High Hunt

by Eddings, David

  High Hunt

  David Eddings

  Contents:

  Prologue

  The Gathering

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  The High Hunt

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  The Parting

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Epilogue

  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."

  "You know where it is."

  When I came back, I went over and leaned my head against his shoulder and looked at the newspaper with him to let him know I didn't hold any grudges. Jack fidgeted on the couch. Any kind of enforced nonactivity was sheer torture to Jack. He'd take ten spankings in preference to fifteen minutes of sitting in a corner. School was hell for Jack. The hours of sitting still were almost more than he could stand.

  Finally, he couldn't take anymore. "Tell us a story, Dad."

  The Old Man looked at him for a moment over the top of his newspaper. I don't think the Old Man really understood my brother and his desperate need for diversion. Jack lived with his veins, like Mom did. Dad just kind of did what he had to and let it go at that. He was pretty easygoing — I guess he had to be, married to Mom and all like he was. I never really figured out where I fit in. Maybe I didn't, even then.

  "What kind of a story?" he finally asked.

  "Cowboys?" I said hopefully.

  "Naw," Jack vetoed, "that's kid stuff. Tell us about deer hunting or something."

  "Couldn't you maybe put a couple cowboys in it?" I insisted, still not willing to give up.

  Dad laid his newspaper aside and took off his glasses. "So you want me to tell you a story, huh?"

  "With cowboys," I said again. "Be sure you don't forget the cowboys."

  "I don't know that you two been good enough today to rate a story." It was a kind of ritual.

  "We'll be extra good tomorrow, won't we, Dan?" Jack promised quickly. Jack was always good at promising things. He probably meant them, too, at the time anyway.

  "Yeah, Dad," I agreed, "extra, extra, special good."

  "That'll be the day," the Old Man grunted.

  "Come on, Dad," I coaxed. "You can tell stories better'n anybody." I climbed up into his lap. I was taking a chance, since I was still supposed to be sitting on the couch, but I figured it was worth the risk.

  Dad smiled. It was the first time that day. He never smiled much, but I didn't find out why until later. He shifted me in his lap, leaned back in the battered old armchair, and put his feet upon the coffee table. The wind gusted and roared in the chimney and pushed against the windows while the Old Man thought a few minutes. I watched his weather-beaten face closely, noticing for the first time that he was getting gray hair around his ears. I felt a sudden clutch of panic. My Dad was getting old!

  "I ever tell you about the time your granddad had to hunt enough meat to last the family all winter?" he asked us.

  "Are there cowboys in it?"

  "Shut up, Dan, for cripes' sakes!" Jack told me impatiently.

  "I just want to be sure."

  "You want to hear the story or not?" the Old Man threatened.

  "Yeah," Jack said. "Shut up and listen, for cripes' sakes."

  "It was back in the winter of 1893, I think it was," Dad started. "It was several years after the fam
ily came out from Missouri, and they were trying to make a go of it on a wheat ranch down in Adams County."

  "Did Grandpa live on a real ranch?" I asked. "With cowboys and everything?"

  The Old Man ignored the interruption. "Things were pretty skimpy the first few years. They tried to raise a few beef-cows, but it didn't work out too well, so when the winter came that year, they were clean out of meat. Things were so tough that my uncles, Art and Dolph, had to get jobs in town and stay at a boardinghouse. Uncle Beale was married and out on his own by then, and Uncle Tod had gone over to Seattle to work in the lumber mills. That meant that there weren't any men on the place except my dad and my granddad."

  "He was our great-granddad," Jack told me importantly.

  "I know that," I said. "I ain't that dumb." I leaned my head back against Dad's chest so I could hear the rumble of his voice inside my head again.

  "Great-Granddad was in the Civil War," Jack said. "You told us that one time."

  "You want to tell this or you want me to?" the Old Man asked him.

  "Yeah," I said, not lifting my head, "shut up, Jack, for cripes' sakes."

  "Anyhow," the Old Man went on, "Granddad had to stay and tend the place, so he couldn't go out and hunt. Dad was only seventeen, but there wasn't anybody else to go. Well, the nearest big deer herd was over around Coeur d'Alene Lake, up in the timber country in Idaho. There weren't any game laws back then — at least nobody paid any attention to them if there were — so a man could take as much as he needed."

