Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 16

It was both strange and hard for Jeebee to admit to himself that he had come to feel so close, not merely to Merry, but to Paul and Nick. Close enough so that he was torn at the thought of parting with them. It was even harder and stranger yet to accept the fact that they might have become fond of him in reciprocal measure.

But evidently that was the way it was. His whole life had taught Jeebee to trust his perceptions. Faced with a problem—physical, mental, or emotional—his instinctive reaction was to take it apart and find out why it was the way it was, as he might have done with an unfamiliar mechanism that was not working, like the nonworking alarm clocks of his childhood.

This need to dismantle and understand was instinctive in him. As a result, he faced the fact that the present times were simply those in which friendships could come more strongly and more suddenly than they had in the earlier, more technological years.

At the same time it was part of what they all had to do for survival’s sake. He and Merry could not stay together. Paul could not give him in trade anything he had not earned or paid for, no matter how much the other had come to like him. There was a point now at which charity became unnecessary sacrifice, and unnecessary sacrifice became self-destruction.

Still, as they rode now through the hours before stopping, he and Paul discussed what Jeebee would take by way of payment for his gold and the seed he had brought back. Jeebee had not realized that he would have to make choices. He could have a horse to ride and a packhorse. Beyond that Paul strongly suggested that he take traps to support an appearance as a trapper, if nothing else. That would at least identify him as someone other than a raider.

“No,” Jeebee had said, “there’d be too much risk for Wolf if I started setting traps around.”

He had seen the twin jaws of the metal traps, with their offset teeth and stiff springs, and the part of him that was likely to feel for anyone and anything had imagined itself as an animal with a leg caught by those jaws.

“Suit yourself,” Paul told him, “but I’ll tell you one thing. I haven’t got any cold-weather clothing to trade you. I don’t visit my customers during the winter season, and the room I have for goods is limited, so I just don’t carry that sort of thing. That means you’re going to have to make your own warm clothing. I can give you heavy needles and thread, and instructions on how to tan and use hides. You think you can take it from there?”

Jeebee nodded.

“The thing is,” said Paul, “it’s you, yourself, who’s going to have to produce them when it comes time for them, when the snow and ice season comes. One of the best ways to fit yourself with winter clothes is to use animal pelts, fur and all, and there’s only two ways to get them. One is shooting, the other’s trapping. Trapping’s more practical for you.”

“I’ll still take my chances shooting,” said Jeebee. “What else can you give me?”

It turned out that what Paul was able to give him, not only for the seeds he had gathered with Merry but for the valuable knowledge of the location of the seed farm, were the two horses complete with saddle and packsaddle, bridles, halter ropes, and saddle blankets. Also ammunition, for Jeebee’s two rifles, cooking utensils, some light clothing, salt, and bacon. Also, Paul had thrown in a variety of lesser camp supplies.

“Now,” Paul wound up, “some of these seeds can be yours. If they’re really designed for northern crops, you’ll want to plant a seed source for yourself. If so, and you can meet me along about here, this time each year, with some sacks of clean, good seed, we can make a regular business out of trading for it. Or if it turns out I can get rid of either the seeds or gold for more than I think, I’ll make up the difference to you next time we trade. Fair enough?” “Fair enough,” Jeebee said.

They pulled into camping position by the side of the road while there was still a good two hours of daylight left. Jeebee unharnessed the team and put the horses from it back with the rest of the string that Merry was settling for the night. Then, with both Merry and Nick in attendance as well as Paul, both his saddle and packhorse were picked out.

Jeebee had known nothing about horseflesh three months before. He knew only a little bit more now; but he had picked up enough to appreciate that he was getting two good animals. His riding horse was a large bay, and his packhorse was a small but sturdy-legged black-and-white-splashed mare, calm and agreeable. She had been one of the packhorses on their seed trip.

Jeebee knew of, if not all about her. Her name was Sally. The bay, Brute, was one of the wagon’s horses he had never ridden. He saddled Brute now with the saddle that Paul produced, to try both of them out. It was a good saddle, he thought. But Brute clearly had a mind of his own and a somewhat uncertain temper. However, he, too, was good in all the essential ways. Jeebee rode him around for some five minutes, ending up putting him into a full gallop back along the roadside for a hundred yards or so before turning around and coming back to the wagon. Brute was both fast and strong, and his wind was good.

