Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 28

So began some of the busiest weeks of Jeebee’s life.

Late summer, if not fine early fall weather, clear and warm, still held the land. The days were still long, and it seemed to Jeebee that most of their useful length was in the afternoon hours.

He took the utmost advantage of this, rising before daylight to make his arrival at the ranch as early as possible. Every trip down there, now, he brought back something; even his backpack would be stuffed full of small items such as used nails, screws, or cloth in any size and shape.

Actually, in these early days, his time was spent mainly in working at the ranch itself. In addition to its tractors, cars, pickup trucks, and the one snowmobile, there were the two wagons of different sizes. Both ran on regular car axles and had Y-shaped hitch devices so that they could be pulled by trucks or tractors.

The larger wagon was a flatbed affair, high-sprung to ride over small obstacles, but built to carry heavy and bulky loads. It had a plank bed, ten feet wide by twenty feet in length. Possibly, Jeebee thought, it had been used to bring fodder out where the range cattle could get at it at times of the year when ordinary graze was scarce.

In winter, with snow on the ground, it must have had its wheels changed for the equivalent of skis. He went looking for some such things, and found them, together with skis for the other, much-smaller, two-wheeled wagon, up on rafters in a half-burned outbuilding.

He left them where they were. He had no time to waste even examining them now. In any case, the larger wagon was no use at all to Jeebee. His two horses could certainly pull it across the flatlands, but not with a load of any weight on it.

Even if they had been able to, it would have been impossible to pull it up the open slopes of the foothills, where there were no roads, or even tracks on which to travel. He turned to examining the two-wheel trailer.

It was obviously homemade, mainly of metal. It had the shortened axle from some car, with two ordinary automobile wheels and extra-thick clumps of leaf springs between them and the trailer bed. The bed itself had been made of thick planks, covered with sheet metal to take the wear of use.

It was surrounded by a four-bar railing of welded, one-and-a-half-inch pipe on posts of heavier pipe placed vertically, three feet high. The railing at the back was a gate that hinged at the base and had both planking and sheet metal across it so that it could be let down as a ramp up which the trailer could be loaded. The scraped and worn metal sheeting of the bed was about the dimensions of that in the back of a small pickup truck.

The hitch on its front was obviously designed to be fastened to the back of a tractor or a truck. Probably, thought Jeebee, a tractor. Its heavy construction would make it capable of carrying equipment, and other small but heavy loads, out into open areas where it was needed.

Someone had also welded a skid to the middle of the back bar of the frame that held the trailer bed. Jeebee had no idea why. But the skid was ideal for his needs, pulling the loaded wagon up slopes where its back end might otherwise drag on the ground.

As it was, when the two-wheeled wagon stood unhitched on the level, as now, it was tilted only slightly to the rear, resting on the tip of the skid. Obviously, with a tractor pulling it, it would move forward with its bed level and the end of the skid would ride half a foot above the ground.

This was something that Sally and Brute might be able to pull together, if they were willing to work as a team. Also, something they might be able to bring up the untracked slopes between the ranch and his cave.

Jeebee went searching for some sort of double yoke the two horses could wear to pull in tandem. He found nothing, however, and decided he was just as glad he had not.

On the uneven footing of the slopes, where the two horses might not have their backs level at all times, they were probably better off in separate harnesses. With such harnesses, closely tied together, but not so close that one would pull the other off balance by stepping downhill suddenly, they would be much safer.

Accordingly, he made two harnesses out of rope, wrapping soft cloths around any parts of the rope that might chafe. He also worked out a fairly complicated rope tie that would fasten both harnesses to the Y-point of the hitch.

The tie would undoubtedly wear thin and break from time to time, but the ranch had plenty of rope, and the tie could always be replaced.

The day he finished all this it was barely noon. He had come down alone on Brute, so he spent the rest of the day scouting the area between the ranch and his meadow to find a route that followed the gentlest possible slopes. He did not have a great deal of choice in most places. Still, he ended by finding a route that he estimated would probably take three hours or more for the horses with the trailer loaded. But at least it ought to be possible to them.

He had been riding only Brute lately to give Sally a rest after her recent days of having to carry both him and what he was bringing back from the ranch. But the day after scouting the new route, he brought both horses down early.

