"Эрнест Хемингуэй. Big two-hearted river" - читать интересную книгу автора

through his thorax and into the last segments of his abdomen. The
grasshopper took hold of the hook with his front feet, spitting tobacco
juice on it. Nick dropped him into the water.
Holding the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull of
the grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel with his
left hand and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the little waves
of the current. It went out of sight.
There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was
his first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he brought
in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pumping
against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. He lifted the rod
straight up in the air. It bowed with the pull.
He saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body against
the shifting tangent of the line in the stream.
Nick took the line in his left hand and pulled the trout, thumping
tiredly against the current, to the surface. His back was mottled the clear,
water-over-gravel color, his side flashing in the sun. The rod under his
right arm, Nick stooped, dipping his right hand into the current. He held
the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the
barb from his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream.
He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a
stone. Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under
water. The trout was steady in the moving stream, resting on the gravel,
beside a stone. As Nick's fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool,
underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the
stream.
He's all right. Nick thought. He was only tired.
He had wet his hand before he touched the trout, so he would not
disturb the delicate mucus that covered him. If a trout was touched with a
dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot. Years before when he
had fished crowded streams, with fly fishermen ahead of him and behind him.
Nick had again and again come on dead trout, furry with white fungus,
drifted against a rock, or floating belly up in some pool. Nick did not like
to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were of your party, they
spoiled it.
He wallowed down the stream, above his knees in the current, through
the fifty yards of shallow water above the pile of logs that crossed the
stream. He did not rebait his hook and held it in his hand as he waded. He
was certain he could catch small trout in the shallows, but he did not want
them. There would be no big trout in the shallows this time of day.
Now the water deepened up his thighs sharply and coldly. Ahead was the
smooth dammed-back flood of water above the logs. The water was smooth and
dark; on the left, the lower edge of the meadow; on the right the swamp.
Nick leaned back against the current and took a hopper from the bottle.
He threaded the hopper on the hook and spat on him for good luck. Then he
pulled several yards of line from the reel and tossed the hopper out ahead
onto the fast, dark water. It floated down towards the logs, then the weight
of the line pulled the bait under the surface. Nick held the rod in his
right hand, letting the line run out through his fingers.
There was a long tug. Nick struck and the rod came alive and dangerous,