“I like him,” said Jeebee. “In fact, I like them both.”

“They’re good horses!” said Merry.

“I figured so,” Jeebee said hastily. “I just thought you’d like to know that I liked them.”

“Always good to hear that,” Paul answered.

They unsaddled Brute, gathered all of Jeebee’s goods and possessions together in one spot near the front of the wagon, and Nick got started on planning dinner.

Meanwhile Paul dug back in among his trade goods and came up unexpectedly with a bottle of sour-mash bourbon and four glasses.

“Where did you get this?” Jeebee asked. He knew that Paul did not like to be questioned about where his goods came from. He had picked up that much almost by osmosis, in the time he had been with the wagon. But the words were out before he could stop them.

He added, a little lamely, “Liquor seemed to be the first thing everybody was tearing places apart for when things started to go to pieces.”

Paul climbed down from the wagon with the bottle and began to mix drinks in the glasses, roughly half whiskey and half water, from the evaporation-cooled water bag hanging to one side of the front seat.

“I’ve got homemade stuff back there, if you’d like it better,” he said. “I just figured since this was a special occasion, it needed something special in the way of a drink.”

Jeebee had not known that Paul drank alcohol. But it turned out that he did, with moderation. Jeebee and Nick took a couple of glasses. Merry took a small one.

Jeebee had never thought of alcohol in the past unless he suddenly found himself in a situation where he was expected to drink it, and had never really enjoyed the taste of it. But for some reason, now it tasted good to him. Somehow, standing out by the side of the road in the late-afternoon sun, with the ruined freeway stretching in both directions and at the end of a day in the open, the combination of whiskey and the evaporation-cooled water from the bag combined in a sensation that was pleasant and memorable in his mouth.

Nick came out of the wagon, evidently having decided to do his cooking inside. He was carrying the usual four metal folding chairs, and he set them up on the shoulder of the road. The four of them sat there, enjoying their drinks and watching the afternoon wane, like four people in a backyard before civilization had vanished as the Roman Empire and others like it had done.

Every so often Nick would get up and leave them, to go back inside the wagon to his cooking. But he was never gone long.

It was a curious, almost golden time. Jeebee found himself thinking that if Wolf had been there and lying silent close by, then everything that was worthwhile in his present existence would be caught in this one temporary but timeless moment. He smiled a little ruefully at his own perfect fantasy of a scene. If Wolf had indeed been there, he would not have been lying quietly—not with all the new and uninvestigated things around. He would have been shredding the folding chairs, leaving irreparable tooth scars on Jeebee’s new possessions, and generally disrupting the serenity of the evening. Sometimes the best thing about companioning with Wolf was his absence.

But Wolf had left again during the night just past, and not come back yet. Eventually, the sun set, and they started their evening fire close to the wagon, but safely enough away so that there was no danger of setting anything on fire. Nick brought out the dinner.

It was a remarkable surprise. Nick had made a soup, followed by a small roasted chicken and skinned roast potatoes.

“Where did the chicken come from?” Jeebee asked when they were all at the table beginning to eat it.

“Came from a can,” said Nick, smiling. The smile was a sly one. “Not many of them got sealed up whole like that, in cans. I mean, sealed up, cooked whole, and after you get them out, you can recook them. They were restaurant goods, mostly. I’ve had this one tucked away for a while, now. I had some wine, too, but it went sour. You can’t keep wine in a wagon that jolts around like this.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jeebee. They were all drinking plain water now, one after another having ceased to add the whiskey to their glasses. “It couldn’t be better than this.”

“He’s right, Nick,” Merry said to the older man.

Nick’s V-shaped face creased in an even deeper smile.

“Special occasion,” he said again. “There’s dessert, too.”

The dessert turned out to be a sort of rich pudding, very black and crumbly, with a thick, buttery-tasting white sauce or icing on it—it was impossible to say which class the topping fell into. At any rate it was very sweet and filling. To Jeebee, who weeks before had lived with hunger, it seemed to be the best dessert he had ever tasted.

After dinner Nick cleared the dinner trays without handing them to Jeebee to wash.