At the ranch, Brute objected even to being put into his harness. But then, Brute could be expected to object to about anything. Sally was clearly not too pleased with hers, either, but she made no important protest.

The real test came after they had both been harnessed to the empty trailer wagon and Jeebee tried leading them with the wagon behind them. It was well that he had taken a close grip on their halter ropes, because Brute’s first impulse was to bolt. He was clearly under the impression that if he ran quick enough and far enough, he would get rid of the obnoxious device that was trundling behind him.

Jeebee ended by spending most of the afternoon leading the horses around. It was not until late afternoon that he got to the point where he thought he could try standing in the wagon and driving them.

He had rigged long, double reins to each horse. It was not so much that he felt that he needed to hold all four lines in his hands at once as it was the fact that both horses had been trained to neck reining, in which the rein was merely laid against the side of their necks to signal a turn. He had considered that on the slopes with the trailer, a rein could easily fall against the side of a horse’s neck accidentally. Jeebee wanted to take as few chances as possible. If he could train them to mouth reining when they were pulling together like this, it would be safer.

The driving was only partly successful. Jeebee at last gave up trying it. He told himself that in any case, he would not be riding in the trailer when they were actually going up the slopes. He would be walking and leading the horses. Not only was that safer, but they would have load enough without adding his weight to it.

It was getting late in the day. He gave up his original hope of bringing the wagon back to the cave this trip, and unhitched both horses. He rode Brute back, with Sally on a lead rope, as usual.

The next morning early he took them down again, harnessed them to the trailer, and was about to take it back empty as a practice run. But the sheer need to make each trip count as much as possible caused him to put a few items in it.

He bundled these in an old blanket and tied it down to the trailer bed, above the axle. Rope anchored the bundle to the metal railing on all four sides.

Feeling reasonably certain that it would not shift, he began driving the horses along the flatlands, northward, for a little distance. His newer, easier route did not begin until they had reached a sort of cut into the foothills, about half a mile from the ranch house.

Moving across the open flatlands, Brute settled down somewhat to pulling with Sally. Jeebee was optimistic that with time the male horse would become completely used to the work.

When they got to the cut, Jeebee got out of the wagon and began leading the animals. Brute was, if anything, relieved to be led. Still, there were problems of turns, and places where their path was along the bottom of one slope with another at an angle to it, so that the trailer traveled tilted up on one side for a little distance. About twenty minutes into the foothills, the rope hitch broke and had to be retied, so that they were a good four hours finally getting to the cave.

The final half hour of daylight barely saw them into the campsite. Jeebee unhitched the relieved horses inside the closed wire fence to protect the trailer and its load from Wolf. Then he put them in the wooden corral he had been building and carried the bundle into the inner room of the cave.

He started a fire and went back outside to the trailer, closing the fence behind him.

The moment he did, Wolf materialized out of the last of the gathering gloom, and Jeebee came back out of the fenced-in area to go through their regular evening set of greetings. Then Wolf, after some hesitation, gave the trailer as thorough an examination through the fence as he could. Jeebee had carefully placed it so the rope of the harnesses and the trailer hitch were beyond his reach.

Satisfied at last, Wolf came to the fire and lay down.

Sitting, watching the other, Jeebee told himself that Wolf must almost certainly have been following him, out of sight, down to the ranch these last few days, or even weeks. In fact, Wolf had probably been making the route down and back to the ranch parallel to him on many of his trips.

He had certainly not appeared where Jeebee could see him. But that was Wolf’s nature. He had been equally slow to approach Paul’s wagon. He would not want to come into any unknown place until he was sure it was safe to do so, no matter how used he was to seeing it from a distance. Undoubtedly, Jeebee thought as he finally rolled himself in his blankets, Wolf would end up in the long run coming into the buildings with him. Which might pose a problem in Jeebee’s gathering and collecting things he wanted to take back to the cave.

He turned out to be right within the next week. Five days later Wolf appeared just before he got to the ranch and came with him to the edge of its inhabited areas. In the next couple of days he came increasingly closer, until he was actually in among the buildings.

However, after a certain amount of limited exploring, staying as close to Jeebee as he could most of the time, Wolf made himself scarce once more. In the days that followed, Jeebee found that the problem he anticipated never really materialized. Wolf remained shy of entering any enclosed area. Also, many days he simply was not there.

