Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 19

Jeebee came out of sleep like a fired bullet out of the muzzle of a gun. It was a habit he had picked up on those first few weeks of his lonely flight out of Michigan. He had gotten away from it while sleeping in the wagon. But it had returned when he and Merry had gone after the seed—and it was back with him now again. Plainly, sleeping in the open had become the trigger of a reflex.

He woke to find Wolf with his teeth set in a corner of the groundsheet, trying to tug it from underneath him.

“No!” Jeebee shouted instinctively—and, as instinctively, sat up and drove his fist at Wolf’s head.

His knuckles jarred on hard bone. Wolf let go and backed a step, his eyes on Jeebee’s without animosity, his head cocked slightly to one side.

“No! Leave it alone!” said Jeebee.

He lay down again, ready at any minute to feel again the tugging that had woken him. But it did not come, and when he lifted his head to look, Wolf had disappeared. Still too steeped in the need for sleep to worry further about it, Jeebee closed his eyes and was instantly in slumber again.

When he woke for the second time, there was still no sign of Wolf. The two horses were on their feet and looking at him. The sun was high overhead. But so thick together were the branched tops of the lodgepole pines, in their fierce competition for daylight, that down here on the thick carpet of dead brown pine needles all was in pleasant shadow. Brute lifted his head and neighed.

Jeebee struggled out of the confines of his bedding. Of course, the horses needed to drink from the stream from which their tethers kept them, and what little fodder they had been able to find in the needles underfoot was now cropped close.

He threw the last of the entangling blanket aside and staggered to his feet. He was suddenly aware that with the warming of the day, he had become drenched in sweat under the blankets. He stumped over to the horses, untied them, coiled up the now-loose ends of the ropes that had held them to their trees, and led them down to the stream.

They drank thirstily, and reminded of his own dryness of mouth, he stepped upstream to drink, himself, then remembered the danger of parasitical infection. He paused only to empty his bladder, then retied the horses, lowered the load with the water bags, and drank from the disinfected contents of one of these.

These primary needs taken care of, he reloaded the horses, gave them nose bags supplied with some of the grain in the loads, and let them eat.

For himself, he got from his saddle pack the last of the shortbread Nick had made for him before he had parted with the wagon. These hard, floury little cakes, rich with fat and sugar, tasted delicious in his mouth after the long, almost mealless day and night preceding. His conscience troubled him a little for eating them now. He could, he told himself, have saved them for a day or two and hoped to either pick up some game, or find an abandoned farmstead with the latest generation of crops run wild, to fill his empty stomach instead.

Instead, he finished off all the cakes, even licking the crumbs from the palms of his hands. He went back to the water bag, drank as much more as he could hold, then emptied what little was left. He refilled it from the stream, adding one of the disinfecting tablets he had gotten from Paul. In a couple of hours it, too, would be safe for him to drink. With Sally now carrying the full packload and Brute once more saddled, he led both horses down to the stream to give them also a chance at a final drink—which both took.

The trees about him were still too thick and the ground underfoot too sloping for easy travel off the road. He mounted Brute and headed them all back up onto the cracked pavement, heading downhill toward Ten Sleep.

It took him eight days, traveling north at an easy pace, to reach the neighborhood of Glamorgan, where Walter Neiskamp, the man who had kept wolves and been Paul Sanderson’s customer, lived.

The little town—it was barely more than a couple of blocks on either side of the main street, with no more than three rows of houses behind the stores—was close below the border of Montana. He approached the town just as night was coming down and made camp in the closest patch of trees to it, which was about a half mile distant. The next day and night, he spent observing it. Caution had come to be second nature with him now. However, he saw no signs of life about it. No movement of people in the daytime, no smallest flicker of light from a window after dark.

Finally, gingerly, he approached it. Wolf, who had caught up with him again, followed him perhaps a hundred feet out from the trees and then stopped, leaving him to go on alone. It was all open country, but he had picked the time just before twilight to make his approach. If it turned out that for some reason he had to run from it, after all, at least he could count on darkness closing down around him to aid his escape. He approached in a series of zigzags, keeping below the crests of the open but rolling land that surrounded it. He was puzzled by the lack of appearance of life around it. The cities, even the larger towns, had effectively destroyed themselves once their power, water, and communication with the outside world had been cut off, as the people in them had fallen to fighting among themselves for the necessities of life that were still available where they were.

But tiny towns like this had normally survived. For one thing, they were close to the country, which meant that they could draw upon or trade with their rural neighbors. For another thing, they were country people themselves, and more accustomed to being self-sufficient. Finally, there would be very little at a place like this for people to fight over.

So he thought. But, as the shadows deepened and he ventured at last around the houses and the stores into the main street, he had to face the fact that the town was entirely dead, and several of the houses at the far end had caught fire and burned down to shells. The stores themselves had their windows smashed and inside each of them things were strewn around as if a hunt had gone on for anything that might be useful or valuable.

