"Thomas A. Easton - Down on the Truck Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

for a truck.”

The vet was up to her shoulders in the truck's birth canal, doing something with the chains. When she was
done, she screamed at her assistant, “Get that thing turned around!” When he had obeyed, she attached
the chains to a tie-ring behind the seat and screamed again: “Move!”

The engine roared, the chains grew taut, and there was a sucking sound as the newborn pup emerged
into the world. The tractor stopped, the chains went slack, and the vet tenderly removed them from the
infant truck. It was three times the size of an adult, unmodified Saint Bernard, but naked, wet, and blind.
The mother extended one paw to rake it in close to her side, where it began to nuzzle while she licked it
clean.

Nickers sighed with relief. “They'll both be all right.” A moment later, he said, “Look. The next one's
coming on its own.” Jimmy watched, and the tender smile on the vet's face brought an answering smile to
his own, even as his fist clenched in sympathy with the laboring mother and his nails drove into his palms.
The vet obviously loved her giant charges, just as he had loved the mongrel bitch the Branes had once
owned. Her name had been Ruffles. It had been the high point of his tenth year when she had had pups.
But then they had had her spayed. She had disappeared when he was twelve.

“You'll love the next barn.”

“What is it?” asked Jimmy.

But Nickers said nothing more, even when they stood outside their next stop. Instead, he simply opened
the door, stood aside, and said, “We clean up every morning, but....”

Jimmy and his Dad both choked when the thick, pervasive odor hit them. Nickers only shrugged and
smiled; he was used to it. It took a moment, but in the way of noses, Jimmy's soon stopped protesting,
and he was able to step through the door.

This barn was not divided into bays. The door Nickers held open let them into a small chamber whose
walls had been welded together from inch-thick steel bars. It reminded Jimmy of nothing so much as a
shark cage, the kind used to protect tourists who want close looks at man-eaters. Similar cages enclosed
the barn's other doors. Between the cages, the barn was one cavernous room.

That room held at least fifty short-legged bulldog puppies. They ran in circles. They rolled. They yipped.
They tumbled in fuzzy balls. They chewed on each other and old tires and logs. They lapped water that
bubbled up in a concrete basin. They sniffed assiduously in the corners of three food troughs that might
each have held a whole Armadon. Some even slept, curled up wherever the hay that littered the floor had
been swept by ceaseless motion into piles.

Jimmy did not truly appreciate the size of the puppies until they reacted to the presence of the three men
in the entry cage. Then, as they all stopped running, rolling, yipping, tumbling, chewing, lapping, sniffing,
and sleeping and thundered toward the steel bars, he realized the truth: Every one of those puppies was
the size of an old-fashioned pickup truck.

Nickers shouted, “Down!” The pups sat quietly just outside the bars. They did not whine or growl or
prance. Their tongues, the size of bedsheets, lolled. Their short tails hammered cheerfully on the concrete
floor. Nickers unlatched a gate on the inner wall of the cage and indicated that Jimmy and his Dad should
go through. “They'll behave,” he said. “Just watch your step.”