Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 26

Sometime in the night, pain woke Jeebee. Luckily, the night sky was as clear as the daytime sky had been for several weeks now. That could not last. They were getting to the end of summer and the good weather was bound to break.

He fumbled in the medicine container, found the Dilaudid container by feel, and brought it out, opening it with hands that trembled from pain and the urgency for relief. He stopped himself from taking it just in time. He reclosed the container with extra care and went searching for the Tylenol. Rationally, he knew that taking more than the recommended dose would not help cut the pain more; all the same, he counted out four. Then came a search for the water bag, which had evidently been moved by his body as he slept.

He located it less than an arm’s length away under the flap of tarp, and swallowed water from it to get the pills down. He was shaking now from chill, awake enough again to feel the cold. He scraped together some of the dry wood he had saved and got the fire going. But it cast only feeble heat as the flames slowly caught.

Instinct drove him to movement to warm himself. He crawled around and managed to find more fuel for the fire. Finally, his shivering stopped.

Wolf, curled up beyond the flames, with his bushy tail over his nose tip, regarded Jeebee with drowsy eyes.

He could not go on like this, without some kind of cover to hold in his body heat. He would die of exposure as soon as he ran out of fallen branches close enough to find by firelight. But the blankets were all in the packload up out of his reach. There was no way for him to get his hands high enough even to pull one out—

Swearing at himself for being such an idiot, he started off on hands and knees toward the dark shapes of the horses. Even in the dark, Sally’s silhouette and smaller size distinguished her from Brute.

Crawling to the side of her that was away from Brute, he literally climbed up her leg, pulling himself to his feet. Brute would not have put up with that for a moment, but Sally patiently let herself be used as a series of handholds.

“Good girl,” he panted. Sally turned her head to look at him through the dark. He crouched, jumped upward mightily on his good foot, and twisted; somehow he managed to throw his hurt leg up and over her back. The pain of the movement almost blacked him out for a second. A fury in him helped to beat it back. He pulled himself up on her. She braced herself automatically against his off-center weight as he climbed.

Finally on her back, he pulled himself forward along her neck and urged her up to the tree to which her halter was attached. He untied it and, with knee pressures and heel touches, steered her to the tree holding the packload.

He halted her beside it. He could just make out the dark bulk of it, like an enormous morel mushroom, clinging to the dark tree trunk overhead.

“Steady now, girl,” he said to Sally, “stand steady!”

Clinging to the tree trunk, he pulled himself up until he was kneeling on Sally’s broad back. The bone of her spine bit, hard and uncomfortable, into the bones of his lower legs. He ignored the discomfort. Reaching up as high as he could in this position, he felt his hands grip and hold on the netted plastic that carried the packload.

It was too dark to see where the edges of the plastic tarpaulin came close together under the flap of the one corner of it he had draped over the edges as a rain roof. But he felt his way through its folds until his fingers recognized the tarp’s edges, then worked his hands inside and felt for the rough-soft surface of his sleeping blankets.

And found them.

A few minutes later, triumphant, he was climbing down to a position back astride Sally, with three blankets wadded in his arms. Shortly after that, he was urging Sally back to the tree to which she had originally been tied.

He had been tempted to ride her to the fire and tether her to a tree beside it. But it would be unfair to tie her up where she could not drink. Once more he crossed the ground on hands and knees. Wolf had risen to his feet to stare at Jeebee as he approached. Jeebee had tucked the blankets inside his jacket for fear Wolf would be impelled to grab any loose ends in his teeth.

But Wolf made no move. In fact, if anything, he seemed a little wary of Jeebee’s shape, swollen by the blankets.

Jeebee made it back to his place by the fire, spread out the blankets, and gratefully rolled himself up in their double thickness. It was not until all this was done that Wolf lay down again. Thumped down, rather, with a grunt that sounded almost like a grumble.

