The Atlas полностью

In a field of gray ponds and grass-haired water, he saw three little black ducks.

Past a lake which they crossed by trestle bridge there were an Anglican church, a red building, a log house and upended aluminum canoes. Indians stood in the high buttercupped grass, watching the train. The boys and girls pretended to hit each other, laughing. The older ones just stood there. They loaded some boxes and coolers onto the train, and a few of the teenagers got on. That was in Allan Water, Ontario. Then the train went west.

Half an hour later they reached Savant Lake. There were more Indians, in flannel shirts, old sneakers, windbreakers, tall rubber boots, baseball hats in that town of long ago whitewashed houses among the flowery grass, tall white crosses, some trailers, a propane truck, then more birch trees.

He had begun to believe that this might be one of those perfect days which are sometimes given to you so gently and lovingly that they are half over before you comprehend their perfection. Amidst blackened backbones of dead firs sprung crazily with lichens he remembered the steep streets of Taxco, Mexico, narrower than your outstretched hands, whose stones had been worn dangerously smooth; sometimes there was grass, sometimes a smell of urine, always cool darkness from behind the window-grilles of the overhanging houses; he'd walked there with a woman he'd loved, held back from her heart by arch-windowed, bar-windowed white houses — a world of white houses with cryptic windows to make them into dominoes under the awnings where the juice-bottles stood; and now he didn't know where that woman was anymore.

And the Bible said: Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes; for a harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread, but an adulteress stalks a man's very life. Can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Or can one walk upon hot coals and his feet not be scorched? So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife; none who touches her will go unpunished. They transected a lovely gray water-plain with brown highlights. The sun shone on spiderstrands as fine and blonde and precious as the hairs he found on his pillow after kissing the first girl he ever loved. And the Qur'-An said: It was said to her: Enter the pavilion. But when she saw it, she supposed it was a spreading water, and she bared her legs. He said: It is a pavilion smoothed of crystal. She said: My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I surrender with Solomon to God, the Lord of all Being. A pale blue lake was sublated.

An old Polish lady got on at Sioux Lookout. She'd lived there for forty years. She had three children, eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She said she picked lupines as high as her shoulder — red, blue, yellow, purple, so beautiful! She ate beaver meat all the time: not just the tail, but the whole beaver, boiled an hour, then roasted. She loved to eat black bear meat, too, but beaver was the best, served on a plate of wild rice. She said she'd had a good life and was still having one. — When you get old, you know what you have to look forward to, she said. So why not go on enjoying yourself as long as you can?

She thought he was crazy to be going into the wilderness alone.

Now it was blue and white in Heaven instead of gray, so the land was the color of blueberry bushes in summer and the lakes were the color of blueberries.

Can I try beaver meat in Winnipeg? he said.

I don't know. I have no one there, so I never go there. Find an Indian.

She saw some teenagers drinking from a water bottle. — They brought their own water, she said. That is very good.

Fringy frothy green growth, moist, cloudy and sprucified, guarded an island like a swimming stegosaurus. They passed a still lake's black-streaked white cliff; and a memory of happiness flashed in him like some crescent-shaped brown pond, rock-shelved and hid in birchy wilderness. Everything was good; goodness was water trickling down sunburned rock.