Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 33

He remained scared. Meanwhile, the winter wore on, the temperature lowered, and the snow grew deeper, until at last the curve of icy temperatures turned upward, the snow cover gradually began to decrease again, and they moved at last into spring. Throughout all this time, there were no lack of problems and emergencies that for the moment had been able to shove Merry’s condition out of the immediate center of his mind.

But the moment any of these were past, it returned to center stage in his thoughts, as the Powder River Pass had both filled him with foreboding but drawn him toward it.

As soon as he was free to think of something other than immediate necessities, the fact of the approaching birth would come back to him, inescapable, ominous, beckoning.

Face it any way he might, it remained a certainty that he alone was the only person Merry would have to turn to for help when the hour came. He was far from confident about how much help he would be then, in that time in which the life of not only the child growing within her, but her own, would be at balance.

It was something he had never imagined having to face. He, Jeebee, with a critical responsibility for the safe birth of a child and its mother. Nor did it help that the child would be his own, and the mother of that child the one person he loved most on earth.

There was no way he could alter or control what would happen. He knew that; but knowing this did not change his feelings. He took his fears out in a savage attack on what would be needed when the time came. Even the temporary relief this work gave him had to come in the intervals between his normal duties of keeping them fed, housed, and protected.

Survival required that he keep up his hunts down on the flatlands. Half a dozen more times before spring came, he was caught by storms while he was down there. On five of these occasions he managed without trouble. He waited them out, warm enough—if not exactly comfortable—in his homemade sleeping bag, under the shelter of the sledge and the snow that quickly drifted over him.

But the sixth time, the storm lasted sixteen hours, and after the first ten switched direction a quarter of the way around the compass. So that from this new angle the wind blew clear the drift that had accumulated over him and the sledge.

He had to wrestle the sledge into a new position, with the numbingly cold wind and snow pushing against him as if the sledge were a wooden sail, fighting him every inch of the way.

He had been exhausted when he finally established his new position and the snow began to build about them again. He did not think he could have worked another fifteen minutes before reaching the limits of his strength. But as it was, he saved not only himself, but the load of frozen meat he already had on the sledge. A load, unfortunately, which had made the sledge that much more difficult to shift.

On one other trip he had missed his shot at a range bull, which had been the only animal he could find. He had wounded it, but not enough to even slow it down. It had charged him. Only the fact that he had dodged behind the sledge and the bull had tripped over a snow-covered corner of it, trying to get to him, had given him time to pump another shot in just behind its shoulder and bring it down. At that, it was still not dead. He had to fire another shot into it before it finally lay still.

In the same icy months of January through early March, up at the cave, Merry had experienced her own near escape. Investigating a slight noise in the outer room one afternoon, she had all but stepped out on top of a cougar, who had come in through the swinging wolf door that Jeebee had built for Wolf, into one wall of the smithy.

The cougar had been attracted by the smell of the stored meat. Frustrated, like Wolf, by the wire netting over the storage pit, it was hooking its claws into the mesh and trying to pull it up, and this had made the sound Merry had heard.

Merry reacted without thinking. She had been drying the last of the morning dishes when the noise caught her attention, and still held the dish towel. She ran at the bewildered cat, flailing at it with the towel and waving her arms wildly.

“Get away from our food!” she screamed.

The mountain lion bounded back past her, back along the cold room and through the wolf door into the smithy, and vanished from there into the brush. It left behind a few hairs on the wooden framing.

The look on its white-haired face had been one of sheer terror, in the face of the flapping dishcloth, and Merry found herself leaning against the frame of the inner door, laughing hysterically at the poor creature’s obvious stark fear and comical retreat.

The image of the predator fleeing from a furious, dish-towel-waving woman sent her into another bout of nearly uncontrollable laughter when she later told Jeebee the story.

