Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ starts with the second mountain range. The two are separated by a scorched and naked valley, wide and deep with sides that sheer abruptly into overhanging crags: for here the rock is granite. The harsh, crumbling micaceous schists are left behind, and with them that acid, chemical, volcanic sterility that brings to mind a slag heap, the poisoned wasteland of an industrial town. With the change of rock comes a change in vegetation; it is much richer, far more gracious. It is a country of forest trees except on the higher land where, when even the low holly and the dwarf juniper can no longer hold out against the wind, there is sweet turf like a lawn, covered with flowers. You would gasp to see them in an alpine garden, but here they are in such profusion that you cannot walk without treading on them; and then, wherever the grey and lichened rock shows through, or where the huge boulders stand uncovered, everywhere there are saxifrages crowding, cushions of delicate pink flowers, tight rows encrusting the gentle rock where they can hold a footing.

      Here, in this intervening valley, there were no trees, however: the whole of it had been ravaged by a fire that burnt not only the undergrowth, the trees and every living thing that moved, but even the earth itself, searing it to the bare rock: and so it remains. The prevailing wind, the tramontane, swept over the distant ridge for all the days of the fire, and preserved the farther trees – prevented the fire from crossing the mountain. The forest reaches the top, therefore, and can be seen between the naked peaks, just overlapping into view.

      The ravaged valley must be crossed: hours of break-neck scrambling and sliding down; a long traverse over the bottom; hours and hours of climbing up the other side. There is nothing but charred wood and ruin: a few blackened trees still stand, and where there is some trace of fertility left in the soil, there are blue thistles. Some wandering birds are there, that hurry through, and a few large green lizards; nothing else. But at the crest suddenly the new country shows itself and unfolds in a series of high, cut-off, unsystematic valleys, with the forest spread over all of them and running up and over all the peaks and ridges except the highest. It runs on and on, a dark green that smooths all angularities, on and away until the trees appear no larger than the smallest bushes seen from a distance; and in the end, before they are lost behind the higher mountains, they might be no more than a crop of darker grass, so uniform they are, and so united.

      Once across the ridge you cannot look back and see the sea any more: it is the unknown country, and everything behind and known is cut off. There are trees before you, and on each side trees: and already you are among the first of the trees. This is the wood.

      The man in the wood had crossed over the ridge that afternoon, bleeding from the thistles on his legs, striped with black where he had pushed through the rigid, scorched, dead trees, and choked with the black dust. On the ridge the trees stood wide on the turf – oak trees here – and he passed through them and down the slope, being swallowed by the wood almost before he realized that he was well in it.

      He made his way down, where the oaks were thick and smaller on the steep slope, low, almost bushes, down, across the brown stream, and up again through the tall trees to the first of the downland crests, where the high timber stopped, diminished to a border of strong hollies, and those to low, neat, prickly bushes, as trim as if they had been shorn. There were little silvered junipers on the clean turf, and flowers everywhere – tiny yellow rose-shaped flowers. He had stayed up there for half an hour, standing exposed on a certain rock, and then returning he had plunged into the trees again.

      He sat now on a slope above the stream, a little way inside the wood. Here it was beech wood, all beeches except for a few spindling hollies and one prodigious oak. The upper edge of the wood, with its belt of hollies and mixed lower trees was dark behind him, and in front the wood was grey.

      When first he had passed through the sunlight had dappled the ground, and in the stronger light the carpet of dead brown leaves – no undergrowth, but only leaves – had shown red and umber, and a lively green had filtered through. Now the shadow of the mountainside had swept across the wood: it was light still, but the night had never wholly left the wood and by the stream it gathered there again.

      It was not a deep, a thick, wood, obscure or hard to penetrate: far on each side of him the grey trunks rose solemn to an unseen burst of green, but its grey silence was quadrupled by the dead trees that stood; still stood, though dead. From the hump of moss on which he sat it seemed to him that half the company was dead: it was not so, but dead trees stood on every hand. Some lay, felled by the wind, and many were there, flayed white and blackened by the lightning blast. On the ground, covering it high in some places, the branches lay, some moldering to their last decay, some fresh, but all pale: in the living trees too there were dead branches, diseased limbs of their own or the arms of other trees which, falling, had caught and had not reached the ground, huge gaunt bones hung up in chains.

      It was a wood in as natural a state as it could be, for no one had cut it, planted or touched it: it was too far, too isolated by the rocks and precipices for the charcoal burners even. But to him it looked unnatural, a wan Golgotha of a wood.

      There were ancient trees that had died where they stood, and some had fallen, bringing down others: there were ancient trees that still lived, enormous slow eruptions that had been glorious but that now were three parts dead, massive limbs that towered up beyond the screen of leaves, dead and naked in the sea of green. There were very few young trees, and even those few were grey: everything was grey now, beneath the barrier of the leaves.

      At the bottom of the slope, far down, a cataract in the stream sent up a continuous noise that made the silence stronger. He sat there, wondering if he would ever hear the trees, and he sat comfortably on his moss-buried rock, quite relaxed, leaning his head back against the broad stone, slowly drawing in fresh strength (it had been a cruel journey). His mind wandered at large; but it did not wander far, not so far that it did not return with an instant spasm when there was a sound behind him.

      It was to his left, in the higher wood behind him. With his neck rigid he kept his head still; a movement is seen when stillness is not. And the sound was crossing behind him.

      There are sounds made in spite of an intention to make no sound: they are not like common noises. There are small sounds made by large things, and they are different: a blackbird scuffling in dead leaves may make more noise, but it is not the same.

      Now it was directly behind him: it must be nearly by the hollies, he said, with all his senses sharpened to the last degree, but strained backwards and his useless eyes unseeing. His mouth was half open, and his nostrils flared; he breathed, but very faintly.

      The noise stopped. He grew more rigid, and his right hand, poised above his knee, slowly clenched to. From the first second he had known that something was in presence: now it knew; and this was the crisis now.

      Then from the centre to the right, faster, and more quietly now: it was on his right side and his eyes, forced to the corner (but his head quite rigid still) pierced with all their force. The sound, now stronger, and his head jerked round; and there fleeting among the trees, the glimpse of a tall grey form, far bigger than the dog he feared.

      Breathing normally again, and easy now against his rock, he closed his mouth: the tension died all over his body.

      Cold: it was growing cold, and he gathered in his warmth, sitting closer, buttoned up his coat. With the creeping shadows the naked trunks stood barer still, with a light of their own under the darkening canopy.

      Now he was leaning forwards, waiting actively: it was nearly time. He caught it at once, the low far whistle away on the right hand: he was half up, and across his field of view the tall grey wolf ran back through the trees, headed, fast but unhurried, almost noiseless.

      The whistle again, and he answered; a clear, true whistle. A distant voice, well known, carried across on the silent air. ‘Aa-oo, aa-oo,’ and ‘Aa-oo, aa-oo,’ he answered.

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