Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 14

Perhaps, thought Jeebee, traveling with Wolf might have made him a better observer and more sensitive to the little signs of body language. But there was something about this business with the map that gave him a definite feeling that Merry had, for a second at least, offered a sort of truce between them. Or if not a truce, at least the signal of willingness to their having a closer association. He spoke to her back.

“This’ll make all the difference, your telling me about this man with the wolves,” he said. “When I get back, I’ll ask Paul about him. Even if I can’t go there now, now that I know where his place is, I can find my way to it later and see if any of his books are there to look at.”

Merry reined her horse back until they were side by side.

“It really means a lot to you to know more about wolves—and Wolf?” she said, looking at him.

“It does,” Jeebee answered. “As I say, he’s a person. And there’re as many possibilities in him as there might be in any human being you might know—only one whose language you couldn’t quite speak or understand. Also wolves are more like us, socially and in individual character, than I ever realized. It could be that understanding them better could help us understand our own species. The matter of instinct, now—”

He broke off with a feeling he was talking too much.

“Dad’ll be glad to tell you about this character, I think,” Merry said, after waiting a moment for him to continue. “As I say, people don’t understand. Dad’s done a lot more studying and knows a lot more about a lot of things than people realize.”

“I’d about come to that conclusion on my own.” Jeebee was half-afraid of saying the wrong thing and frightening her off, but at the same time he desperately wanted to build some kind of bridge more solidly between them, before they had to go their separate ways.

“You really have?” Merry looked at him and her very bright blue eyes were even brighter with searching. “Hardly anybody does. I didn’t expect you would.”

“All my life I’ve been used to having people to talk to who are full of information about things I don’t know,” said Jeebee. “Actually, a lot of them know, but can’t talk. Not their fault, actually. They’d like to communicate but just don’t know how. Your father does. I found that out almost from the start.”

“You did?” Merry was looking at him, warily.

“Yes,” said Jeebee.

“How?” she demanded. When he was slow about answering, she went on. “I mean how did you find out? You say you saw this for yourself. But what showed it to you—before I mentioned it just now, that is?”

Jeebee shrugged.

“Experience,” he said. “A number of things. As I said, I’m used to talking to people who know a lot, and a lot of what they know I don’t. You get to know the signs. Your father shows them.”

“But what signs?”

“I can’t tell you,” said Jeebee. “In Paul’s case, it’s the way he answers questions. What he tells. What he decides not to tell. The way he thinks before he speaks sometimes… a number of things; but, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Your father’s not only very capable and intelligent, but a very well-read man. Self-educated, I’d think. But he has knowledge.”

Merry continued to look at him almost suspiciously.

“No one else that I know of ever picked that up,” she said. “That is, not counting a few people who used to know him years ago. But those are all gone, or dead now. What’s different about you that you’d understand that?”

Jeebee felt a strange weariness.

“It’s part of—” He broke off. “My whole working life, actually—maybe beginning with my parents—I’ve lived with people who live by and with what they know. It marks them. It’s the same sort of marking that makes a teacher look like a teacher after forty years and a doctor look like a doctor and so on and so forth. The signs show, the way they talk and act shows.”

“He didn’t know about this seed farm,” said Merry.

“I only know about it by chance,” said Jeebee. “My work put me in contact with somebody who worked for one of the large seed companies, and he offered to show me what such a place looked like. I was in Denver on a sort of vacation at the time, and this place we’re going to had a few things he particularly wanted to show me, in the way of crops they were experimenting with. So he took me to it. That’s the only reason I know.”

“Why did you go?”

“The seed farm was a commercial enterprise, but the social dynamics models I was working on had to consider any factors that might affect distribution of resources, especially food resources.”

They rode in silence for a little bit. Merry was no longer looking at Jeebee but thoughtfully forward into the next stand of trees beyond the bit of open country they were now covering.

“Do you know where Dad’s heading in the long run?” she said at last, without turning her head.

“I think so,” Jeebee answered.

She looked at him quickly.

“Do you? Where’s he heading now, then?”

