Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 29

It was a long, hard struggle back to the cave. In spite of the fact that the air temperature stayed low, the horses found most of the going slippery, and the trailer was evidently a problem to pull, particularly when they ran into smaller drifts.

Jeebee went ahead of them to break trail and to make sure that the horses did not wander into a drift too deep to pull the trailer through. Its only load was the sledge, but under these conditions that was enough.

They reached the meadow in late afternoon. The bright, cloudless sky overhead, and the fact that the surrounding trees blocked out much of what little wind stirred, gave the meadow an appearance of being warmer than it actually was. Jeebee unhitched the trailer without bothering to take the sledge out, unharnessed the horses, and put them in the corral.

He went directly to the shelter of the cave for himself and built a fire in the fireplace. Wolf, who at first had been reluctant to venture inside the newly built wall at all, had some days since worked himself up to coming into the outer part. He had inspected every feature of the space minutely. Much of the wood bore exploratory chew marks, and one of the vertical studs had obvious stains. Wolf had found a corner of the wall where Jeebee had built a rough frame for a cloth weather barrier to stand between the smithy and the rest of the lower front room, and adopted it as a nice place to curl up and sleep.

Jeebee closed the outer door, now, but did not latch it; merely pulling it to, and fastening it with a loop of leather thong after Wolf followed him in as far as the front room. He was confident that Wolf would push on the door if he wanted to get out and would discover the thong. Even if he didn’t recognize that it held the door closed, he would almost certainly bite it—and thereafter Wolf would go for the thong whenever he wanted the door open.

Jeebee lit one of his battery-fed interior car lights and kept it lit long enough to get a fire started in the fireplace, using the dead wood and tinder he now kept stored beside it, ready for use.

The fire blazed up. It began to warm the interior room almost immediately. Jeebee turned off the electric light. Looking around in the firelight at the unfinished cave, he thought that it was not much of a place to come home to, offering little more than warmth and shelter. Only its front wall was finished. Its two side walls, including the one with the fireplace, were still in process of building, and the innermost wall was simply a slope of dirt and sand that every so often crumbled loose and slid down to join the dirt underfoot. Jeebee told himself that he must get around eventually to flooring the interior room, once he had finished sealing the walls, ceiling, and all else.

Meanwhile he had his fireplace. He had moved his packload bed inside and put those things like bacon, wrapped, up on the yet-unceilinged rafters, out of reach of anyone but himself.

Feeling secure, therefore, in a sudden burst now of good feeling at being out of the weather and warm again, Jeebee left the interior door open and tried to coax Wolf to come in by the fire. But the most he was able to achieve was a hesitant muzzle thrust partway through the door opening, just above the threshold.

Jeebee gave up on his coaxing. He turned his attention to moving his bed close to the fire for the night. Near it, even with the inner door open, and the outer one barely closed, he was comfortable enough. There was plenty of draft coming in to keep the fire going. The only thing to concern himself about was that he might run short of firewood in the night.

He went forth into the cold once more to gather sufficient heavy pieces of wood to last the night, and went to bed. He knew he would be roused by the increasing chill from time to time to add wood to the fire before it went out.

The last thing he remembered before dropping off was a bit of dirt falling from the unfinished ceiling into his hair. He brushed the sand and dirt away, sleepily, and muzzily reminded himself that he needed to make himself a cap for winter use. Fully dressed and feeling the warmth of the fire on his face, he drifted off, thinking that he would try out the snowshoes tomorrow.

But even during the night, the weather warmed. Jeebee woke up, with the fire out entirely, but was still comfortable underneath the two blankets over him and inside the clothes he was wearing.

He felt his way across the short distance of earth to the inner door and opened it to see the early-morning light. The outer door was standing wide, and the chewed remnant of the thong still hung from the jamb.

Wolf had wanted out, but he had not left the meadow. He was curled up in the sunlight outside. He got to his feet, shook himself, and came over to greet Jeebee as Jeebee stumbled out of the door. They had the brief interchange of greetings that Wolf usually insisted on before leaving mornings. Then he was gone.

Jeebee went through his own private morning process. He had changed his mind about the snowshoes. The day was warming up toward normal autumnal temperatures, and the snow was not so much melting as simply evaporating about him. A soft wind blew.

