Читать книгу The Hawkline Monster - Richard Brautigan - Страница 20

· Binoculars ·

Suddenly the stagecoach stopped on top of a ridge that had a meadow curving down from it. There was an Old Testament quantity of vultures circling and landing and rising again in the meadow. They were like flesh angels summoned to worship at a large spread-out temple of many small white formerly-living things.

“Sheep!” the driver yelled. “Thousands of them!”

He was looking down on the meadow through a pair of binoculars. The driver had once been an officer, a second lieutenant in the cavalry during the Indian Wars, so he carried a pair of binoculars with him when he was driving the stagecoach.

He had gotten out of the cavalry because he didn’t like to kill Indians.

“The Morning County Sheepshooters Association has been working out this way,” he said.

Everybody in the stagecoach looked out the windows and then got out as the driver climbed down from his seat. They stretched and tried to unwind the coils of travel while they watched the vultures eating sheep down below in the meadow.

Fortunately, the wind was blowing in an opposite manner so as not to bring them the smell of death. They could watch death while not having to be intimate with it.

“Those sheepshooters really know how to shoot sheep,” the driver said.

“All you need is a gun,” Cameron said.