Jeebee did not care. The Tylenol was taking hold. It touched the pain only lightly, but now that he had quit throwing it around, the leg seemed to recover a bit on its own. In moments Jeebee was warm; and shortly after that he was asleep once more.

When he woke the next day, Wolf was not to be seen. Jeebee found himself oddly worried by this. Since that evening Wolf had approached him with what Jeebee now knew to be submission behavior, Wolf had seldom left the campsite without touching base, first, with Jeebee, after the latter woke in the morning.

Did the leaving today signal changes in Wolf’s attitude toward him? There could be drawbacks as well as advantages to being accepted by Wolf as a pack mate.

But Jeebee was in no state to ponder that question at the moment. It was full morning and the pain of his ankle was gnawing at him again. He took more Tylenol, only three this time.

They did not seem to help at all. He lay there, sweating, but finally decided that while it hurt badly, the discomfort was not insupportable—at least as long as he did not move the ankle.

He found himself very thirsty and drank deeply from his full water bag, until he remembered the difficulty he might have refilling either or both bags now that he had the bad ankle. He checked himself then and his body reminded him of other necessities. He badly needed to urinate, and he would at least have to move away from his bedding to do so.

He moved, therefore, crawling sideways off the rise of land he had lain on, trying to hold the bad ankle in the air so that it would not be dragged. A sudden increase in pain made him grunt as he jarred the ankle while dropping the several inches from his sleeping mound.

He had counted on the thick folds of the blanket splint to cushion the ankle at least to some extent in his movement. But the pain was so abrupt and fierce that it was as if there was no cloth between the injured body part and the ground.

He lay for some minutes, waiting for the hurt to subside before trying to move again.

The pain went down slightly—or perhaps it was only his swollen bladder, insistent, that started him moving again. At any rate, he pulled himself a little farther sideways, then swiveled until he lay along the edge of the slope to the river below. His hand shaking, he managed to unbutton the stiff metal buttons of the work pants he had gotten from the wagon, and at last allow himself relief.

It was only afterward that he realized he should have brought at least one of the water bags with him so that he could take advantage of having moved this far to fill it from the running water of the river, a body’s length upstream.

At first he thought that once having made it back to his bed, he would never be able to face the thought of another trip, this time not only to the top of the bank, but down the sharp stones of it to the water’s edge. But once he had made it back, he realized that he would do it. Whatever he must do to stay alive he would do, in the end, as long as his body held out. And if he would do it in the end, why not now, before the point of desperation set in?

So he went after his water, and got it.

He did not in any sense conquer the ankle pain. But after a fashion he came to terms with it.

As the day wore on, he discovered he could, indeed, move around, by dividing the work into short moments of effort, then resting until he felt ready to try again. A stubbornness that he had not realized he had, grew in him. Also an inventiveness. He took a stone from the earth near the fire and put it into the fire to sterilize it. Then, after it had cooled, he put it into the empty water bag, ran a light rope through the cloth carrying handle of the bag, and tied it in a slipknot around the neck of the bag.

With a sidearm motion he threw the bag from his bed place out into the stream, and after it had sunk and filled itself with water, he hauled it back with the rope.

In spite of the fact that the slipknot pulled itself tight around the neck of the bag, some of the water in it slopped out and was lost as it bumped its way back to him. But it was so much easier a way of renewing his water supply that the loss did not matter.

The success cleared his head. He began to look on himself as a great deal less helpless than he had assumed. By thinking out easy ways of doing things and by making large movements in small, slow steps, he began to get things done.

This way, bit by bit, he gathered enough fresh fuel through the day for his fire to last the night. He even managed to chop through a pine sapling, cut off its limbs, and make himself another crude crutch.

It did not stand up any better to use than his earlier crutch. But by using it he was able, after several days, to move the horses one by one to a series of new tethering spots, where fresh ground cover was available to replace the sparse grass they had cropped off completely within the earlier circle of their tethers.