For the first time the complete silence of the town impressed itself on him. He had been moving with extreme caution, out of the habits ingrained in him these last few months and the possibility that someone might be hidden in this otherwise deserted-appearing place. Now an absolute certainty settled in him that there was no one here. A faint breeze whistled softly through some of the broken doors and windows, but that was all that reached his ears, and for the first time he accepted that he was utterly, completely alone.

The place had been raided by some considerable armed force and was presently no more than a ghost town.

Without bothering to continue being particularly silent or trying to stay in the shadows, he ventured into several of the stores and buildings along the street. But they were all empty. There were no signs either of living people or dead bodies.

He worked his way down the street and at the very end he came across a small cemetery. In one corner of it a large area had evidently been dug up, at one end of which a rough wooden cross had been driven into the spaded earth, but with no sign or message upon it.

So, somebody at least had either escaped and come back, or come along, found the dead here, and buried them. It could not be otherwise. As for who had sacked the place, it had probably been raiders, a good-sized group to take even a small town like this so completely.

He shivered. He had been lucky so far not to encounter any such post-Collapse gang.

The further end of the tiny town reached into the fold of the foothills below which the town was set. A gravel road, already beginning to be overgrown with small plants of the spring, led off up into the fold. He followed it. Walter Neiskamp, the customer of Paul Sanderson who had kept wolves, had lived out just such a road at some little distance from this town—perhaps half a mile.

Jeebee had gone only a couple of hundred yards, however, before the turn to the road put hillside between him and the dead town. It was at this point that Wolf came out of the shadows and rejoined him. Together, they moved on. A small night wind whispered and muttered about them in the dark shapes of the trees flanking the road as the last of the daylight faded, and little patches of moonlight showed them enough to keep Jeebee from losing his way.

The road ceased even to be gravel and became simply a rutted path, now thick with small ground-covering vegetation. This narrow way ended finally in an open, bowl-shaped area, clear of trees and, as Merry had described, completely surrounded by the close slopes of the foothills, an area barely large enough to contain the house and grounds the hillsides enclosed.

A little stream chuckled in the moonlight, down along the far side of the house and out of sight into the trees on Jeebee’s right. This place had also clearly been visited by the raiders. Jeebee went forward to examine the house, Wolf following more cautiously, a little behind him, but showing—Jeebee noted—an unusual willingness to investigate this unknown, in contrast to his usual caution.

However, well short of the point at which he would have entered the dead house before them, Wolf balked. Jeebee himself had paused for a moment before the entrance, the door of which had been reduced to nothing more than a few shreds of wood hanging from the hinges, evidently as a result of some interior explosion. Then he stepped through, himself.

He would have been stepping into utter darkness if it had not been for the fact of the same explosion—perhaps the raiders had thrown a grenade, or something with more than the destructive power of a grenade, perhaps a stick or two of dynamite taped together, through the windows beside the door. Certainly the windows were all broken. Likewise, the roof overhead had been blown half off the room into which he stepped, and the light of the now-rising moon shone down brightly through this, to reveal, in shades of black and gray, a scene of utter devastation.

Apparently there had only been one piece of furniture in the room, which was itself rather large. This one piece of furniture was a sofa, with its cushions now torn apart and its underframe broken. It lay in two halves at about a thirty-degree angle to each other against a further wall.

The floor also had holes in it, but none large enough to fall through. Jeebee made a decision and reached into his backpack, took the risk of lighting a candle.

The wavering light from the candle flame showed him a slightly smaller door in the shadows of a further wall. He went through it. It led him into a hallway, which in turn took him into two bedrooms, or at least one had been a bedroom, for it held a bed apparently completely untouched, except that there were no blankets or covers upon it, and the other had been some kind of storeroom full of papers. He passed a couple of other rooms full of what seemed to be odds and ends of leather and metal junk and came at last to a room with shelves all around its four sides. Shelves that were filled with books, none of which seemed to have been touched or taken.

Jeebee’s breath shortened. If this had been the library of Walter Neiskamp, then there was a good chance that the books he wanted would still be here. They would have been of no interest to the raiders. But the sensible thing was to go through them in daylight.

He was about to turn around and leave the house again, but he was out in the corridor and only one door was left. He yielded to curiosity and stepped through it, to find himself in the kitchen.

The windows of it had been smashed, and it, too, had been blown apart, though apparently with somewhat lesser force than that which had torn apart the living room. More importantly, on the floor of this room lay the remains of a human being. Small scavengers at least had been at it, for it was barely more than a skeleton, but the clothes seemed to indicate that it had been a man rather than a woman.

