Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 22

The third day after meeting the bear, to his infinite joy, the swelling of his arm and leg had decreased. It still looked like about a third more than normal size. Definitely, however, the wooden stiffness that had come into both the damaged leg and arm from the engorgement of the blood vessels had relaxed somewhat. His torn scalp also felt better under its stiff cap of dried blood and hair.

It was too painful to attempt much flexing of either arm or leg, but he experimented to the point of convincing himself that the improvement was actual, and not just a product of his imagination.

Buoyed up by this and his latest dose of Dilaudid, he was able to creep off his erstwhile bed and drag the unusable parts of his body, with the two depleted water bags, to the river. There, he refilled them one by one and put in each a couple of sterilizing tablets.

It would be half an hour before the water so medicated would be safe for him to drink. But he had drunk most of what had remained in them before he made the attempt to reach the bank and he could easily wait out those thirty minutes or even a bit longer if necessary.

He also had brought along the rough bandages from his leg and arm, by the expedient of tucking them into his belt. He now soaked them in water and wrapped them again in place. The icy touch of the liquid was welcome upon the wounds.

He realized suddenly that while he had remembered the Dilaudid, his mind, occupied with the business of attempting the journey to the riverside, had made him forget his Augmentin.

But a delay of half an hour in taking the antibiotic would not be so desperate a matter to endure.

He had aimed at a slight dip in the bank, which gave him a rise to his left where he could sit down and elevate both the left arm and the left foot. With these up, the wet cloths around them, and the water bags beside him, he relaxed. Having gotten through the difficult journey to the river, there was no point in going back until he had to.

Luckily Wolf had been gone when he started the trip, otherwise Jeebee could imagine the other objecting to the arm and leg being covered again. Jeebee had made up his mind that if Wolf did, he would simply unwrap the limbs himself and let Wolf get at them. The idea of Wolf tugging at the cloth wrapped around his left leg, in the sensitive state it was in at this moment, was something he did not even want to think about.

He would in any case, he thought, unwrap the limbs the moment he saw Wolf, and leave them open. If Wolf went through his process of licking them, no harm should be done. If not, he would simply fold the cloths into a pack and lay them directly on the torn areas of skin so that they could be pulled off by him or lifted off by Wolf’s nose easily.

The current Dilaudid was just beginning to take full effect. He was beginning to approach comfort to an extent that he had hardly thought possible for the last thirty-six hours when he suddenly realized that he had reached the point where he could no longer avoid evacuating his bowels.

With a great deal of discomfort and awkward crab crawling on the ground, he managed to get away from the place where he was lying to a spot at the edge of the riverbank just down from him, and satisfy the natural requirement.

Having done this, he re-dressed the lower part of his body and got back to his riverside hollow, with the arm and leg elevated again.

The awkward movements had done the two damaged limbs no good. It was some time, even with the Dilaudid in him, before the pain started to abate again. He lay full in the sunlight, and—particularly with the cold cloths on him—the heat was welcome. He half dozed; and later on, when Wolf did come back, he uncovered the wounds. But Wolf merely sniffed at them without licking. Jeebee dozed off again, and woke to find himself once more in shadow, chilled by the absence of the sun, and with Wolf also gone.

He made the slow pilgrimage back to the stack of bedding that was the load and settled himself there for the night.

The next day he was a great deal better. He had less pain, and the arm and leg had definitely gone down in their swelling to the point where he could bend knee and elbow perceptibly. There would be one more day at least before he could think of trying to move out. To leave at all meant at the very least he would have to saddle Brute, and that would require his standing, lifting, and doing a number of other things that were still beyond him.

The next day, however, he had improved to the point where he decided to at least experiment by trying to saddle Brute.

It would be necessary for him to make a crutch, first. The trouble was that not even the thickest of the willow stems growing around the stream was strong enough to hold him up. Happily, however, he had some folding tent-pole props. He was able to unfold one of these and tightly wrap it with leather cord so that it was not too likely to buckle under him.

The crutch he ended up with as a result was shorter than he would have liked. But used with care, it did not give underneath him. He also had nothing that could be easily fixed at the top to make a crosspiece to go under his armpit. He ended by making a tight wad of cloth at the top of the prop, which fitted into his armpit. It worked, but cut off the circulation in his arm after a few minutes use.

His first attempt to stand on his feet with this support was comic. But he did get up; and he was supported. He propped the saddle ready so that by still leaning on the staff and holding to it with what strength there was in his left hand, he could reach down with his right and lift it.

It was a heavy load for one arm to lift, let alone for one arm to throw over the back of the horse.