But the ankle was remarkably slow to mend. It seemed unreasonable that all the bear had done should mend so quickly, while a simple turned ankle was so slow to improve. Jeebee worried over the possibility that he had done something more than merely sprain it. He knew sprains were stubborn to heal, but… He also fretted over the time he was losing when he should be on his way. Until he took himself firmly in hand and told himself that worrying over the fact that he could not move on would not put him on his way any faster.

To take his mind off matters he returned to the wolf books, reading the few he had not had time to finish and rereading all the others.

He was trained at this type of attention by his academic years, and it was not long before he became once more engrossed in wolf lore. As he read, his mind finally solved a puzzle that had stayed with him since the moment in the willows, when he had found himself fighting for his life against the bear.

The last thing he had expected then had been that Wolf would come to his aid, as a storybook faithful dog comes to the rescue of its master.

But Wolf had come. It had seemed to be against all the pragmatic reactions and instinct for self-preservation that Jeebee had seen Wolf show otherwise. Wolf had nothing personally to gain by putting his own life at risk in tackling the bear that was engaged with Jeebee; and much to lose.

It would have been far more wise, Jeebee had thought then and afterward, for Wolf to stay back and see whether Jeebee won or not. And only then come galloping in, once it was clear that the bear was defeated. Prudently, that way, he would have avoided getting involved in a situation in which it might have been Jeebee who was being defeated, and the bear would then have been free to turn on Wolf.

Now, not from what was on the pages before him, but out of some coming together of all he had read up until this moment, he found himself understanding why Wolf had done what he did.

The key—as he’d fleetingly surmised while he lay recovering from his wounds—was social evolution. Social organization allowed wolves to hunt animals many times their own size and made them the most effective predator in North America until the arrival of Man. But group hunting required foresight, planning, communication, and other forms of intelligent behavior found only in creatures like humans and chimpanzees, creatures that matured slowly and so remained helpless and dependent for much of their lives. For pups to survive so extended a period of immaturity had required the evolution of cooperative care of the young and an instinct for cooperative defense.

It was not Jeebee, the person, to whose rescue Wolf had come. It had been to the assistance of a pack mate under attack. For a wolf it would always be the pack that was of first importance, the individual only second.

In short, Wolf had simply joined in as he normally would if some other wolf of his pack had become involved with a bear.

The discovery was like a bright light in Jeebee’s mind, illuminating a great deal of the rest of the material he had studied. He reminded himself again, out of his own scientific training, that there must always be an explanation.

Everything he had ever learned had always demanded that.

It did not mean that the explanation was always immediately available. But nothing happened without a reason; particularly as far as the actions of the higher mammals were concerned. There had to be a cause for every action.

That understanding brought his mind back to his latest concern about Wolf—that, against custom, Wolf had left without waiting for Jeebee to wake up.

Of course, Wolf had always come and gone as he wished. But his normal pattern lately had been almost exclusively to appear at twilight, stay through the night, and leave as soon as Jeebee had accepted his morning greetings.

Now, he was leaving before Jeebee was awake, but reappearing three or more times in the day—greeting Jeebee briefly, sniffing him over, and showing what Jeebee felt was a different sort of interest in him.

It was as if Wolf now was waiting for something to happen. However, invariably after he had been back for a little time, he would abruptly be gone again. Wolf never visibly came or went.

He was suddenly there, or he was as suddenly gone again. Except for the fact that Jeebee had long since become familiar with this behavior, it would have been a little like living with a ghost.

Jeebee found himself concentrating on the new puzzle of why Wolf was acting as he did. Again, there must be a reason. It was hard to think, because, although the pain was being controlled by Tylenol alone now, it had been days since he had eaten anything and he was becoming preoccupied with wanting food very much.

It was one thing to tell himself he could go without food for a few days. But now that the few days had stretched to nearly a week, the body began to send different and more urgent signals that nourishment was needed. It was not so much hunger as a sort of knowledge in brain and bones that it would be dangerous to go without food too long. And his body was telling him it was time he did something about the situation.