Jeebee realized after some thought that most of his partner’s days needed necessarily to be given to hunting for needed food. Wolf might take some time off from this, but he could not take much. Normally, Jeebee ended up alone with the horses, in his process of getting what he wanted from the ranch.

He blamed himself for not thinking of making use of the two-wheeled wagon before. With it, he could have brought up the two-by-fours and much of the other lumber in just a few loads, if not in one large load. He had carefully been increasing the amount carried in the trailer, and watching the horses to be sure he did not work them too hard. It was as necessary to him, as to them, that they keep their strength.

Now he got into necessarily heavier loads, and into loads he had not thought of carrying originally. Ignored by himself as well as the raiders was an aluminum building set off at some distance from the rest of the ranch structures. This was something he recognized as a pole barn, a structure made of poles and aluminum sheets solely for the purpose of housing and protecting baled hay from the weather so that it could be stored into the winter and its contents available for use to whatever horses or other such animals were at the ranch. It had been set apart like that simply because hay caught fire very easily, and the whole structure could be destroyed in a twinkling by a carelessly dropped cigarette.

Now, on seeing it, he realized that he would have to lay in a supply of fodder for the two horses during the winter months up at the cave. Here was the fodder, ready for him, and the trailer could transport it. Not only that, but he found his attention attracted by the pole barn itself. Its doors, sides, and roof were modular, light enough to carry, and of a size that could be carried in the two-wheel trailer.

The side poles were set in the earth. The rafters were attached to horizontal boards nailed between the side and corner poles of the barn. The wall and ceiling strips of aluminum were four feet wide to bridge the distance between poles and some ten feet in height. All together they enclosed a remarkable amount of baled hay.

He could strip the siding and roof off, take the rafters and dig up the poles and simply transport the whole thing to the cave. On second thought, he need not even dig up the poles. He could cut and set log poles at the cave to attach the aluminum strips to. All in all, it was well worth the days it would cost him to take apart and transport the movable part of the pole barn and its contents.

He did so, accordingly, during part of the following week. The segments of the pole barn made an awkward, but not over-heavy load for the trailer. The hay was a slower business, not only to transport but to load—and it drove him crazy with the chaff and straws that worked their way into his hair and through his clothing to itch him to a frenzy.

Nonetheless, finally it was all done, and he had a strange sense of pride at looking at it, set up, filled with fodder, and ready to take care of the horses during the winter.

He turned back to moving his other necessities up to the cave and getting the cave itself finished. He was racing against the calendar. He wanted all his needed materials up at the meadow before snow came.

Two of his most difficult trips came when he began to break loose both the front and back doors of the ranch, complete with their frames. One of these at a time was a full load for the horses to pull to the cave. He was forced to make two trips to get them both up.

It took a good deal of muscle on his part to transfer each one to the trailer, even once he had loosened them from the house. But he must have them. He had decided he would need solid-core, outer doors for his cave because he wanted them to be as resistant to low temperatures, wind, and snow as possible.

The frames were necessary because Jeebee had no faith in his ability to either build a door frame or hang the door within one. He had heard once that it was a tricky thing to do. The door had to be hung just right, both vertically and in the frame. In the end he got both of them up to the cave, where he put the first one into the opening he had left for it in the outer wall.

His weather front for the excavated home was now complete. Only the interior remained undone. But he could take his time about the work inside, he told himself.

He celebrated that day by taking down the wire fence. It was only late afternoon, but Wolf had already returned and watched him remove it.

To his surprise—although afterward, thinking about what he knew of wolf behavior, it should not have been—Wolf did not at once enter into the territory that the fence had guarded.

Instead, he began by taking his time about making a leisurely approach to the now rolled-up fencing, lying in the meadow a little way from where it had been set up. Finally, he got close enough to sniff it over completely, both the fencing and the angle-iron posts that had secured it. But then, little by little he came deeper into the earlier-denied space until he reached the wall itself, which he then examined closely, from one end to the other.

The next morning, after Wolf had left, Jeebee began work inside the wall.

