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

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HIGH HUNT

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David Eddings

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BALLANTINE BOOKS " NEW YORK

Copyright й 1973 by David Eddings

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-87613 ISBN 0-345-32887-6

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Manufactured in the United States of America


First Ballantine Books Edition: March 1986 Third Printing April 1990


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For JUFELEE

The more things change

The more they remain the same.





Prologue

When we were boys, before we lost him and before my brother and I turned away from each other, my father once told us a story about our grandfather and a dog. We were living in Tacoma then, in one of the battered, sagging, rented houses that stretch back in my memory and mark the outlines of a childhood spent unknowingly on the bare upper edge of poverty. Jack and I knew that we weren't rich, but it didn't really bother us all that much. Dad worked in a lumber mill and just couldn't seem to get ahead of the bills. And, of course, Mom being the way she was didn't help much either.

It had been a raw, blustery Saturday, and Jack and I had spent the day outside. Mom was off someplace as usual, and Dad was supposed to be watching us. About all he'd done had been to feed us and tell us to stay the hell out of trouble or he'd bite off our ears. He always said stuff like that, but we were pretty sure he didn't really mean it.

The yard around our house was cluttered with a lot of old junk abandoned by previous tenants  rusty car bodies and discarded appliances and the like  but it was a good place to play. Jack and I were involved in one of the unending, structureless games of his invention that filled the days of our boyhood. My brother  even then thin, dark, quick, and nervous  was a natural ringleader who settled for directing my activities when he couldn't round up a gang of neighborhood kids. I went along with him most of the time  to some extent because he was older, but even more, I suppose, because even then I really didn't much give a damn, and I knew that he did.