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

"Well, it had gotten real cold early that year, and when he got to the lake, it was frozen over — ice so thick you coulda driven the team and wagon right out on it, and about an inch of snow on top of the ice. He scouted around until he found a place that had a lot of deer-sign and he made camp there."

"What's deer-sign, Dad?" I asked.

"Tracks, mostly. Droppings. Places where they've chewed off twigs and bark. Anyhow, he pulled up into this grove, you see — big, first-growth timber. Some of those trees were probably two hundred feet tall and fifteen feet at the butt, and there wasn't any of the underbrush you see in the woods around here. The only snow that got in under them was what had got blown in from out in the clearings and such, so the ground was pretty dry."

From where I sat with my head leaned against the Old Man's chest, I could see into the dark kitchen. I could just begin to build a dark pine grove lying beyond the doorway with my eyes. I dusted the linoleum-turned-pine-needle floor with a powder-sugar of snow made of the dim edge of a streetlight on the corner that shone in through the kitchen window. It looked about right, I decided, about the way Dad described it.

"He got the wagon set where he wanted it, unhitched the horses, and started to make camp."

"Did he build a fire?" I asked.

"One of the first things he did," the Old Man said.

That was easy. The glow of the pilot light on the stove reflected a small, flickering point on the refrigerator door. It was coming along just fine.

"Well, he boiled up some coffee in an old cast-iron pan, fried up some bacon, and set some of the biscuits Grandma'd packed for him on a rock near the fire to warm. He said that about that time he'd have given the pipe and being grown-up and all of it just to be back home, sitting down to supper in the big, warm, old kitchen, with the friendly light of the coal-oil lamps and Grandma's cooking, and the night coming down around the barn, and the shadows filling up the lines of footprints in the snow leading from the house to the outbuildings." Dad's voice got faraway again.

"But he ate his supper and called the dogs up close and checked his pistol when he heard the wolves start to howl off in the distance. There probably wasn't anybody within fifty miles. Nothing but trees and hills and snow all around.

"Well, after he'd finished up with all the things you have to do to get a camp in shape, he sat down on a log by the fire and tried not to think about how lonesome he was."

"He had those old dogs with him, didn't he, Dad?" I asked, "and the horses and all? That's not the same as being all alone, is it?" I had a thing about loneliness when I was a kid.

Dad thought it over for a minute. I could see Jack grinding his teeth in irritation out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't really look over at him. I had the deep-woods camp I'd built out in the kitchen just right, and I didn't want to lose it. "I don't know, Dan," the Old Man said finally, "maybe the dogs and the horses just weren't enough. It can get awful lonesome out there in the timber by yourself like that — awful lonesome."

I imagine some of the questions I used to ask when I was a kid must have driven him right up the wall, but he'd always try to answer them. Mom was usually too busy talking about herself or about the people who were picking on her, and Jack was too busy trying to act like a grown-up or getting people to pay attention to him to have much time for my questions. But Dad always took them seriously. I guess he 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 kind of huddled up to see what's gonna happen."

I could see Jack leaning forward now, his eyes bright with excitement and his lips drawn back from his teeth a little. Of course, I couldn't look straight at him. I had to keep everything in place out on the other side of the doorway.