Читать книгу The Crash of Hennington - Patrick Ness - Страница 29

It was still dark, and the sleeping bodies of the herd were scattered across the Arboretum’s wide main field like boulders thrown from a volcano. Maggerty slept in a nervous curl at the base of a tree, somnolently shooing away a murder of dream crows that pecked at his bare dream feet. A clear sky huddled overhead, the stars whispering in urgent tones about some universal matter or other. There was no artificial light on the hill of fields, but the moon was bright enough to cast crisp shadows of the many clutches of snoozing rhino hillocks. All was quiet. It was late enough for the olive bats and Hennington flying foxes to have finished their nocturnal feedings and scoot themselves off to inverted slumber. Even the breeze had settled down to rest.

But she was awake. She wasn’t upset, she probably couldn’t have even been called troubled, but there was definitely a disquiet in her. For hour upon hour now, she had been unable to work it out. She was lying down and had pulled distractedly at the grass within reach of her lips until a bald spot had appeared in a semicircle around her. Even then, she kept at it until she tasted nothing but dirt. Finally, she just sat up, twisting her ears this way and that, listening for the usual sounds of the deepest part of the night, hearing some, not hearing others.

Everything was wrong and nothing was. Her nostrils could smell the hint of dust in the air, yet that in itself wasn’t troubling. The eagles weren’t in their nests, but maybe they had just started mating season a few weeks early. The grass tasted bitter, but maybe something had just gotten into the groundwater. Maybe her anxiety was misplaced. The rest of the herd didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. The birthrate had held steady, and the nine calves that had been born this year were neither more nor less healthy than in previous years. The last animal to die was almost two years ago when an ancient male was unable to pull himself out of a mud bog and the animals had to mill around helplessly while he slowly bleated his way to death by dehydration. There was no disease in the herd, no malnourishment, no hoof or skin malady.

So what was bothering her? The herd might be oblivious but the thin creature that always followed them had sensed something, too. He gave off a horribly forlorn and confused smell in the best of times, but lately it had increased to the point of almost being distracting. He also stuck closer to the herdmembers than he had before, even daring to nap in the middle of the herd while they grazed. It didn’t prove anything, but at least she wasn’t alone.

The sky began to change color, glowing slightly along one horizon. She hadn’t rested all night, but forcing herself, she laid her head down onto the dirt mat to snatch whatever slumber she could before full-fledged daybreak. It was still a long while before she finally slipped off to shallow, fitful sleep.