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

figured that if they were important enough for me to ask, they were important enough for him to answer.
He was like that, my Old Man.

The wood popped in the stove again, but I didn't jump in time. I just slipped the sound on around to the
campfire in the kitchen.

"Well, he sat up by his fire all night, so he wouldn't sleep too late the next morning. He watched the
moon shine down on the ice out on the lake and the shadows from his fire flickering on the big tree trunks
around his camp. He was pretty tired, and he'd catch himself dozing off every now and then, but he'd just
fill up that stubby old pipe and light it with a coal from the fire and think about how it would be when he
got home with a wagon-load of deer meat. Maybe men his older brothers would stop treating him like a
wet-behind-the-ears kid. Maybe they'd listen to what he had to say now and then. And he'd catch
himself drifting off into the dream and slipping down into sleep, and he'd get up and walk around the
camp, stamping his feet on the frosty ground. And he'd have another cup of coffee and sit back down
between his dogs and dream some more. After a long, long time, it started to get just a little bit light way
off along one edge of the sky."

The faint, pale edge of daylight was tricky, but I finally managed it.

"Now these two hounds Dad had with him were trained to hunt a certain way. They were Pete and Old
Buell. Pete was a young dog with not too much sense, but he'd hunt all day and half the night, too, if you
wanted him to. Buell was an old dog, and he was as smart as they come, but he was getting to the point
where he'd a whole lot rather lay by the fire and have somebody bring him his supper than go out and
work for it. The idea behind deer hunting in those days was to have your dogs circle around behind the
deer and then start chasing them toward you. Then when the deer ran by, you were supposed to just sort
of bushwhack the ones you wanted. It's not really very sporting, but in those days you hunted for the
meat, not for the fun.

"Well, as soon as it started to get light, Dad sent them out. Pete took right off, but Old Buell hung back.
Dad finally had to kick him in the tail to make him get away from the fire."

"That's mean," I objected. I had the shadowy shapes of my two dogs near my reflected-pilot-light fire,
and I sure didn't want anybody mistreating my old dogs, not even my own grandfather.

"Dog had to do his share, too, in those days, Dan. People didn't keep dogs for pets back then. They
kept them to work. Anyway, pretty soon Dad could hear the dogs baying, way back in the timber, and
he took the old rifle and the twenty-six bullets and went down to the edge of the lake."

"He took his pistol, too, I'll bet," I said. Out in my camp in the forests of the kitchen, I took my pistol.
 "I expect he did, Dan, I expect he did. Anyway, after a little bit, he caught a flicker of movement back
up at camp, out of the corner of his eye. He looked back up the hill, and there was Old Buell slinking
back to the fire with his tail between his legs. Dad looked real hard at him, but he didn't dare move or
make any noise for fear of scaring off the deer. Old Buell just looked right straight back at him and kept
on slinking toward the fire, one step at a time. He knew Dad couldn't do a thing about it. A dog can do
that sometimes, if he's smart enough.

"Well, it seems that Old Pete was able to get the job done by himself, because pretty soon the deer
started to come out on the ice. Well, Dad just held off, waiting for more of them, you see, and pretty
soon there's near onto a hundred of them out there, all bunched up. You see, a deer can't run very good
on ice, and he sure don't like being out in the open, so when they found themselves out there, they just