Читать книгу The Naked Storm - C.M. Kornbluth - Страница 3

I

The wolf was gaunt and shabby; he slunk cringing through the snow, quailing at every blast of wind. He was starving. His ribs showed plainly and his belly drew up tight; he looked grotesquely like the caricature of a greyhound on the buses. He had eaten last a week ago, a sheep cut out from a Colorado rancher’s flock and pulled down running. He had gorged on the sheep and awakened from the heavy sleep to find the bones picked by buzzards. The snow had started about then.

He stopped as a familiar, frightening smell permeated the air. It was the complex smell of man and his works. Oil. Gasoline. Cloth. Fire. Whenever that smell had filled the air before it had been followed by loud, inexplicable noises, rushing things moving faster than he could, stones that did not stay in place as stones should but hurtled through the air and thumped him in the ribs or on the nose. As a cub he had learned about that complex smell; it meant trouble and he had stayed away from it.

But he was starving, and part of the complex smell was meat.

With his hackles up and his heart pounding, he inched toward it through the snow. The smell came from a bundle on the ground, and the bundle did not move. His lips drew back as a strain of polecat and another of mink wafted his way. But the bundle did not move, and it smelled also of meat. His caution was consumed by the raging pain in his belly. He leaped on the bundle and tore at it, worrying away strange layers of pelt and cloth. It did not move; it was frozen. He knew what to do with frozen game. He went for the belly with his long, pointed eyeteeth and opened it up. The exposed organs steamed a little in the icy air.

The wolf crouched down and looked about, growling his ownership. There was nobody to dispute it so he began to gnaw at the liver.

He would live through the winter after all.