Название: SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series
Автор: Buchan John
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788075833495
isbn:
Wattie was calling fiercely on his Maker.
“God, it’s the auld hero,” he muttered, his eyes glued to his telescope.
At last Lamancha got his glasses adjusted, and saw what his companion saw. Far up the corrie, on a patch of herbage—the last before the desert of the rocks began—stood three stags. Two were ordinary beasts, shootable, for they must have weighed sixteen or seventeen stone, but with inconsiderable heads. The third was no heavier, but he had a head like a blasted pine—going back fast, for the beast was old, but still with thirteen clearly marked points and a most noble spread of horn.
“It’s him,” Wattie crooned. “It’s the auld hero. Fine I ken him, for I seen him on Crask last back-end rivin’ at the stacks. There’s no a forest hereaways but they’ve had a try for him, but the deil’s in him, for the grandest shots aye miss. What’s your will, my lord? Dod, if John Macnab gets yon lad, he can cock his bonnet.”
“I don’t know, Wattie. Is it fair to kill the best beast in the forest?”
“Keep your mind easy about that. Yon’s no a Haripol beast. He’s oftener on Crask than on Haripol. He’s a traiveller, and in one season will cover the feck o’ the Hielands. I’ve heard that oreeginally he cam oot o’ Kintail. He’s terrible auld—some says a hundred year—and if ye dinna kill him he’ll perish next winter, belike, in a snaw-wreath, and that’s a puir death to dee.”
“It’s a terrible pull to the Beallach.”
“It will be that, but there’s the nicht afore us. If we don’t take that beast—or one o’ the three—I doubt we’ll no get anither chance.”
“Push on, then, Wattie. It looks like a clear coast.”
“I’m no so sure. There’s that deevil o’ a hind somewhere afore us.”
Down through the gaps of the Pinnacle Ridge blew fine streams of mist. They were the precursors of a new storm, for long before the two men had wormed their way into the corrie the mountain before them was blotted out with a curtain of rain, and the wind, which seemed for a time to have died away, was sounding a thousand notes in the Pan’s-pipes of the crags.
“Good,” said Lamancha. “This will blanket the shot.”
“Ba-ad too,” growled Wattie, “for we’ll be duntin’ against the auld bitch.”
Lamancha believed he had located the stags well enough to go to them in black darkness. You had only to follow the stream to its head, and they were on the left bank a hundred yards or so from the rocks. But when he reached the burn he found that his memory was useless. There was not one stream but dozens, and it was hard to say which was the main channel. It was a loud world again, very different from the first corrie, but, when he would have hastened, Wattie insisted on circumspection. “There’s the hind,” he said, “and maybe since we’re out o’ Macqueen’s sicht there’s nae need to hurry.”
His caution was justified. As they drew themselves up the side of a small cascade the tops of a pair of antlers were seen over the next rise. Lamancha thought they were those of one of the three stags, but Wattie disillusioned him. “We’re no within six hundred yards o’ yon beasts,” he said.
A long circuit was necessary, happily in good cover, and the stream was not rejoined till at a point where its channel bore to the south, so that their wind would not be carried to the beasts below the knoll. After that it seemed advisable to Wattie to keep to the water, which was flowing in a deep-cut bed. It was a job for a merman rather than for breeched human beings, for Wattie would permit of no rising to a horizontal or even to a kneeling position. The burn entered at their collars and flowed steadily through their shirts to an exit at their knees. Never had men been so comprehensively and continuously wet. Lamancha’s right arm ached with pulling the rifle along the bank—he always insisted on carrying his weapon himself—while his body was submerged in the icy outflow of Sgurr Dearg’s springs.
The pressure of Wattie’s foot in his face halted him. Blinking through the spray, he saw his leader’s head raised stiffly to the alert in the direction of a little knoll. Even in the thick weather he could detect a pair of bat-like ears, and he realised that these ears were twitching. It did no need Wattie’s whisper of “the auld bitch” to reveal the enemy.
The two lay in the current for what seemed to Lamancha at least half an hour. He had enough hill-craft to recognise that their one hope was to stick to the channel, for only thus was there a chance of their presence being unrevealed by the wind. But the channel led them very close to the hind. If the brute chose to turn her foolish head they would be within view.
With desperate slowness, an inch at a time, Wattie moved upwards. He signed to Lamancha to wait while he traversed a pool where only his cap and nose showed above the water. Then came a peat wallow, when his face seemed to be ground into the moss, and his limbs to be splayed like a frog’s and to move with frog-like jerks. After that was a little cascade, and, beyond, the shelter of a big boulder which would get him out of the hind’s orbit. Lamancha watched this strange progress with one eye; the other was on the twitching ears. Mercifully all went well, and Wattie’s stern disappeared round a corner of rock.
He laboured to follow with the same precision. The pool was easy enough except for the trailing of the rifle. The peat was straightforward going, though in his desire to follow his leader’s example he dipped his face so deep in the black slime that his nostrils were plugged with it, and some got into his eyes which he dared not try to remove. But the waterfall was a snag. It was no light task to draw himself up against the weight of descending water, and at the top he lay panting for a second, damming up the flow with his body…Then he moved on; but the mischief had been done.
For the sound of the release of the pent-up stream had struck a foreign note on the hind’s ear. It was an unfamiliar noise among the many familiar ones which at the moment filled the corrie. She turned her head sharply, and saw something in the burn which she did not quite understand. Lamancha, aware of her scrutiny, lay choking, with the water running into his nose; but the alarm had been given. The hind turned her head, and trotted off up-wind.
The next he knew was Wattie at his elbow making wild signals to him to rise and follow. Cramped and staggering, he lumbered after him away from the stream into a moraine of great granite blocks. “We’re no twa hundred yards from the stags,” the guide whispered. “The auld bitch will move them, but please God we’ll get a shot.” As Lamancha ran he marvelled at Wattie’s skill, for he himself had not a notion where in the wide world the beasts might be.
They raced to a knoll, and Wattie flung himself flat on the top.
“There,” he cried. “Steady, man. Tak the nearest. A hundred yards. Nae mair.”
Lamancha saw through the drizzle three stags moving at a gentle trot to the south—up-wind, for in the corrie the eddies were coming oddly. They were not really startled, but the hind had stirred them. The big stag was in the centre of the three, and the proper shot was the last—a reasonable broadside.
Wattie’s advice had been due to his loyalty to John Macnab, and not to his own choice, and this Lamancha knew. The desire of the great stag was on him, as it was on the hunter in Homer, and he refused to be content with the second-best. It was not an easy shot in that bad light, and it is probable that he would have missed; but suddenly Wattie gave an unearthly bark, and for a second the three beasts slowed down and turned their heads towards the sound.
In that second Lamancha fired. The great head seemed СКАЧАТЬ