Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 18

Ascending more gradually now, the ledge wrapped around the cliff wall to the north. At a narrow place where Julie hesitated, Jamal reached back to help her along, and then they had come out into the warmth of sunlight. Jamal let go of her wrist and turned toward the lowering sun, raising one hand to shade his eyes, inside the yellow goggles. On this side of the cliff the horizontally striped stone hills were densely grouped together, with shallow, dry canyons snaking between them. The first phase of the sunset picked the landscape out in bands of turquoise and rose.

“Wow,” said Julie, “We could be on the moon.”

“Except—” Jamal pointed to the horizon. A glint of reflection from a car window as the vehicle turned a loop in a band of blacktop. It was too far away to hear the motor, and when the car turned out of sight Julie couldn’t even pick out the thread of highway any more. The whole desert valley resonated with an airy silence.

Then squeaking, like a hamster in distress, and it grew louder, but there couldn’t be a hamster in mid-air. From below the lip of the ledge where they stood the beating wings of a hawk came into view, flogging the air as it flew to perch on a crag a dozen yards away.

Julie pulled out her phone to take a picture, but felt Jamal’s warm palm, this time on her forearm.

“Don’t,” Jamal said. “Just. . . . Watch it.”

The hawk tightened its talons, and the squeaking abruptly stopped. Julie didn’t know if she wanted to watch, and she wanted to ask what the hawk had caught, but how would Jamal know better than she? It couldn’t be a hamster of course, and it was bigger than a mouse, and furry. A prairie dog. Did they have those here? She watched the hard bright eye of the hawk as the curved beak dipped, cut and penetrated, then raised a quivering strip of bleeding meat. There was something dreadful about it and yet—

“They’re not cruel,” Jamal said, as if he’d read the half-formed notion from her mind. “They’re just not on our program.”