But, of course, there was nothing he could do. He was able to move around the clearing, but he could not even, as he would have to, stand on Sally’s back to reach far enough up and into his packload to find the flour and bacon; which had been packed, from prudence, in the very middle of it. He had been lucky, in fact, to have found the ends of the blankets as close to the edges as he had been able to reach.

Lately, he had been debating with himself over using one of his knives to slash open the net and plastic wrapping of the pack-load so that everything inside it would fall to the ground. But to do that would be self-defeating. He might get food for a few days, but it would have meant damaging, and exposing to damage, everything he had, for perhaps three or four days’ rations.

What was more, once his possessions were scattered on the ground, he would have no way of protecting them. Wolf, or other wild animals, would probably tear, chew up, or carry off a good deal of what he possessed.

Besides, the net itself would be irreparable. Theoretically, he had enough leather thongs to tie it back together again. But even if he could and did repair it, or could use another of the folded-up plastic tarps he carried in the packload—still, he would have to be able to climb the tree in order to reaffix it to the block and tackle and haul it up where it would be safe.

His own cleverness at tying the rope that secured both the blocks and the top of the packload to the tree trunk above the load itself now frustrated him from getting at what he needed.

Shortly after dawn one morning he was lying in his usual resting place on the blankets, straining his mind again for some way of getting at the packload, when Wolf made one of his visits back. By this time Jeebee was not only beginning to feel weak from lack of food, but also depressed. He hardly acknowledged Wolf as the other loomed suddenly above him and began to sniff at him. As Wolf sniffed up toward Jeebee’s face, Jeebee smelted an odor, with a nose that had grown more sensitive by a life in the open. In the same moment he noticed what he had smelled.

There was a reddish dampness on the hair around Wolf’s muzzle.

A sudden wild thought came to him. It was impossible, and under ordinary standards, unthinkable. But he had felt the fear of a weakness from lack of food that could keep him from surviving. He had nothing to lose by trying.

He pulled himself up on one elbow. Putting his face right up to Wolf’s, he deliberately licked at the moist fur around Wolf’s mouth.

The taste on his tongue was salty.

For a second nothing seemed to happen. Then Wolf seemed to cough, and as Jeebee pulled back his head, Wolf regurgitated onto the blankets some chunks of raw, red-gray meat, which steamed in the cool morning air.

Jeebee felt within him a leaping of ridiculous joy. It had been the craziest of possible chances. But he had taken advantage of the way wolves brought back food to their pups, and to the mother of pups when she was denned up with them. The regurgitation was reflexive—another of the social instincts that made it possible for wolf pups to enjoy an extended childhood and develop the intelligence they would need for group hunting. The wolf who had eaten could deliberately put himself in the position—as Wolf must have been doing these last few days—ofgiving up the food he had swallowed. But once he had been licked about the muzzle as pups of his species did instinctively, and Jeebee had just done, the reflex to regurgitate was uncontrollable.

It was a miracle out of nature itself. One of the writings on wolves had mentioned that an adult wolf would even bring food in this fashion to a den-bound mate—or even to another adult pack mate who might be too sick, or otherwise unable to get about, to travel or hunt.

The last seldom happened, Jeebee had gathered. But it could. It had happened now.

He realized suddenly that Wolf was looking at him, bright-eyed. Jeebee started to touch him in thanks, then realized that was not what Wolf was waiting for.

Jeebee changed his motion and bent down over the chunks of meat. Ordinarily the thought of eating something vomited up, whether by an animal or another human, would be nauseating. But Jeebee knew that Wolf gulped his food whole. There was no real chewing or digestion done in his mouth. His stomach acids would have begun to digest the meat only from the surface, and there could not have been time enough for that to work very much. At the most, the acids might have started to tenderize it; also, they would have effectively sterilized it, being very strong acids.

Acid would destroy any bacteria, even that which might be in the meat itself.