“If he can keep going another twenty years,” Jeebee said, “I figure he plans to set up what you might call stations, along the way of this route of his. Places where goods can be safely stockpiled, with already-established, reliable people there. With, say, one person or more to watch over them. Eventually the stations can grow into local outlets for the merchandise he’s been carrying himself about the country; and the deliveries of goods will be direct from where he gets them to the stations, instead of to him so he can carry them along the peddling route. The country is going to grow back and he wants to grow back with it.

“By that time,” he went on, “Paul’ll be in a position of sitting tight somewhere, probably back farther east, getting information from the stations on what they need and arranging to buy it so that it can be sent out to them. Again, he’ll have picked the strongest possible place for his headquarters, some community that’s growing in strength and beginning to form the nucleus of a new city.”

She drew in a deep breath.

“So that’s what you think,” she said.

“That’s what I’m almost certain of,” Jeebee answered quietly. He still did not want to scare her off or make her angry. “Your father’s operation is a microsystem of resource distribution. In its present form it’s pretty much an optimal adaptation to the current state of social organization. In the next twenty years the isolated farmsteads you’ve been visiting are going to become extended communities—”

“All the better for us,” she interrupted.

He held up his hand for a second to check her, and went on.

“Resource demands will change. Your father’s enough of a salesman to know that distribution systems will have to change accordingly. Besides, he has to want something better; not only for you but for himself. Particularly as he ages, and it’ll not be as easy for him to be on the road like this.”

She looked ahead again without responding, and they rode on in silence until the trees closed about them with no more words said.

But the ice had been broken. After a little while she asked him more about his childhood; and he told her, then asked her in turn about hers. It turned out that they both had been isolated children, with people but not of them, because of the movements of their parents or some other situation beyond their control.

They continued to talk more steadily as the day wore on. By the time they stopped, close to sunset, and pegged out the packhorses before starting a fire and settling down for the night, they had come to know a great deal about each other. They were talking like people who had known each other for years.

When the fire had caught strongly on a couple of short ends of wood, Jeebee got down the portable stove from one of the loads the packhorses had been carrying before they unloaded them for the night.

The stove was a smaller duplicate of the one on which they cooked at the wagon. It was metal and consisted of only two compartments; like a miniature chest of drawers with two drawers, one above the other. In the bottom one went the burning coals from the wood of a fire that had been going awhile. Then a lid was lifted to get at the top compartment; and on the sheet of metal that was its bottom, you could heat or cook food as the burning coals below continued to draw draft through the slots cut on either side of the stove, venting them through a higher grilled opening, and heating the metal surface above them.

On this particular evening, they merely reheated the ingredients of a stew, mixed with water from the containers they carried, to make a hot meal. Just before this was ready to eat, Jeebee put in to heat four of the biscuits that had already been cooked back at the wagon and sent along with them. They were Nick’s biscuits and they were good.

They had eaten everything but two of the biscuits when Wolf appeared out of the darkness like a magician out of an apparently empty box. One moment he was not there, the next he was coming around the fire smiling, head down, tail wagging. He had learned to avoid the hot metal of the stove; and he came first to Merry, who was closest, and licked at her face when she squatted down. He accepted her petting, and then after a little bit moved on to Jeebee, where he crouched and rolled over on his back.

Jeebee scratched his belly for him.

Wolf got to his feet again and invited them to play, crouching down over his forepaws with his hindquarters in the air. He dodged away as Jeebee reached for him, and tried to get Jeebee to chase him. Jeebee squatted and sat and Wolf came back to him for a moment, then romped over to Merry and made play invitations to her.

“He’ll wear you out if you try to chase him,” Jeebee said.

“I can believe that,” said Merry. She talked to Wolf in a low, soft voice, mainly nonsense words. Wolf whimpered and licked at her face.

After some minutes of this, going back and forth between the two humans, Wolf’s path brought him right beside the stove. With a suddenness that was almost too fast for the eye to follow, he suddenly turned his head, snatched up the two biscuits from the still-hot top of the stove, where they were keeping warm, and bolted them down—practically choking in his efforts to growl at the same time to warn Jeebee and Merry against any attempt to take the biscuits from him.