Luckily, Brute was still in an agreeable mood, apparently, and did not sidle around or try to avoid the saddle as Jeebee made an effort to put it on. To Jeebee’s surprise, he still had more strength in his right arm than he had realized.

The way he had been living—and eating at the wagon—had evidently wrought a more permanent physical improvement than he had thought. Also, a certain amount of desperation was at work inside him. If nothing else, even if he had to abandon everything else to escape some danger here, he had to be able to get that saddle on Brute and cinched tight.

It took him nearly two hours to do it. Most of this time was spent in working out a method, using knee and single hand to pull the cinch tight enough so that the saddle would not slip around under Brute’s belly and dump him off the horse when he was mounted. A fall like that, now, would not only be painful but could put him back out of action for several more days.

Finally he got the saddle on and cinched properly. He tried mounting, but that was too much for him, as yet. He unbuckled the cinch strap and dropped the saddle to the ground, again.

With the excitement of working over, he began to realize acutely that it was time for another painkiller. So far he had stuck to three tablets of Dilaudid a day. He was determined not to exceed that so he could be sure to be able to give up the medication at the end of seven days.

However, at the end of forty minutes of rest on his makeshift bed, the pains had eased off. So much so that he thought he might perhaps try getting the saddle blanket on Sally, and at least some of the more necessary items. The blanket was light, he had worked out ways of pulling the cinch tight with his good hand and bracing knee, and Sally was much more likely than Brute to stand still while he put stuff on her.

Accordingly, he struggled back up on his crutch. But to begin with, there was the problem of tying an anchor knot to a ring on the cinch strap one-handed when he had been used to tying it with two. He tried various ways, using not only his knee but as much of the hand on his hurt arm as possible, to hold the rope still while he threaded the end of the rope around and through the metal ring. Finally, eventually, he found a way to get it tied. Then came the relatively easy job of looping the rope back and forth through the other iron rings that secured it to the cinch strap; then finally the almost impossible-seeming problem of pulling it tight and tying the final notch.

This last defeated him. As the sun was sinking, he got the knot tied, but the rope was not pulled anywhere near as tight as it should have been, and there was no telling whether the load might not shift under the movement of the mare as she tried to carry it.

He was worn out, and the pains had come back with redoubled force. It was finally time for him to allow himself another Dilaudid. He took it and collapsed on his bed. He fell abruptly into sleep, but woke up after a short while, hungry.

He had been surviving on the trail mix and some dried beef that Merry had supplied him with when he left. There was enough left of this for two or three meals yet, if he made them very light ones. He compromised by eating only a handful of the trail mix and drinking a good amount from the water bags.

He fell asleep again, still ravenous. He came awake suddenly, feeling alarmed, but not knowing why. The sun was just up. Light was just beginning to flood the landscape.

After a few minutes he heard the sound of a single, distant rifle shot.

He waited, gripped by fear. The sound was not repeated. He guessed, however, that there had been another before it, and that this was what had wakened him earlier.

At all costs, fit to travel or not, he must get away from his present exposed position. Even if it meant taking his next Dilaudid ahead of time.

He struggled to his feet again and began trying to saddle and load the two horses in earnest.

Whether it was the new Dilaudid or what he had learned earlier that made it possible, or whether it was the necessity of leaving nothing behind to signal his presence here, piece by piece he managed to get all the load on Sally and tied down, and Brute saddled.

The sun was high, and he did not like to move in daylight. But the horses were now ready to travel, and he must move with them. He could not risk waiting around here much longer.

Leaning heavily on his makeshift crutch, he got his foot in the stirrup, a firm grasp on the saddle horn, and tried valiantly to swing his bad leg over the back of Brute so that he sat in the saddle. It was a tremendous struggle, but he failed.

He told himself he would not give up. He leaned against the side of Brute, panting, his wet forehead pressed against the leather of the saddle horn. Wolf had meanwhile come back and was standing a dozen feet off, watching.

He made three more efforts before he finally, by some miracle of rage at himself, got the leg over and his rump into the saddle. Dismounting, he realized now, would be almost as painful. But that did not matter now. Now he could travel. He lifted the reins and spoke to Brute.

“Get on, you bastard,” he said—and Brute moved off among the willows. Sally trailed obediently behind at the end of the rope that tied her to Brute’s saddle. Jeebee could no longer see Wolf. He did not know if the other was with him now or not. But he no longer had any doubt that Wolf, if alive, would be likely to catch up with him somewhere. In any case, it did not matter. Jeebee was moving, and he was traveling upstream toward the foothills.

By midday, he was exhausted and called a halt. He left the horses, having no choice, with their gear on, and slept on the ground beside them until nearly dark. With nightfall he went on, taking a chance and leaving the willow bottoms of the stream for a more direct route overland to the foothills, as he had seen them at the end of the day.