The most urgent thing, he realized, was what he had set out to do the day before. That was hunt for food. He hated to impose on the horses after their long haul through the snow of yesterday. But if one of them could stand the imposition better, it would be Brute. So it was Brute he saddled, and took Sally on a lead rein, not toward the ranch at all, but directly down and out into the flatlands to look for cattle.

Once down on the flat, however, he changed his mind. He angled southeastward until he hit the line of poles that had once carried electricity to the ranch. They paralleled a road that he had assumed was the ranch’s access to some main highway, somewhere to the east. The snow was now only a thin coating of icy crust on the land.

It had occurred to him that with the landscape suddenly all the same color, landmarks he had unconsciously become used to would be either hidden or changed, and it would be wise to have an anchor point. He could use his orienteering skills, but the poles were visible for some distance and could serve as an easy reference line. He could go out along them, and if he felt like looking northward for possible cattle, he could go in that direction with the assurance that if he only turned back southward, he would eventually come upon the line of poles again, which would lead him back to the ranch and familiar territory.

With the mountains behind him there would be no lack of at least two high points that could be seen for miles. If he took bearings on two such points, this would give him a point he could always get back to. It was almost impossible to get lost if you had a compass and a mountainous horizon.

It would not be the most direct route if he had to do that, back to the meadow and his cave, but it was a sure way of getting home again.

He followed the line of poles and rode slowly out along it, slightly south of east as to direction, according to his compass.

He stayed with the poles, but both south and north of them he swept the horizon steadily with his binoculars for any sight of cattle.

About midday he spotted some specks south of him, in the distance. He had counted poles as he went and he was just past the two hundred and sixteenth of these when he spotted whatever it was he was seeing to the south.

Now he wished he had had the forethought to bring along the hatchet he had found at the ranch and carried up to the cave, where it had proved to be very handy indeed. However, he had the next best thing in his smaller, working sheath knife at his belt.

Using this, he hacked a strip from the two hundred and sixteenth pole, exposing the lighter color of new wood by removing gray, weathered surface. The slash was on the south side of the pole, and should be recognizable through his binoculars from some little distance. He put the knife back in its sheath, redid the button closure, and once more located the specks with his binoculars.

They had moved, if at all, not very far from where he had first seen them. He rode toward them.

He was lucky. It was a cow accompanied by her almost full-grown calf. The calf had nowhere near the weight that it would carry once it was full grown, but it stood nearly as tall as its mother, and its frame was nearly as large.

Like the other cattle he had found and shot before, these two let him get quite close before they showed signs of moving off. Nearly all these cattle must have been used to being approached by humans on horseback and in vehicles, up until just a few years before, and there were not that many predators around that came either with horses or with vehicles to threaten them.

Jeebee killed the calf with a single shot, which was not only easier on his ammunition supply, but more merciful to the animal. From this short distance there was no problem in making such a quick kill with a single bullet.

For a few minutes he thought he would have trouble getting the cow to leave the dead calf so that he could safely get down and begin butchering. But when he untied Sally’s lead rein and galloped Brute at the cow, whooping and waving his cap over his head, she took fright and lumbered off in a clumsy gallop of her own. He got down and began the messy business of slicing through the skin of the calf and butchering off as much meat as possible, to be carried back in one of the plastic tarps again.

Done at last, he was ready to go. He found, as he had suspected, that in the process of chasing off the cow, getting down, and butchering the calf, he had lost his bearings in the still-white wilderness that surrounded him. On the off chance that he might not be too far away to see it, he unslung the binoculars and looked for the slash that identified the two hundred and sixteenth pole. But he could not even see the poles.

He secured the load of fresh, slippery, warm chunks of beef in its plastic and net on Sally’s back, tied her lead rein back to its anchor at the back of Brute’s saddle, mounted Brute, and using his compass, headed northward.

Either the cow and her calf had been moving away from him, all the time he was bearing down on them, or else the road had taken a turn to the north on its way to the highway—he had never been out along it this far before—but he rode for some little while before he began to pick up what looked like a row of black dots right on the horizon.

