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HIGH HUNT

David Eddings



BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

Copyright © 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

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.

After supper it was too dark to go back outside, and the radio was on the blink, so we started tearing around the house. We got to playing tag in the living room, ducking back and forth around the big old wood-burning heating stove, giggling and yelling, our feet clattering on the worn linoleum. The Old Man was trying to read the paper, squinting through the dime-store glasses that didn't seem to help much and made him look like a total stranger — to me at least.

He'd glance up at us from time to time, scowling in irritation. "Keep it down, you two," he finally said. We looked quickly at him to see if he really meant it. Then we went on back out to the kitchen.

"Hey, Dan, I betcha I can hold my breath longer'n you can," Jack challenged me. So we tried that a while, but we both got dizzy, and pretty soon we were running and yelling again. The Old Man hollered at us a couple times and finally came out to the kitchen and gave us both a few whacks on the fanny to show us that he meant business. Jack wouldn't cry — he was ten. I was only eight, so I did. Then the Old Man made us go into the living room and sit on the couch. I kept sniffling loudly to make him feel sorry for me, but it didn't work.

"Use your handkerchief" was all he said.

I sat and counted the flowers on the stained wallpaper. There were twelve rows on the left side of the brown water-splotch that dribbled down the wall and seventeen on the right side.

Then I decided to try another tactic on the Old Man. "Dad, I have to go."