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

"What's deer-sign, Dad?" I asked.

"Tracks, mostly. Droppings. Places where they've chewed off twigs and bark. Anyhow, he pulled up
into this grove, you see тАФ big, first-growth timber. Some of those trees were probably two hundred feet
tall and fifteen feet at the butt, and there wasn't any of the underbrush you see in the woods around here.
The only snow that got in under them was what had got blown in from out in the clearings and such, so
the ground was pretty dry."

From where I sat with my head leaned against the Old Man's chest, I could see into the dark kitchen. I
could just begin to build a dark pine grove lying beyond the doorway with my eyes. I dusted the
linoleum-turned-pine-needle floor with a powder-sugar of snow made of the dim edge of a streetlight on
the corner that shone in through the kitchen window. It looked about right, I decided, about the way Dad
described it.

"He got the wagon set where he wanted it, unhitched the horses, and started to make camp."

"Did he build a fire?" I asked.

"One of the first things he did," the Old Man said.

That was easy. The glow of the pilot light on the stove reflected a small, flickering point on the
refrigerator door. It was coming along just fine.

"Well, he boiled up some coffee in an old cast-iron pan, fried up some bacon, and set some of the
biscuits Grandma'd packed for him on a rock near the fire to warm. He said that about that time he'd
have given the pipe and being grown-up and all of it just to be back home, sitting down to supper in the
big, warm, old kitchen, with the friendly light of the coal-oil lamps and Grandma's cooking, and the night
coming down around the barn, and the shadows filling up the lines of footprints in the snow leading from
the house to the outbuildings." Dad's voice got faraway again.

"But he ate his supper and called the dogs up close and checked his pistol when he heard the wolves
start to howl off in the distance. There probably wasn't anybody within fifty miles. Nothing but trees and
hills and snow all around.

"Well, after he'd finished up with all the things you have to do to get a camp in shape, he sat down on a
log by the fire and tried not to think about how lonesome he was."

"He had those old dogs with him, didn't he, Dad?" I asked, "and the horses and all? That's not the same
as being all alone, is it?" I had a thing about loneliness when I was a kid.
 Dad thought it over for a minute. I could see Jack grinding his teeth in irritation out of the corner of my
eye, but I didn't really look over at him. I had the deep-woods camp I'd built out in the kitchen just right,
and I didn't want to lose it. "I don't know, Dan," the Old Man said finally, "maybe the dogs and the
horses just weren't enough. It can get awful lonesome out there in the timber by yourself like that тАФ
awful lonesome."

I imagine some of the questions I used to ask when I was a kid must have driven him right up the wall,
but he'd always try to answer them. Mom was usually too busy talking about herself or about the people
who were picking on her, and Jack was too busy trying to act like a grown-up or getting people to pay
attention to him to have much time for my questions. But Dad always took them seriously. I guess he