Jeebee put down his head and mumbled at the chunks with his mouth, pretending to eat.

Evidently, his act was good enough to satisfy Wolf. For when he lifted his head again, the other was gone. Jeebee took his water bag, which luckily was full, and washed off the meat, chunk by chunk, until it was thoroughly clean. Then, with fingers that shook with eagerness, he built a small fire, even though it was bright daylight. As soon as it was putting out anything like sufficient heat to cook, he threaded the chunks on a sharpened stick and held them over the flames.

His mouth was continually filling with saliva, which he alternately swallowed and spat out, as the chunks sizzled above the fire. He held out against the hunger in him as long as he could, then pulled the stick to him and began to eat the still-half-raw meat.

He had not tasted anything as wonderful since he had found the canned food in the root cellar, back before he had met Merry, Paul, and Nick. Fortunately, he remembered how the canned stew had made him sick, suddenly gulped down on a long-empty stomach. He was careful to eat slowly and with pauses; this time he avoided being ill.

From then on he licked Wolf’s whiskers whenever the other came to sniff at him, and Wolf brought him meat at fairly frequent intervals. This way he survived another week. At the end of that time his ankle had improved to the point where he could hobble around on it, even without the crutch.

At last he felt able to stand on Sally and let down the pack-load long enough to get flour and bacon out of it.

Fortified by several days of this food, he finally ventured to saddle the smaller packhorse, as the calmer and more surefooted of the two, and take the rifle down into the lowlands by a route that avoided the shale slope. There, he had the good luck to find another midsummer calf and kill it. He butchered from it what he estimated to be about thirty pounds of its flesh, with none of that weight being bone.

It was a larger load than he had tried to bring back on Brute, simply because Brute would not endure carrying the raw and bloody meat in any way on the saddle. Sally was more complacent. She was not only willing to carry the extra thirty pounds, but also Jeebee, since he could never have walked that distance by himself.

It was an effort above and beyond the call of duty for the little mare. She had to climb slopes with nearly two hundred and twenty pounds of burden, counting Jeebee, the saddle, and meat, but she struggled back up through the hills to the campsite without protest.

He pegged her out by the stream in an area of fresh browse, with deep gratitude, and a resolution that she could stand idle for at least the next few days while she recovered.

He cooked the meat. During the process, Wolf appeared. Jeebee squatted over the pile of raw beef, guarding it, but threw what he estimated to be about ten pounds of it, piece by piece, to his partner while the rest finished cooking. He figured that Wolf had earned his share of the calf meat. Besides, it would have been impossible to protect all of the food from him, in any case, while Jeebee was cooking it.

Once the beef looked done, Jeebee took what he had been able to guard and wrapped this in one of his blankets, which he tied into a bag with some of his extra thongs.

With apologies, he pressed Sally once more into service after all so that he could kneel on her back. He tied the bundle of cooked meat as close as possible to three of the ropes holding up the net of the main packload. His new package hung down a little farther than the packload itself. But Jeebee had put it up at arm’s length from a kneeling position on Sally’s back, and the trunk was absolutely vertical.

Jeebee did not think that Wolf could leap high enough to get his teeth into it. Wolf watched from below.

The daylight was ending. Jeebee went back to his single blanket and the fire. Wolf lay down opposite him and regarded Jeebee somberly.

Jeebee knew how the other was feeling and did not blame him. By Wolf’s standards, Jeebee should have eaten as much as he could hold of the meat, and then left it to Wolf to fill himself up with as much as he could hold.

In fact, Jeebee could have done so. But he knew that even with his stomach full, Wolf would still keep snatching up pieces of meat and running off with them to cache them someplace else, until all was gone.

He apologized to Wolf—not that it made any difference to the other, but it made Jeebee feel better—and then sat down with his back against the tree trunk, watching the fire and thinking deeply. He was on the verge of probably the most serious decision he had made since leaving Stoketon.