Having done this, he wandered over to investigate the packs from the horses, but they were already on the ground in the midst of the four horses, who were picketed in a rough circle around them. The horses drew together at his approach and looked anything but welcoming. With an air of indifference, he turned and wandered back to the fire, flopping down on his side, with his belly toward the heat of it. His eyes watched Merry and Jeebee sleepily.

“Will he stay now?” Merry asked. There was a gentle look on her face that Jeebee had never seen there before.

“Overnight, probably,” said Jeebee.

They settled down again to their talking by the fire.

It was astonishing, thought Jeebee, how much there was to know about her. How much he wanted to know about her. He had not talked at extended lengths like this for a long, long time. He had had long discussions back at the study group, but they had not been like what was going on here and now, a close, warm thing. Not only intellectually, but emotionally, he wanted it to go on forever. Somewhere along in the talk, Jeebee looked over and saw there were only the two of them here now. The fire had died down and darkness now hid the location of the horses.

“Wolf’s gone,” he said, reaching for a torch made of dry twigs bound together. “We’d better check the packs. We don’t want him tearing them apart.”

“Are you sure he’d do that?” Merry asked.

Jeebee nodded. “I think it’s instinctive for him to chew things up. That’s something else those wolf books might be able to tell me.”

He pushed the far end of his torch into the glowing coals of the fire and they blazed up almost immediately. By its light they went back together to examine the packs and horses. The horses were alert and all facing in another direction. But nothing seemed to have been touched.

They were about halfway back to the fire when Jeebee’s torch reached the water-soaked end that made its handle and burned itself out. Merry stumbled in the abrupt darkness and blundered against Jeebee, who reached out to catch her automatically.

He was suddenly holding her, and without thought, without any conscious plan of any kind, he found himself tightening his arms around her; and a moment later finding her lips in the darkness and kissing them.

She shoved against him, in an attempt to break away, but the effort did not last. It died before her full strength tore her loose.

She stood for a long second, merely letting herself be kissed. Then, slowly, Jeebee felt her arms closing around his own back and holding him to her. Then she was kissing back.

For a long moment they held together. Abruptly, with a furious push, she broke loose completely from his arms, turned, and stumbled rapidly over the night-hidden ground toward the fire. He followed slowly.

When he stepped once more into the open firelight of the little clearing where they had settled for the night, she was standing on the other side of the dying fire with her back to him. He stopped, not knowing what to do or what to say.

Neither one of them spoke. The fire crackled and sparks flew up between them, toward the stars.

“Well,” said Merry in a thick voice, “now you know!”

“Know what?” Jeebee said dazedly. What he had done was not like him. But her reaction had been equally unexpected.

“That I’m just as human as you are!” Merry said, still without turning around. “Damn you, stay away from me, or I’ll kill you.”

Jeebee was lost in his own inexperience and bewilderment. He did not understand her and he did not understand himself. He was lost. Only, he realized he had wanted to give in to his own impulsive action of a moment before for a long time now.

“If that’s what you want,” he said numbly.

“That’s what I want!” said Merry, still talking to the dark woods in front of her. “You’re leaving us in a few days!”

“You could come with me,” said Jeebee, in spite of himself and all Nick had said, suddenly reckless.

“I can’t leave the wagon,” she said fiercely. “You know that! Just like you know I don’t have a chance to stay anywhere or meet anyone. You know!”

“It isn’t that,” said Jeebee, not exactly sure himself what he was talking about, but protesting against the emotion in her voice rather than the words she was saying. “I just—”

“You just go your way and I’ll go mine!” Merry turned around and looked at him through the firelight. “I mean that. I mean every word of it!”

Jeebee shook his head, not in denial but simply because he could think of nothing else to do. He sat down cross-legged on his side of the fire, as if to appease her by not seeming to stand over her, in spite of the space and fire between them. She turned aside without a word, went to their supplies, and put a fresh, homemade, and traded-for candle into the lantern she had brought with her, then set it aside and went to her sleeping bag on its air mattress. She sat down, took off her boots but nothing else, and lay down on her side in the sleeping bag, zipping it up tightly.

Jeebee was left sitting on the ground and staring into the fire. He sat staring for a long time, finding no answer to anything there—or anyplace else for that matter.