His last work outside had been to put a roof over the end of it that was far enough away from the face of the cliff so that the space needed bridging—that space where he hoped to set up his smithy. He had needed to fit the rest of the roof tightly against the face of the bluff, digging into the actual earth, with wood slanting upward into it so that any rain would run off. Later on he would undoubtedly find chinks and openings in the roof and wall, but he could then patch them with clay. When winter came, snow and ice would help by filling any openings and freezing them shut.

He was so concerned with having the structure tight that when he finally went in at last to start work on the inner cave section, he discovered something he had completely forgotten. With the wall up and the roof in position, it was too dark inside to see what he was doing.

He had already established that the solar blanket would charge the car batteries, even if it took some time to do it. But he found that working in constant gloom, he used up the batteries’ charge faster than he could replace it.

He found his solution in connecting the batteries to the ceiling lights of the cars. The idea of using these had occurred to him earlier; but he had forgotten it. Now, it turned out to be ideal. The automobile interior lights gave him more than adequate illumination, and drained a battery only slowly.

But in the end he finally gave up and went back down to take out one of the ranch house’s unbroken windows and bring it back to put it in a space he cut in his front wall.

Accordingly, he lost another day and a half of working time before he was able to resume excavation of the cave’s interior in earnest.

He had made some preliminary sketches of how he might do the timbering. Now he began work by digging back the earth that faced the front wall from a few feet short of the end opposite to the blacksmithing area and over to the point where the bluff itself curved back to make the smithy space.

He had to pause occasionally to let dust clear the air of the cave and settle. This slowed him down still further, but he developed the habit of stepping out and doing some other little chore for a while. Eventually, however, he had created a space about four feet deep with a level floor. It was as far as he could go, simply digging.

He began the putting up of two-by-fours as studs, and building a second, interior wall, topping it off with an inner roof to hold back the sandy soil of the bluff above him. He would timber a bit, dig a little further, then timber again. Eventually, he planked between the studs of his inner wall as far as the curve of the bluff, leaving a space in it three feet in from the outer wall, and leaving a space in both outer and inner walls that would be filled by the two doors he had brought from the ranch house.

Once he had done this, he was ready to dig and timber the inside room of his cave. But his estimate of materials had been woefully short. He was forced into more trips to the ranch for used lumber and nails.

With these up at the meadow, finally, he began to work through the space of the door opening he had left in the inner wall.

He timbered as he went, and gradually excavated a room about eight feet wide and ten feet deep, with an interior ceiling over his head, both to support the earth above and keep it from trickling down upon him.

He had begun the interior room deliberately at a level a good two and a half feet above the level of the front room he had made with his two walls. Now, he was attempting to put to use something he had read about, which evidently worked in the building of igloos and snow caves. An igloo, he had read years ago, had its entrance, and a small interior area, below the level of a higher shelf on which much of the actual living was done. This arrangement caused a cold air barrier to form in the lower area. The heavier cold air below could not rise; so the warmth above was not lost to the icy outside temperatures.

The theory was undoubtedly excellent, but he found that in practice, even with both doors open to the outside, after he had worked a short while, the air began to grow bad. There was no real circulation into the area where he was digging.

He was forced to stop. Clearly he would have to provide some air circulation to the cave.

Happily, he had already made some plans to solve not only the circulation problem but the problem of heating the cave at the same time.

He went up to the top of the bluff, and by measuring, positioned himself over the space he had already cleared in the original hole, below. He began to dig a slanting hole down from there for about twelve feet. At this point he was sure he was well below the ceiling he would be excavating up to for the inner cave.

He went back to digging within the cave and soon, at what would be the left side of the inner room, as seen from the entrance, broke through to the point where the hole had been opened to the top of the bluff. He had brought up a length of chimney pipe from a dusty, long-unused, potbellied heating stove in one of the outbuildings of the ranch. He poked this up through the hole to just above ground level at the bluff’s top and anchored the pipe in place. Then he began building a clay-mortared stone fireplace and chimney up to and around the pipe.

Now that he had ventilation in one wall of the cave, he returned to the digging. Air came in through the open doors and was warmed by his body heat and exited up the pipe. When he experimented with the doors closed, still enough air leaked in to keep it fresh while he worked. Whether it would be safe to build a fire in the fireplace was another question.