They sat at the table by the fire, drinking coffee, with Paul, in addition, puffing on his pipe. On the open air the smell of the tobacco was fragrant in Jeebee’s nostrils. It was only after a while longer than Jeebee would have thought it necessary for Nick to wash and store the dinner dishes that the smaller man appeared back out at the fire, carrying something wrapped in cloth and looking a little like a board close to two feet long and four or five inches wide.

He sat down and laid it on Jeebee’s knees. Paul produced a small similarly cloth-wrapped package from his pocket and Merry produced apparently from nowhere a fairly bulky object about eight to ten inches by six, also cloth-wrapped and neatly tied with ribbon.

“Gift time,” said Merry.

Jeebee stared at the three packages.

“Little gifts?” he said.

“A bit larger maybe than little,” said Paul, complacently puffing smoke.

The three packages had been laid out, apparently for him to pick up himself. Now it became a question of who he might offend if he picked them up in the wrong order.

After a moment’s thought he came to the conclusion that the only safe thing was to open Merry’s package first.

“Merry,” he said as he started to carefully try to untie the ribbon, “I don’t know what I can say—”

He interrupted himself. The ribbon that he had tried to untie had slid itself down into a knot.

“Oh, just break it,” said Merry.

It seemed like a brutal way to handle a package so carefully wrapped, but he pulled on the ribbon and it snapped. After that, the cloth came off, revealing a pair of Bausch and Lomb Elite eight-by-forty binoculars, under an inner wrapping of cardboard that had disguised their shape. The packaging had been deliberately deceptive.

Paul frowned a little.

“Those are your binoculars, Merry,” he said. She looked at him.

“And I’m giving them to Jeebee,” she replied evenly.

Paul puffed on his pipe and said nothing.

Wonderingly, Jeebee picked up the binoculars and put them to his eyes, looking off at the horizon where the moon had just risen. They were, indeed, a perfect match for the binoculars Paul had lent him and taken back again. A magnificent gift.

“You shouldn’t give me these,” he said to Merry.

“Well, I have,” Merry said. “Open the other gifts.”

Jeebee reached for the small package that Paul had laid on the table. In this case the cloth wrapping had not disguised it and merely snapping the string about it and unfolding the cloth revealed to Jeebee what his finger had told him he might—which was a very small revolver.

“It’s a Smith and Wesson .38 Bodyguard Airweight,” said Paul. “I’ll fit you out with ammunition for it before you leave.”

It was a revolver that would fit into the palm of his hand. Jeebee had heard of very small automatics, but never of revolvers, this size. It had a shroud over the hammer to keep it from catching on clothing. It looked, in fact, almost like a toy. But very plainly, it was not.

“It’s a boot gun. Stick it down inside the top of your boot and it ought to be out of sight, as well as easy to get at,” Paul said around his pipe stem. “It’s good for up to about twenty feet. You’d better practice a bit with it—as I say, I’ll give you the shells—so that you can get some idea of how it throws. We can do that tomorrow morning before you leave.”

Jeebee had been trying not to think that it was tomorrow Paul turned the wagon southward. It was as if a corner of emptiness entered him. As if the wagon was taking everything he knew away from him. He had never thought he would feel like this when the time came.

“And now,” said Merry, “Nick’s going to pop if you don’t get around to opening his gift.” Jeebee came to with a start.

Something about the size and overall shape of Nick’s gift had made him feel hesitant—he did not know exactly why. That was at least one of the reasons he had left it until the last, although opening Merry’s gift first, because she was the woman, and Paul’s second because he was the leader, was only natural.

But now he picked up the small man’s gift, which his knees had told him was a little heavier than he would have expected. As heavy in proportion to its large size as the handgun Paul had given him had been light for its smallness.

He opened the last package and found it was two packages inside, one large and one smaller. He opened the smaller and found three items. An ordinary carpenter’s hammer, a large pair of pliers, and what looked like a small, iron chisel, but with only a short, thick handle; the whole thing less than five inches in length.

“A hardy!” he said, recognizing the chisellike object from seeing the one like it, stuck chisel-edge-up through a hole in one end of Nick’s anvil.

“Right,” said Nick, “that, and the hammer are what you can use to start blacksmithing from scratch. Any good solid piece of steel will do for an anvil. You can find that yourself; and you can build your own forge and bellows. But you need the hammer to beat the metal with, the hardy to cut it with when it’s heated enough, and the pliers to hold it until you can forge yourself a regular pair of tongs. Also, the pliers can be used as pliers. Lots of times a pair of pliers can come in handy—open the other package.”

