"David Eddings - High Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

"He just wasn't any good anymore," Dad said, "and when a dog wasn't any good in those days, they
didn't want him around. Same way with people. If they're no good, why keep them around?" He looked
straight at Jack when he said it.

"Well, I sure wouldn't shoot my own dog," I objected.

Dad shrugged. "It was different then. Maybe if things were still the way they were back then, the world
would be a lot easier to live in."

That night when we were in bed in the cold bedroom upstairs, listening to Mom and the Old Man yelling
at each other down in the living room, I said it again to Jack. "I sure wouldn't shoot my own dog."

"Aw, you're just a kid," he said. "That was just a story. Grandpa didn't really shoot any dog. Dad just
said that."

"Dad doesn't tell lies," I said. "If you say that again, I'm gonna hit you."

Jack snorted with contempt.

"Or maybe I'll shoot you," I said extravagantly. "Maybe some day I'll just decide that you're no good,
and I'll take my gun and shoot you. Bang! Just like that, and you'll be dead, and I'll betcha you wouldn't
like that at all."

Jack snorted again and rolled over to go to sleep, or to wrestle with the problem of being grown-up and
still being afraid, which was to worry at him for the rest of his life. But I lay awake for a long time staring
into the darkness. And when I drifted into sleep, the forest in the kitchen echoed with the hollow roar of
that old rifle, and my shadowy old dog with the sad, friendly eyes tumbled over and over in the snow.

In the years since that night I've had that same dream again and again тАФ not every night, sometimes only
once or twice a year тАФ but it's the only thing I can think of that hasn't changed since I was a boy.




The Gathering
 1

I guess that if it hadn't been for that poker game, I'd have never really gotten to know my brother. That
puts the whole thing into the realm of pure chance right at the outset.

I'd been drafted into the Army after college. I sort of resented the whole thing but not enough to run off
to Canada or to go to jail. Some of my buddies got kind of excited and made a lot of noise about
"principle" and what-not, but I was the one staring down the mouth of that double-barrelled shotgun
called either/or. When I asked them what the hell the difference was between the Establishment types
who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to Nam and the Antiestablishment types who stood on the
sidelines telling me to go to a federal penitentiary, they got decidedly huffy about the whole thing.

Sue, my girlfriend, who felt she had to call and check in with her mother if we were going to be five
minutes late getting home from a movie, told me on the eve, as they used to say, of my departure that