He was extremely doubtful that his crude heating plant would work at all, or that if it did, it would not also smoke him out or otherwise asphyxiate him. But he built a fire in it with the doors open and there was a moment of extreme jubilation on his part when he found that it drew quite well. Even with both doors closed, it would draw, and the firelight within it illuminated the cave somewhat.

The illumination was not great, but it was enough to let him do without even the interior car lights if he had to.

It was only a stop-gap form of illumination, but would have to do for the moment. It was time for him to go hunting again. He had been doing a minimum amount of gathering meat, grudging the time that it took away from his work. But he was now scraping bottom from his last slaughtering trip to the flatlands, and the last of the meat had not really kept too well. It had not made him sick. But even though the nights were much cooler, outdoors it was still nowhere near refrigerator, let alone freezer temperatures.

Accordingly, that evening, by an outside fire—for Wolf would still not go into the inner room of the cave—he made plans to go down to the flatlands for at least a couple of days. The first he would spend hunting. The next would be at the ranch, gathering up at least several more of the vehicle batteries.

The air was chill in spite of the fire and he thought he felt a hint of snow in the dark night air around him. He changed his mind. He had originally been thinking of riding Brute down and taking Sally along as a packhorse to carry the meat and the batteries—which together would not make too much of a load for her.

Now he decided to take the trailer. He had put off bringing up the skis for it. He should get those and keep them with the trailer; after first finding out how they went on. He would need to have the necessary nuts, bolts, and wrenches—or whatever—with him to put them on in case he was caught unexpectedly by snow.

The next morning was frosty. He harnessed both horses to the trailer and started down. It was now only mid-September. He had thought about the possibility of freakish early snowstorms, but it had really not come home to him until now what a difference it would make for him if one caught him unprepared, with wind and an abrupt, steep drop in temperature.

Even on the drive down to the ranch, the wind picked up and became colder. He was glad, and he was sure the horses were glad as well, to get to the ranch. He tied them in the shelter of one of the partially burned outbuildings, and went himself to look in the outbuildings where he had seen the skis for the two wagons. He had merely looked at the skis the time before, registering the fact they were there. He had not examined them.

Now that he climbed up to the rafters and looked at them closely, he discovered that the skis for the larger wagon were unusable. One had its tip ruined by fire, the other was half burned away. The skis for the small trailer were untouched, but as he looked at them, common sense suddenly shoved his imagination aside.

He could use them on light snow over level ground. But in deep or slippery snow and upslopes, the weight of the trailer alone would be too much for the horses to pull.

He took them down anyway. Tied to one of them, in a large and strong cloth sack that had printing—now unreadable—stamped in black upon its once-white surface, he found all the necessary parts to connect them in place of the wheels.

He took them to the trailer, and put them in it. A few solitary but heavy flakes were drifting on the wind now and one lit on the back of his hand to touch him with a sudden sensation of an icy fingertip.

He looked at it in the moment before it melted from the heat of his body and disappeared. After a moment’s thought, he took the hitch of the unloaded trailer and pulled it himself into the same outbuilding that was sheltering the horses.

If it turned into a real snowfall, they might all have to hole up here at the ranch for a day or so. He still found it hard to imagine a real blowing blizzard this early in the year. But the sky above him seemed to sag low with the weight of the dark clouds that hung overhead from horizon to horizon, and the snowflakes were coming at him more thickly.

He decided to ignore the storm, for the moment at least. He was dressed warmly, and by turning the collar of his jacket up around his neck and ears, he could ignore the cold wind. He had already started to think of what he could do if the trailer proved unusable. Not only the trailer, he reminded himself, but the horses. Deep snow would make it almost impossible for them to get through. Certainly, it would make it impossible for them to drag any amount of weight.

What he would have to do was build a light sledge that he could pull himself. Then he could go on foot down into the lowlands on snowshoes, which were one of the things he had found in the house here. That was handy, though he had researched them before leaving Stoketon. He knew two patterns for building them, including a temporary, emergency kind that could be built by someone who was lost in wilderness in sudden snow.

He didn’t have to try to make them now, and in fact had already removed the snowshoes he had found, along with the skis, to the cave—as well as the heavy snowmobile boots.

He went now to look for lumber that he could peel from the outbuildings of the ranch, lumber that would make it possible for him to build the kind of one-man sledge he had in mind.