Later on, he was never able to recall this part of his trip with any clarity until he saw the burning buildings. In the saddle at last, he had begun to have hopes of making it into the foothills in one night’s ride.

It was true it was a night placed on top of a day that had asked the most from him. But he had given that much before and assumed that he could do it now. However, to a certain extent he was still worried about the painkillers he might have to take to help him reach his goal. It seemed to him he had heard of army surgeons in field hospitals during the war in Vietnam becoming hooked on Dilaudid because they had had to operate twenty-four hours around the clock and taking the drug was the only way they could do it.

But the Dilaudid was the only thing that could get him through. As it turned out, it did; but it was not easy. He was still holding off on his first pain pill of the trip, now that he was mounted and moving. But even with the horses going at a walk, he found riding hard. It was not so much that he could not deal with the pain on a minute-to-minute basis. It was the problem that the tension in him from his defiance of it was wearing him out. It was a matter of bracing himself against a new surge of pain each time Brute’s hooves struck the ground, jolting his hurt body. But there were things even beyond that to deal with.

One of these was the question of how to place his hurt left leg. Both in the stirrup and out of the stirrup it was uncomfortable. He had deliberately shortened the stirrup on that side and he was grateful now he had. But even that position was not good. In the end he put his toe, only, in it, and tried to forget his leg was there.

As the meager moonlight appeared with the rising of the moon to help him on his way—thank God the sky was clear and also that the horses were good at picking their own way in the sense of knowing where to put their feet—it became impossible to ignore the fact that riding in this position with his left leg hanging down was asking for trouble. He took a Dilaudid. Once it had gone to work to make him more comfortable, with great effort he pulled his left leg up with his hand until his knee was partly crooked around the pommel and the leg itself was held mostly near the horizontal.

This was a dangerously loose way to sit the saddle, even with Brute at a walk. He was not sure how long he could go on with it, without doing some kind of further damage to the leg. Thank God the knee would bend at least that much.

Normally, even at a walk like this, three to five hours of traveling should have brought them safely into the hills. They needed to find a place well above any of the ranch houses, a place where both he and the horses could hide overnight.

The fact was, he thought suddenly, he was standing up to the ride better than he had expected. Along with the action of the Dilaudid, there seemed to have come to his aid a sort of semi-hysteric state of determination to make the ride.

It was a state not too different from the shock he had gone into during his encounter with the bear. In this condition, the early hours of the night passed something like a bad dream, in which he was partly insulated from the physical cost of what he was doing and against any tendency to feel so exhausted he had to stop.

He ended by not getting down from the saddle at all, after one or two attempts, simply because he was afraid of getting down and not being able to make the climb back up. If that happened, he would be caught out here in the open, for around him there was nothing but sagebrush and open ground that should have had a certain amount of grass. It was bare partly from the drought of the last few years but would have been treeless even in a wet year. Somehow, he must keep moving until he got to a place where he could hide, both himself and the two horses with their burdens.

In the end he passed into an almost completely dreamlike state in which only a corner of his senses and vision kept watch normally. His vision, even, seemed to adjust unnaturally well to the reduced light of the partial moon, so that he felt he could see where they were going and the ground ahead of them as well as if it were daylight. But the small, sane corner of his mind kept insisting this could not be true.

Still, it was in this condition that, somewhere after midnight, the sane part of him noticed a glow on the horizon. It had to be after midnight because the moon was already starting its descent, which would leave him feeling his way in a nearly complete dark, with nothing but stars to light him along.

The glow came from directly ahead of him. It waxed and waned in curious fashion. He rode directly toward it, fascinated, for some distance, before realizing he was seeing the light of a large fire up ahead of him somewhere.

The hallucination of daylight vision in his present state did not completely shut out a sense of caution. As soon as it sank in on him that the light ahead was that of an unlikely large fire—the kind of fire that a ranch house and buildings might make—he began immediately to circle away from the direct line he had been taking toward it. It was a move as instinctive as that which had pulled him toward it.

He circled to his left, going wide but not so wide that he would not be able to get a view of whatever it was that was burning, when he got closer to it.

With the Dilaudid inside him, his mind was still clear as the minds of those surgeons in Vietnam must have been. A burning ranch house might well have attracted help from neighbors, which meant that there could be a number of people around the blaze.

On the other hand, if a lot of people were there, they still were most likely to be occupied with trying to put the fire out. Moreover, he knew how deceptive light like this could be. After staring into such flames for a little while, even a short distance away from it, everything would seem lost in utter blackness.

He should be able to pass fairly close with some safety from being observed.

Perhaps.