"Gene Wolfe - The Ziggurat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

was something nobody had.
He pictured Jan leaning intently over the wheel, her lips compressed to an ugly
slit, easing her Lincoln into the snow, coaxing it up the first hill, stern with triumph as
it cleared the crest. Jan about to be stranded in this soft and silent wilderness in high-
heeled shoes. Perhaps that streak of hers was courage after all, or something so close
that it could be substituted for courage at will. Little pink packets that made you think
whatever you wanted to be true would be true, if only you acted as if it were with
sufficient tenacity.
He was being watched.
"By God, it's that coyote," he said aloud, and knew from the timbre of his own
voice that he lied. These were human eyes. He narrowed his own, peering through the
falling snow, took off his glasses, blotted their lenses absently with his handkerchief,
and looked again.
A higher, steeper hill rose on the other side of his tiny valley, a hill clothed in
pines and crowned with wind-swept ocher rocks. The watcher was up there
somewhere, staring down at him through the pine boughs, silent and observant.
"Come on over!" Emery called. "Want some coffee?"
There was no response.
"You lost? You better get out of this weather!"
The silence of the snow seemed to suffocate each word in turn. Although he had
shouted, he could not be certain he had been heard. He stood and made a sweeping
gesture: Come here.
There was a flash of colorless light from the pines, so swift and slight that he could
not be absolutely certain he had seen it. Someone signaling with a mirror -- except
that the sky was the color of lead above the downward-drifting whiteness of the snow,
the sun invisible.
"Come on over!" he called again, but the watcher was gone.
Country people, he thought, suspicious of strangers. But there were no country
people around here, not within ten miles; a few hunting camps, a few cabins like his
own, with nobody in them now that deer season was over.
He stepped off the little porch. The snow was more than ankle-deep already and
falling faster than it had been just a minute before, the pine-clad hill across the creek
practically invisible.
The woodpile under the overhang of the south eaves (the woodpile that had
appeared so impressive when he had arrived) had shrunk drastically. It was time to
cut and split more. Past time, really. The chain saw tomorrow, the ax, the maul, and
the wedge tomorrow, and perhaps even the Jeep, if he could get it in to snake the logs
out.
Mentally, he put them all away. Jan was coming, would be bringing Brook to stay.
And the twins to stay, too, with Jan herself, if the road got too bad.
The coyote had gone up on the back porch!
After a second or two he realized he was grinning like a fool, and forced himself to
stop and look instead.
There were no tracks. Presumably the coyote had eaten this morning before the
snow started, for the bowl was empty, licked clean. The time would come, and soon,
when he would touch the rough yellow-gray head, when the coyote would lick his
fingers and fall asleep in front of the little fieldstone fireplace in his cabin.
Triumphant, he rattled the rear door, then remembered that he had locked it the
night before. Had locked both doors, in fact, moved by an indefinable dread. Bears,
he thought -- a way of assuring himself that he was not as irrational as Jan.