, the whole free crowd. From its prison, it was staring not at them, but at him. The wolf was
staring straight into the eyes of Bob Duke.

All of his life Bob had been fascinated by wolves. He enjoyed being near them so much that he had tried
to track them. Often, he dreamed about them. In his childhood he had fantasized that he was a magic
wolf, and could run through the night sky.

He was unsettled by the feeling this poor, imprisoned wolf communicated to him. As he stared back he
tore into the Cracker Jacks box. "Why doesn't it look at somebody else?"

"You're the only poet."

He shot an angry glance at her. He could not help his infirmity. All of his life he had been a poet,
unpublished, ignored, but nevertheless on the perfectly valid path of a poet. He hated his own love of
poetry. Give him instead a good spreadsheet and some numbers to crunch. He was a bitter man.

There was only one way to describe the look in the eyes of the wolf: horrible.

In this regard it was brother to all the creatures here. Bob could feel the unfocused moaning of the place,
the yearning toward a thousand different instinctual freedoms: to run, to hunt, to hide or fly. Love of trees,
of animals, of the whole intricate, savage reality of the wild had always sustained Bob.

As a boy in Texas he had watched the night sky, the racing moon, and dreamed his dreams of the wild.

There was one dream he would never forget. Even though it had happened when he was eleven, it was
still vivid in his memory.

In this dream he had been a wolf. He had been awakened in the thick night by an amazing, intoxicating
odor. His eyes had snapped open and his whole body had been quivering. The moon had shone down
like the eye of some wild god. Waves of fierce pleasure had surged through him, deranging his senses,
overwhelming his childish fear of the dark.

He had leaped out of bed, unlatched the screen window with fumbling, desperate fingers, and rushed off
into the night. He remembered scuttling across the porch roof beneath his window, then leaping into the
moon-silver air. He'd landed as gracefully as an animal on all fours.

Then there were dew-damp leaves slapping his face, and the pulsing, rushing of a beautifully muscled