"Anthony Wall - The Eden Mission (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wall Anthony)

creatures.

Maybe the rich must become poorer, accept a lowering of their material
standards, so that the poor can become richer. Maybe the technology that
helped get us into this mess cannot get us out, and humankind will have to
return to a simpler way of life. Maybe ...

What do you think? What you think matters--yours is the generation that will
need to be wiser and more responsible than previous generations. In your hands
may rest the fate of the whole planet. Anthony Wall, 1995


The Eden Mission

1. Victims

Suddenly the grasses shivered, but there was no wind. Silence, stillness, then
more movement and the sound of a soft, gargling growl. The tall stems parted
... and a fiery face thrust forward. Orange and white and black-barred, it was
a face to strike terror into man and beast, a face like a warrior's daubed
with war paint. A hungry tigress on the prowl. As fast, as fierce, but bigger
and more beautiful than her tan-coloured cousin the lioness.

The great striped cat, perfectly camouflaged, crouched and stared intently at
the lake. Her pale yellow-green eyes did not blink. Out there, under the
water, lay the body of a deer she had chased, caught and killed. But then she
had been robbed of her prize. She intended to get it back.

An hour earlier, just before dawn, the tigress had stalked a group of sambur
deer filing down from the hills to drink at the cool lake and munch the green
feast of water lilies spread over the surface. For twenty minutes the tigress
crept closer and closer, soundlessly placing one huge paw in front of the
other. Then, when she was forty feet away, she tensed her haunches like
springs and exploded into a bounding charge.

Tail erect, ears forward, she crashed through the reeds, splashed through the
water. Deer darted to right and left in a frenzy of white spray. But one stag,
blindly panicking, turned towards the tigress. A fatal mistake. With a flying
leap she brought the deer down, breaking his neck in a single bite.

The stag weighed 500 pounds, the tigress only 350, yet she would wade to land
with him. She hauled her prey shorewards.

Then it happened. The tigress felt a sudden tug. The sambur slipped from her
jaws ... and was dragged under water. Crocodile snouts nudged her heels.
Wasting no time, she fled to the lake's edge--minus her meal.

Twice in the hour since then, she had paddled back to try to retrieve the
deer, snarling and swatting the water. But on each occasion she had lost her
nerve. Finally, with an echoing roar of fury and frustration, the tigress