"Mary Stewart - Ludo and the Star Horse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

snowshoes and take to the snow. Ludo could never decide which he loved more; lying out in the sunshine
at the Alm, watching the goats and cattle peacefully grazing hour by hour; or racing downhill over the
crisp and sparkling snow, as swiftly as the King flew past in his golden sleigh with the four gray horses.

But winter could be cruel, too. You could go to bed one evening after a day in the sun and snow,
and perhaps if you woke in the night you might hear a small sound like a dog whining at the window's
edge. But it wasn't the dog; he was curled beside you in the blankets. It was the north wind; the wicked
winter wind that brought the blizzard snow, thick whirling flakes that blotted the world out and drifted
deep in the valleys and, worst of all, brought great torrents of snow rushing down the mountainsides.
These were the avalanches, which swept away everything in their path and buried itтАФhouses, cattle,
people, everythingтАФso deeply that they were never seen again until months later when the snow melted
in the spring and the bodies were dragged out to be buried.

It was on one such night that Ludo's story starts.

All the week it had snowed, so that the outlines of village and valley were blurred and soft with
snow. Inside the Spiegls' house it was warm and rather stuffy, because nobody with any sense would
have opened a window, and indeed Ludo and his father spent most of their day near the big stove in the
corner, busy with their winter tasks.

First of all let me tell you what the cottage was like, because, Amelie, it wasn't the kind of house you
have ever seen, and probably never will now, though here and there in Bavaria to this day there are
tumbledown old wooden huts that look like cattle sheds, but which were once houses where people like
Ludo lived.

The Spiegls' cottage was all made of wood, and was two storeys high. In the bottom storey the
animals lived during the winter; they had stalls at one end of the roomтАФwe had better call it a
barnтАФwhile the other end was used as a storeroom for the animals' fodder, and also for some of the
family's food, like potatoes, and tubs of pickled cabbage which they called sauerkraut, and strings of
hard dry sausages, and flour. Then there were Herr Spiegl's tools, and his jars of glue and varnish, and a
stack of seasoned wood ready for making into furniture. In one corner stood a box filled to the brim with
what looked like the dried roots of trees, and knotty bits of wood broken from dead branches. Which is,
in fact, exactly what they were. Besides being good at making tables and chairs, Herr Spiegl enjoyed
wood carving, and almost every evening in winter, when the other work was done and Frau Spiegl sat
down by the stove with her sewing, Ludo and his father would sit there, too, whittling away at carvings of
gnomes or goats or chamois, which they might be able to sell during the summer to make a little extra
money.

It is true that Ludo's carvings did not sell very wellтАФunless his father improved them a
bitтАФbecause, as his father said to him, "You will never make a carver until you can talk to the people
you carve, and they talk back to you."

Ludo didn't quite understand what his father meant, because, though Herr Spiegl certainly talked
away (to himself, said Ludo's mother, blinking through her spectacles in the light from the stove), Ludo
had never heard the little carved gnomes and elves saying a single word. But it must be admitted that,
when Herr Spiegl had finished them and hung them on the cottage wall till spring, they looked very lifelike
indeed, as if they had affairs of their own and would, as soon as the family was sound asleep for the night,
jump down from the wall and go about their own business. And though Ludo's carvings each had two
eyes, a nose, and a mouth, all in exactly the right places, they looked just like pieces of pine root with no
affairs at all.