Suddenly glad that Wolf had not come in with him, since Wolf was attracted to carrion of any kind, Jeebee turned about and retraced his steps back through the house. He stepped out into the open, blowing out his candle and returning it to his backpack. Wolf was waiting there and greeted him like a long-lost comrade. Turning, Jeebee headed toward the area behind the former house.

Surprisingly, out here, Wolf showed far less hesitation. Behind the house there had been an arrangement of wire pens, a number of small ones individually capable of being locked; those led by further doors within them into a larger pen that seemed to have been some sort of runway. If the man, Neiskamp, kept wolves, here was undoubtedly where he had kept them; and, in fact, Jeebee could catch in the moonlight here and there a glint of white bone on the nearer dark ground of a couple of the wolf pens.

He found the doors that had let him into them. Lock had been too strong a word for what he had assumed kept them closed against the animals inside. Opening them was merely a matter of pulling a wooden peg from a latch that secured each door. The first door he so opened moved with a screech of metal that was surprisingly loud in the silent night. He went inside; Wolf pushed past him, went ahead, and began to sniff immediately at where Jeebee had seen the glint of white.

Catching up with Wolf, Jeebee found the bones of an animal about Wolf’s size. It was not possible to tell for sure in the moonlight, but it seemed to be the bones of a wolf, with some bits of fur still attached and possibly even some scraps of decayed flesh, although that was hard to tell in the darkness.

As best he could in the moonlight, Jeebee examined the skull of the carcass. It was shattered in front, broken by a large hole as if the animal had been shot. Wolf pushed past Jeebee, put his nose down on the remains, sniffed, then turned and began to explore the pen.

Jeebee left him to it and went to the next pen. It, too, held its bones. All in all, he found six cages, all with remnants of a carcass in each, and each carcass with a hole in the head.

It was fairly clear that the animals had been deliberately destroyed. Whether Neiskamp had destroyed them himself, for reasons of his own, triggered into action by the arrival of the raiders, or—more likely—the raiders had killed them, was an unsolved question, and its solution was probably unimportant. Jeebee let himself back out of the pens, leaving the door ajar so Wolf could join him, and, after a little while, Wolf did so.

That library, Jeebee thought, would have to be examined in daylight. There was no reason not to shelter inside the semi-destroyed house, but Wolf was still unwilling to enter it and Jeebee felt a certain sense of distaste at the thought of doing it himself.

In the end, he camped just outside the house, after fetching the horses, on the east side, where the sunlight would wake him early.

A brightening sky woke him some hours later. He got up and fixed himself some breakfast, taking the horses to drink at the little stream. There was plenty of ground cover for them to feed on here. In fact, around the house there was no lack of grass and the horses had been quietly cropping most of the night. After watering them, he tied them up once more, fed himself, and turned back toward the house. Wolf had taken off and was nowhere to be seen.

As daylight flooded down the rounded sides of the foothills enclosing them and the sun itself rose into clear view, the house was revealed as more damaged than it had appeared by moonlight. Apparently the raiders had wasted little time after tossing explosives into it.

Considering the damage, Jeebee became even more sure that it had been dynamite that had been used, rather than something essentially as antipersonnel as grenades. Going in by the back door to the kitchen, he found some confirmation for this in the fact that the single body there had several firearms scattered around it, one shotgun and two rifles as well as a couple of pistols. All had been too damaged by the explosion to be workable—undoubtedly that was why they had been left where they lay.

Jeebee’s best guess was that Neiskamp had been trying to hold the raiders off from here with enfilading fire. Possibly he had hoped to discourage them from trying to obtain whatever the house might hold. In any case his defense had not worked.

Jeebee went on into the library section. There, the room was half-full of collapsed roof parts as a result of the explosion that must have stressed it to the point where it collapsed inward.

The bright light of day streamed in and revealed a room even more bare of furniture than the living room with its single couch. In fact, the couch, the bed in the bedroom, a small table by the bed, and two chairs and the table in the kitchen were the total sum of furniture that the house had apparently owned. But the bookshelves were full. Now, needing neither candle nor any other type of illumination but the daylight coming through the broken roof, Jeebee began to brush the dust from the spines of the books he took from the shelves to examine.

It was a slow and dusty process, since he had to clean each book before he could identify it by the printing on its spine. There were a remarkable number of issues of magazines, like the National Geographic, bound in homemade covers. There was also a plentiful supply of books about the west in particular, particularly histories of the rise of the cattle industry.

But also, there were a fair amount of histories of the plains and mountain Indians of the west. Halfway around the room, he found what he was looking for, a respectably small number of books on wolves. He took these out, identified them one by one, and made a pile of them on the floor. It did not look like there were too many of them to be added to the load Sally was already carrying without putting her under too heavy a burden.

Eighteen books in all. He took them and left.