Reasoning that these would be the tops of the electric poles, the greater part of their length cut off from him by some swell in the ground ahead, he put aside the binoculars and simply rode directly toward where he had seen them. In about fifteen minutes they became visible to the naked eye, and then seemed to grow up longer and longer from the ground beneath them as he got close.

He rode right up to them and began to hunt to his left, which was westward and back toward the ranch, for one that bore the slash mark he had made. He did not find it and it occurred to him that he might well have gone toward the cattle on more of a slant back westward toward the foothills than he had thought, so that now he had come back to the line of poles behind the two hundred and sixteenth one.

But in any case, his compass showed him the way westward, and he knew he was heading toward the ranch and the foothills. That was all he really needed to know. He rode past several poles before he noticed something that caused him to rein Brute in sharply.

He was astonished at his lack of observation in not seeing it before. On the other side of the poles, there was a track in the snow. It was a track of boots, going in the same direction he was now going. He lifted the reins and Brute moved forward until he halted him again right over the track. The boots were small and tended to shuffle through the snow. Whoever it was, was walking—which should not be happening in this territory, where even if there were no vehicles that ran anymore, there was an abundance of riding horses. And it was headed toward a ruined ranch, which any neighbor by this time must know had no life left within it.

The track could only be that of a stranger, as he was a stranger, to this area. And any stranger was a possible danger. His first instinct was to turn and run. Then curiosity got the better of him.

He unslung his binoculars and looked ahead. Clear in the binoculars was a figure, heavily muffled in clothes and trudging, as the tracks indicated, toward the ranch—which was still out of sight. There was a pack on its back, but it seemed to be empty, and the figure was not carrying a rifle, or in fact any other visible weapon.

Jeebee reminded himself that the other could well have something like a revolver tucked into his belt in front. A revolver that could be pulled as the figure turned to face him, if he came up to it.

But at the same time, by contrast, he himself was almost a traveling armory of guns and knives.

He decided to catch up with the figure, but as quietly as possible. He took the horses forward warily, still at a walk, but at a fast walk—a walk faster than the pace the person ahead of him was making.

The sound of their hooves on the ground was muffled by the snow above it. Jeebee and the two animals went forward very quietly indeed. Still, he could hardly believe it when he came closer and closer to the walking figure and the other did not stop and turn to see who was following.

Now that he was only twenty or thirty feet behind the intruder, Jeebee began to read the expression of the other’s body. Whoever it was, his shoulders slumped, and he was pushing forward as if at the end of whatever strength was in the body above the legs that kept moving.

If the other was really ready to drop from fatigue, as he well might be if he had been going any distance through this snow from the time the sun had risen, then perhaps he was too worn out to hear Jeebee approach behind him, or to look around and take ordinary precautions. Loosening his rifle in its holster,

Jeebee closed the gap between himself and the plodding shape. He moved up right behind it, then level with it, before, at last, the figure stopped, raised its head, and looked at him.

It was Merry. Her eyes were like black holes in a face that was as pale as the face of a person in a coma.

For a long moment she stared at him unbelievingly. Then immediately he was off his horse and had his arms around her. The minute she felt herself held she sagged so suddenly that he found himself holding her whole weight. He realized suddenly that she must be on the ragged edge of exhaustion, only being driven forward by whatever had kept her moving so far.

His arms holding her had pushed her clothing up around her face. He kissed the icy tip of her ear, which was all he could see.

“Merry,” he said, with his whole heart and body speaking the word. He felt her arms try to reach about him and drop.

“Are you able to ride?” he asked softly with his lips right next to her ear.

There was a moment, and then she nodded. He lifted her up on Brute, a dead weight at first, and then she tried to help him—but weakly. He got her into the saddle, then put his own left foot into the nearest stirrup and swung himself up behind the saddle, putting his foot into the other stirrup and pushing away her own right foot, which was instinctively feeling for the stirrup.

“Just sit,” he said softly into her closest ear. “We’ll ride together and I’ll take care of everything. Just lean against me. It’s going to take an hour or two to get where we’re going. So just take it as easy as you can, and remember, I’ll hold you. You won’t fall.”