As he had begun to cannibalize the ranch house to provide materials for his cave, he had discovered that there might be benefits in leaving the undamaged parts of the house and its outbuildings as intact as possible, for purposes of further shelter or use. Accordingly, he examined first the outbuildings that had been most damaged by the fire.

The worst off of these was a building that had originally, evidently, been little more than a roof and a couple of walls. It had been either the blacksmithy for the ranch or the building in which a portable forge had been set up to do blacksmithing. He had already discovered an anvil there, which he meant to bring back to the cave for his own use once he got down the list of other priorities to it. Right now, the need for it was far enough in the future not to concern him.

There was almost nothing left of this building. Certainly there had been nothing about it of the kind of material of which he was most in need.

What he had hoped for was to find a couple of six-to-eight-foot planks, both at least an inch in thickness. If he found them he could saw their ends on the diagonal, or if he could discover a saw around the place that would let him saw in a curve, he could put a continuous upward curve to the bottom edge at the end of each plank. The two planks could then form the runners of his sledge. After that it would merely be a matter of bracing between them with a few two-by-fours and putting light planks across the two top edges to make a bed. The whole thing need only be heavy enough to carry about a hundred pounds of beef, or an equal load.

But there was nothing left in the smithy outbuilding. He went on next to the most ruined shed, which had evidently been a storeplace for odds and ends of small equipment and tools in need of mending, or merely those that were potentially too useful to throw away.

This building had been only about half destroyed by the fire. Jeebee looked it over, but saw nothing of the thickness he wanted. He was just about to leave when he realized that what he was looking for was under his feet.

The floorboards of the shed, in fact the floorboards of all the sheds, were of thicker planks than those used in the sides of the buildings or the ranch house.

He had already taken a number of hand tools up to the cave. But lately he had seen the wisdom of keeping at least one of each of the more common tools down at the ranch, for work there as well. Accordingly, he went to his store of these things and found a claw hammer and a crowbar.

With these he pried up a couple of the floorboards. He found that there was a bonus attached, once he had. For not only were the planks as thick as he wanted, but they had been put down with nails larger than any of those he had so far salvaged from their original places in the house and other buildings.

He went to work with a saw that decidedly was not made to cut curves. Not only was it a straight-cut saw—unthinkingly, earlier, he had taken the best saw with him—but it was rusty and dull. But as it got close to noon, he finally got the sawing done and began to join the two planks with the heavy nails driven through their sides and into the ends of a couple of braces made of two-by-fours.

Planking over the top of the sledge with the lightest boards he could find took less than another hour. He attached a towing rope to the front ends of the runner planks. The end product was good. But he began to be a little worried as he looked at it and realized how much dead weight he would be pulling, even without any load on it. Heading into a blizzard with this dragging behind him, fully loaded, might be more than he could manage. He needed to save weight some way, but certainly he could not save it either on the runners or on the bracing boards.

He went looking for something else to cover the body of the sledge. He found it in a piece of half-inch plywood that had been used in a building that had evidently done double duty as a temporary barn for about three horses or three head of cattle. The plywood had been used to form partitions between the stalls.

Swearing under his breath at his waste of time, he removed the boards and replaced them with the plywood.

When he was done, the sledge was still not what might be called “light.” But it was the best he could do. Wrapped up in his work, he had almost forgotten the weather. But now he stepped outside the building in which he had been working and saw that the day had grown very dark. The snow was no longer a scatter of soft flakes, but hard, almost invisible pellets of ice. There would be no trying to get back up to the campsite and the cave today.

When the morning dawned, there were a good four inches of grainy snow on the ground. But the wind had ceased, and although the temperature was low, the absence of movement in the cold air made it bearable. It was even more bearable as the last of the clouds disappeared, and the sun came out.

The snow was not so deep and the temperature was not so low that what had fallen might not quickly turn into slush or ice, which could be slippery underneath the hooves of the horses. Still… he made a quick decision to load the sledge on the trailer and head back to the camp.

Once there, he could find shelter for the horses in the corral he had built abutting the small, right-angled wall of his smithy-to-be. The trailer would be safe at the campsite, and he would also have the sledge on hand. So that if the weather continued to be bad and more snow fell, he could head down into the flatlands with it alone.

On foot. As he had early imagined himself doing.