The last words came out abruptly, cutting off Jeebee’s attempt to thank the smaller man. Jeebee took the hint and opened the larger package.

What tumbled out onto the tabletop, inside a newly sewn leather sheath, was a knife almost large enough to be a small sword. It had the general shape of a bowie knife; and when he pulled it from its scabbard, it was indeed a bowie.

It had a five-inch handle made from disks of leather impregnated with some sort of glue that left them as hard as the plastic he remembered from the world, now lost behind them all in time, and tightly compressed between the cross guard and a heavy brass pommel that screwed to the end of the tang and counterbalanced the massive, twelve-inch steel blade. It had been carefully and evenly honed from the hilt to the upswept tip and then back along the recurved top edge to a thick strip of brass that had been silver-soldered to the back of the blade. It caught the firelight and flashed in his eyes as he turned it over, feeling the weight of it. It was a precious and lethal gift intended for only one purpose, and that was to do damage to any living thing at which it was directed, just like the pistol Paul had given him.

It was curious, he thought, how natural these warlike gifts seemed, and this strangely different scene, from his surroundings even a year ago. He now sat by an open fire in the open air surrounded by darkness with two deadly weapons and a pair of binoculars. These were not the sort of things anyone would have gifted him with before, except perhaps the binoculars, and even these were far more powerful and expensive than any pair even his closest friend might have given him in that earlier time.

“Feel the edge,” said Nick, directing Jeebee’s attention back to the knife. “No, use the ball of your thumb, very lightly, and just stroke it over the edge, away from you.”

Jeebee did so. The edge had been feathered to a razor sharpness.

“You want to keep it like that,” said Nick. “You’ll probably never use it, but just in case. Meanwhile, go right on carrying that other knife you’ve got hanging at your belt, and use that for any ordinary need you’ve got. Except for practicing with it—and I’ll show you how to practice before you leave tomorrow—this new knife of yours, you’ll hope it’ll never leave its sheath. I’ll tell you about that, too, tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Nick. Thank you all,” Jeebee said, looking around at them. “I don’t know how to thank you. But Nick—”

He turned back to the little man.

“Where did you get this?”

“I traded for it quite a time back,” Nick said. “It wasn’t in the shape you see it now when I got it. It had been made as part of a collection set. It’s supposed to be a pretty fair replica of the knife Jim Bowie gave his name to, but near as I could ever find out, nobody knows exactly what the ‘original’ Bowie knife really looked like. For that matter he probably had half a dozen knives like this of different sizes and each one made some different from the others.

“Anyway, it was a collection piece, but it had been used for everything under the sun, including to chop kindling. It’ll do that, too, but I don’t want you to use it for that. I’ve put a fighting edge on it, instead of the chisel edge it had when I got it. So it may look sturdy as hell, but don’t cut branches with it, don’t sharpen sticks with it, and above all don’t drop it on anything hard. I’ve got a sharpening stone for you to take along with it, and I’ll teach you how to use it. With some practice you’ll be able to touch up the edge, but if you nick it or have to rebevel it, you’ll spend half a lifetime looking for a stone that’s long enough to do the job.”

“Believe me,” said Jeebee sincerely, “I’ll take good care of it.”

“You don’t know anything about using a knife, do you?” Nick stared across the table at him.

Jeebee shook his head.

“Good,” said Nick, “better that way. If you don’t know how, you’re not as likely to try to use it and get yourself killed.” Jeebee stared at him.

“What’re you giving it to me for, then?” he asked.

“Tell you tomorrow. Well—one thing I will tell you today. If you ever do have to use it, remember just one thing only. Forget everything else. Just remember to let the weight and the edge work for you. Go up through the belly. Aim for the balls—excuse me, Merry, the crotch—and you’ve got your best chance of ending in the belly. You got that?”

Jeebee nodded.

“What you really want to do is go up under the breastbone. If you go in deep enough there, you’ll hit the heart; or you’ll cut a main artery. The blade’s long enough, but you want to be up underneath the ribs. You’ve got to be good—and lucky—to go between the ribs. Never try that. I’ll show you in the morning.”