He held her to him with one arm and handled Brute’s reins in the other hand. Brute was not pleased to be carrying double, but Jeebee responded savagely with rein and voice at Brute’s first movement to protest.

“Damn you,” Jeebee snarled, “walk straight!”

The surprised horse was remarkably obedient from then on through the trip to the cave. Sally followed on her lead rein with her usual good temper.

They rode forward at a walk because for all Jeebee wanted to get Merry back to the cave as quickly as possible, he felt it would be much easier on her if he did not even put the horses into a trot. In any case, they would have to slow down to a walk to climb the foothills.

After a while, he got his glasses out and looked ahead along the line of poles. Sure enough, his glasses picked out the dark tiny shapes of the ranch buildings up ahead. He turned and angled off in the northerly direction. As he got closer to the foothills, he steered for the cut up which he had begun his route with the trailer to the meadow. The easier slopes would be the easiest on Merry.

The route was still slippery, but the horses were more surefooted without the weight of the trailer pulling them back. They came eventually to the meadow and the cave, and Jeebee got down from Brute to carry Merry inside. He lit the electric lights with a reckless disregard for depleting the batteries and got a fire going in the fireplace. Only then did he think of unloading or unsaddling the two horses. They could wait a little longer. Merry came first.

He shut and latched the inside door, leaving the outside door open. He looked at the fire apprehensively. But apparently with the outer door open there were still enough air leaks, in and around the inner door as well as through the inner wall, that the fire continued to have enough draft to burn cheerfully.

He felt Merry’s forehead and it felt hot to him, but then his hands were still cold from being outside.

She grabbed his hand fiercely as he started to move away from her.

“Don’t leave me!” she said.

“It’s all right,” he told her softly. “I’m just going to get a thermometer to take your temperature. We’re home now. You’re safe. I’ll take care of you.”

He took the thermometer from his backpack, the same one he had carried in his medical kit from Stoketon, and put it in her mouth. After five minutes by his watch he took it out. She was not running a fever, as his cold hands had led him to believe. Instead her body temperature was a full three degrees below normal.

He piled everything warm he had upon her and built up the fire in the fireplace.

It came back to him then that the first thing to do with a person who has been overchilled is to get hot food into her. He had kept a soup continuously making over the fire when it was lit—a sort of pot-au-feu—using a bent metal rod from the ruined ranch house. He had stuck the rod into the ground beside the fireplace, its upper six inches bent at a right angle out over the flames, with a hook bent into its further end to hold the wire handle of a pot he had also taken from the ranch house. Swivel-ing the rod now, he put the pot above the flames.

Having done this, he went back and sat holding Merry’s hand while the soup heated. She lay with her eyes closed, and he did not try to talk to her. When the soup was heated, he filled a soup bowl and brought it to her.

The packload bed was so low that even kneeling beside it, he was too high. Still kneeling, he sat down on his heels and put the bowl of soup on the ground beside him. With his left arm he lifted her upper body into a half-sitting position and lifted a spoonful of the soup to her lips.

At first she seemed only able to take small sips. Then, she took larger ones. After a bit she was swallowing eagerly. But abruptly she closed her lips and shook her head slightly.

“No more,” she said. “Let me down.”

He laid her back on the bed. She closed her eyes and went almost immediately to sleep. He continued to sit beside her, feeding the fire and making sure the covers stayed piled on top of her. She had volunteered nothing about Paul, Nick, and the wagon. It was obvious something had happened to them or she would have mentioned them by now.

Plainly, there was a reason for her not speaking of them. Jeebee understood this out of his new knowledge of the world and himself. So he would not ask. When she was ready to tell him, she would. He suddenly remembered the horses.

It was probably better to take a chance and go out now to take care of them.

He did so, first unloading the bundle of meat from Sally. He put it safely within the latch door of the inner room, then took both horses to the corral and removed their saddles and blankets. He left them there and returned to Merry, who seemed not to have stirred. He took the pot of soup off the fire, and kneeling by the fire, filled a larger pot with chunks of the recently butchered calf meat and water.

This time he used another rod, bent roughly into a Y-shape at one end, to help support the increased weight of the bent-over end of the first rod. He hung the pot with the water and raw meat in it above the flames and began the slow process of cooking the meat he had just butchered.