  The wind gusted against the house again, and the wood shifted in the heating stove, sounding very loud. The Old Man got up, lifting me easily in his big hands, and plumped me on the couch beside Jack. Then he went over and put more wood in the stove from the big linoleum-covered woodbox against the wall that Jack and I were supposed to keep full. He slammed the door shut with an iron bang, dusted off his hands, and sat back down.

  "It turned cold and started snowing early that year," he continued. "Granddad had this old .45-70 single-shot he'd carried in the war, but they only had twenty-six cartridge cases for it. He and Dad loaded up all those cases the night before Dad left. They'd pulled the wheels off the wagon and put the runners on as soon as the snow really set in good, so it was all ready to go. After they'd finished loading the cartridges, Granddad gave my dad an old pipe. Way he looked at it, if Dad was old enough to be counted on to do a man's work, he was old enough to have his own pipe. Dad hadn't ever smoked before — except a couple times down in back of the schoolhouse and once out behind the barn when he was a kid.

  "Early the next morning, before daylight, they hitched up the team — Old Dolly and Ned. They pitched the wagon-bed, and they loaded up Dad's bedding and other gear. Then Dad called his dogs and got them in the wagon-bed, shook hands with Granddad, and started out."

  "I'll betcha he was scared," I said.

  "Grown men don't get scared," Jack said scornfully.

  "That's where you're wrong, Jack," the Old Man told him. "Dad was plenty scared. That old road from the house wound around quite a bit before it dropped down on the other side of the hill, and Dad always said he didn't dare look back even once. He said that if he had, he'd have turned right around and gone back home. There's something wrong with a man who doesn't get scared now and then. It's how you handle it that counts."

  I know that bothered Jack. He was always telling everybody that he wasn't scared — even when I knew he was lying about it. I think he believed that growing up just meant being afraid of fewer and fewer things. I was always sure that there was more to it than that. We used to argue about it a lot."

  "You ain't scared of anything, are you, Dad?" Jack asked, an edge of concern in his voice. It was almost like an accusation.

  Dad looked at him a long time without saying anything. "You want to hear the story, or do you want to ask a bunch of questions?" It hung in the air between them. I guess it was always there after that. I saw it getting bigger and bigger in the next few years. Jack was always too stubborn to change his mind, and the Old Man was always too bluntly honest to lie to him or even to let him believe a lie. And I was in the middle — like always. I went over and climbed back up in my father's lap.

  The Old Man went on with the story as if nothing had happened. "So there's Dad in this wagon-bed sled — seventeen years old, all alone except for the horses and those two black and tan hounds of his."

  "Why can't we have a dog?" I asked, without bothering to raise my head from his chest. I averaged about once a week on that question. I already knew the answer.

  "Your mother won't go for it." They always called each other "your mother" and "your father." I can't think of more than two or three times while we were growing up that I heard either one of them use the other's name. Of course most of the time they were fighting or not speaking anyway.

  "Well, Uncle Dolph had loaned Dad an old two-dollar mailorder pistol, .32 short. Dad said it broke open at the top like a kid's cap gun and wouldn't shoot worth a damn, but it was kinda comfortable to have it along. Uncle Dolph shot a Swede in the belly with it a couple years later — put him in the hospital for about six months."

  "Wow!" I said. "What'd he shoot him for?"

  "They were drinking in a saloon in Spokane and got into a fight over something or other. The Swede pulled a knife and Uncle Dolph had to shoot him."

  "Gee!" This was a pretty good story after all.

  "It took Dad all of three days to get up into the timber country around the lake. Old Dolly and Ned pulled that sled at a pretty steady trot, but it was a long ways. First they went on up out of the wheat country and then into the foothills. It was pretty lonely out there. He only passed two or three farms along the way, pretty broken-down and sad-looking. But most of the time there wasn't anything but the two shallow ruts of the wagon road with the yellow grass sticking up through the snow here and there on each side and now and then tracks where a wolf or a coyote had chased a rabbit across the road. The sky was all kind of gray most of the time, with the clouds kind of low and empty-looking. Once in a while there'd be a few flakes of snow skittering in the wind. Most generally it'd clear off about sundown, just in time to get icy cold at night.

  "Come sundown he'd camp in the wagon, all rolled up in his blankets with a dog on each side. He'd listen to the wolves howling off in the distance and stare up at the stars and think about how faraway they were." The Old Man's voice kind of drifted off and his eyes got a kind of faraway look in them.

  The wood in the stove popped, and I jumped a little.

  "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.