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

"You ain't scared of anything, are you, Dad?" Jack asked, an edge of concern in his voice. It was almost
like an accusation.

Dad looked at him a long time without saying anything. "You want to hear the story, or do you want to
ask a bunch of questions?" It hung in the air between them. I guess it was always there after that. I saw it
getting bigger and bigger in the next few years. Jack was always too stubborn to change his mind, and the
Old Man was always too bluntly honest to lie to him or even to let him believe a lie. And I was in the
middle тАФ like always. I went over and climbed back up in my father's lap.

The Old Man went on with the story as if nothing had happened. "So there's Dad in this wagon-bed sled
тАФ seventeen years old, all alone except for the horses and those two black and tan hounds of his."

"Why can't we have a dog?" I asked, without bothering to raise my head from his chest. I averaged
about once a week on that question. I already knew the answer.

"Your mother won't go for it." They always called each other "your mother" and "your father." I can't
think of more than two or three times while we were growing up that I heard either one of them use the
other's name. Of course most of the time they were fighting or not speaking anyway.

"Well, Uncle Dolph had loaned Dad an old two-dollar mailorder pistol, .32 short. Dad said it broke
open at the top like a kid's cap gun and wouldn't shoot worth a damn, but it was kinda comfortable to
have it along. Uncle Dolph shot a Swede in the belly with it a couple years later тАФ put him in the hospital
for about six months."

"Wow!" I said. "What'd he shoot him for?"

"They were drinking in a saloon in Spokane and got into a fight over something or other. The Swede
pulled a knife and Uncle Dolph had to shoot him."

"Gee!" This was a pretty good story after all.

"It took Dad all of three days to get up into the timber country around the lake. Old Dolly and Ned
pulled that sled at a pretty steady trot, but it was a long ways. First they went on up out of the wheat
country and then into the foothills. It was pretty lonely out there. He only passed two or three farms along
the way, pretty broken-down and sad-looking. But most of the time there wasn't anything but the two
shallow ruts of the wagon road with the yellow grass sticking up through the snow here and there on each
side and now and then tracks where a wolf or a coyote had chased a rabbit across the road. The sky
was all kind of gray most of the time, with the clouds kind of low and empty-looking. Once in a while
there'd be a few flakes of snow skittering in the wind. Most generally it'd clear off about sundown, just in
time to get icy cold at night.

"Come sundown he'd camp in the wagon, all rolled up in his blankets with a dog on each side. He'd
listen to the wolves howling off in the distance and stare up at the stars and think about how faraway they
were." The Old Man's voice kind of drifted off and his eyes got a kind of faraway look in them.

The wood in the stove popped, and I jumped a little.

"Well, it had gotten real cold early that year, and when he got to the lake, it was frozen over тАФ ice so
thick you coulda driven the team and wagon right out on it, and about an inch of snow on top of the ice.
He scouted around until he found a place that had a lot of deer-sign and he made camp there."