Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (версия книг TXT) 📗
Llewellyn threw back his head and gazed up the main, mast at the tiny figures that spread out along the high yard and wrestled with the reefed canvas. He recognized Vincent easily by his lean athletic form and his dark hair whipping in the wind.
"Bravely done thus far," Llewellyn whispered, "but hurry, lad. Give me a scrap of canvas to steer her by."
As he said it the studding-sail flew out and filled with a crack like a musket shot. For a dreadful moment Llewellyn thought the canvas might be shredded in the gale, but it filled and held and immediately he felt the ship's motion change.
"Sweet Mother Mary! We might make it yet!" he croaked, through a throat scoured and rough with salt. "Hard over!" he called to the helm, and the Golden Bough answered willingly and put her bows across the wind.
Like an arrow from a longbow, she drove straight at the western headland as though to hurl herself ashore, but her hull slid away through the water and the angle of her bows altered. The passage opened full before her, and as she passed into the lee of the land she steadied, darted between the heads, caught the tide, which was at full flow, and sped upon it through the channel into the quiet lagoon where she was protected from the full force of the storm.
Llewellyn gazed at the green forested shores in wonder and relief.
Then he started and pointed ahead. "There's another ship at anchor here already!"
Beside him Schreuder shaded his eyes from the slashing gusts of wind that eddied around the cliffs.
"I know that vessel!" he cried. "I know her well. "Tis Lord Cumbrae's ship. "Tis the Gull of Moray!"
"Eland!" whispered Althuda softly, and Hal recognized the Dutch name for elk, but these creatures were unlike any of the great red deer of the north that he had ever seen. They were enormous, larger even than the cattle that his uncle Thomas had raised on the High Weald estate.
The three Of them, Hal, Althuda and Aboli, lay belly down in a small hollow filled with rank grass. The herd was strung out among the open grove of sweet-thorn trees ahead. Hal counted fifty-two bulls, cows and calves together. The bulls were ponderous and fat so that, as they walked, their dewlaps swung from side to side and the flesh on their bellies and quarters quivered like that of a jellyfish. At each pace there came a strange clicking sound like breaking twigs.
"It is their knees that make that noise," Aboli explained in Hal's ear. "The Nkulu Kulu, the great god of all things, punished them when they boasted of being the greatest of all the antelope. He gave them this affliction so that the hunter would always hear them from afar."
Hal smiled at the quaint belief, but then Aboli told him something else that turned off that smile. "I know these creatures, they were highly prized by the hunters of my tribe, for a bull such as that one at the front of the herd carries a mass of white fat around his heart that two men cannot carry." For months now none of them had tasted fat, for all the game they had managed to kill was devoid of it. They all craved it, and Sukeena had warned Hal that for lack of it they must soon sicken and fall prey to disease.
Hal studied the herd bull as he browsed on one of the sweet-thorn trees, hooking down the higher branches with his massive spiralling. horns. Unlike his cows, who were a soft and velvet brown, striped with white across their shoulders, the bull had turned grey-blue with age and there was a tuft of darker hair on his forehead between the bases of his great horns.
"Leave the bull," Aboli told Hal. "His flesh will be coarse and tough. See that cow behind him? She will be sweet and tender as a virgin, and her fat will turn to honey in your mouth." Against Aboli's advice, which Hal knew was always the best available, he felt the urge of the hunter attract him to the great bull.
"If we are to cross the river safely, then we need as much meat as we can carry. Each of us will fire at his own animal." he decided. "I will take the bull, you and Althuda pick younger animals." He began to snake forward on his belly, and the other two followed him.
In these last days since they had descended the escarpment they had found that the game upon these plains had little fear of man. It seemed that the dreaded upright bipod silhouette he presented had no especial terrors for them, and they allowed the hunters to approach within certain musket shot before moving away.
Thus it must have been in Eden before the Fall, Hal thought, as he closed with the herd bull. The soft breeze favoured him, and the tendrils of blue smoke from their slow-match drifted away from the herd.
He was so close now that he could make out the individual eyelashes that framed the huge liquid dark eyes of the bull, and the red and gold legs of the ticks that clung in-bunches to the soft skin between his forelegs. The bull fed, delicately wiping the young green leaves from the twigs between the thorns with its blue tongue.
On each side of him two of his young cows fed from the same thorn tree. One had a calf at heel while the other was full-bellied and gravid. Hal turned his head slowly and looked at the men who lay beside him. He indicated the cows to them with a slow movement of his eyes, and Aboli nodded and raised his musket.
Once more Hal concentrated all his attention on the great bull, and traced the line of the scapula beneath the skin that covered the shoulder, fixing a spot in all that broad expanse of smooth blue-grey hide at which to aim. He raised the musket and held the butt into the notch of his shoulder-, sensing the men on either side of him do the same.
As the bull took another pace forward he held his fire. It stopped again and raised its head, on the thick dew lapped neck, to full stretch, laying the massive twisted horns across its back, reaching up over two fathoms high to the topmost sprigs of the thorn tree where the sweetest bunches of lacy green leaves grew.
Hal fired, and heard the detonation of the other muskets on either side of him blend with the concussion of his own weapon. A swirling screen of white gunsmoke blotted out his forward view. He let the musket drop, sprang to his feet and raced out to his side to get a clear view around the smoke bank. He saw that one of the cows was down, kicking and struggling as her lifeblood spurted from the wound in her throat, while the other was staggering away, her near front leg swinging loosely from the broken bone. Already Aboli was running after her, his drawn cutlass in his right hand.