Jeebee was not amused. Any wild animal, particularly one hungry enough to enter a place that must smell so thoroughly of humans and Wolf, was unpredictable. Any wild animal was dangerous if cornered, and Merry had very nearly cornered the cougar in the end of the cold room. Moreover, if it was as panic-stricken as Merry had said, it could have injured her just in its efforts to escape. The next day he tripled the two-by-fours reinforcing the vertical sides of the doorframe. Then anchored deeply in them two U-shaped iron hooks, which would hold a bar of axle iron to lock the door.

From then on, Merry kept the door barred, opening it only to Jeebee’s voice, or the whining and scratching of Wolf. Even then, before unbarring the door, she belted the revolver around her waist.

But in spite of the episode of the cougar, the glow that Jeebee had noticed in her on the evening he had learned he was to be a father, remained and deepened. Jeebee found it hard to describe, to himself or her.

“It’s a sort of happiness-of-satisfaction look,” he told Merry once.

“No,” she had answered, patting the beginning bulge of her belly complacently, “it’s just the mother-feeling.

“Isn’t that right, baby?” she said to the child inside her.

But then she looked up into Jeebee’s face.

“You know,” she said, “you look different, too.”

“I do?” Jeebee asked, astonished.

One of the things Merry had brought up from the ranch was the only mirror that had escaped being smashed by the raiders, the cover of the medicine chest in the ranch-house bathroom. Later on, when he was able to do so without Merry catching him at it, Jeebee looked at his bearded features in the glass. He tried very hard to see the difference Merry had mentioned. But as far as he could tell, it was the same old face.

Merry happened to come back to the inside room just as he turned from the mirror.

“Finally decided to shave it off?” she asked.

Merry had never liked Jeebee’s beard, but they had come to a compromise. He could wear it through the cold winter months. He had found it an actual asset in warmth for his face, particularly down in the open winds of the flatlands. But with the melting of the winter’s snow, his beard would also disappear.

“In the spring, as I promised you,” he said now.

He went out to check on his current charcoal-making fire. During his time back up at the cave, his days were filled with things like making more charcoal for his forge. This, and an ever-increasing list of other matters, always needed to be attended to. The consumption of charcoal had gone up because of the many things needing to be made of metal, particularly with the improvements they were both now adding to the interior room.

By the end of March, he had finished excavating back another five feet and walling in the final side of the room. Another week and the ceiling was completed. He and Merry had discussed a number of ways of sealing the walls, floor, and ceiling so that they would be able to keep the area clean. Jeebee had laid down a plank floor. Now even this should be sealed in some fashion that would keep the dirt from working up through the cracks between the planks.

Merry’s original use of old blankets and the like for throw rugs, while successful in creating warmth underfoot, particularly when feet were without boots or socks, was not a practical way to ensure cleanliness. This was because, in their limited space, it was impossible to do the constant, large amounts of washing and rewashing needed to keep the floor coverings fresh and safe.

It was finally decided they would put down a second floor on top of what was already there, with a sheet of plastic as a sealing layer between it and the underfloor. To do this they would have to wait until spring had advanced far enough to make the outbuildings at the ranch clear of drifted snow.

The sealing layer, Jeebee thought, could be made by joining the large plastic bags, each bag measuring three feet five inches by two feet ten inches, of which there was a tall stack, laid flat, in one of the outbuildings. He had come up with the idea of melting the edges of some of these bags together into one large sheet, using an iron rod, heated at the forge. The tricky part would be to get the rod at the right temperature and hold it there.

A sandwich of layers like that might keep dirt from working up into their rooms from underneath; both at the time of the birth and after the baby had come.

Finally, they were at the end of April, and the snow was rapidly disappearing. It seemed to evaporate almost as much as it seemed to melt. In fact, thought Jeebee, considering their altitude, a good deal of straight evaporation might indeed be removing it. Regretfully, he shaved his beard, and decided it was time to have a look at the ranch.

He chose to ride Sally, as the steadier of the two horses—particularly after a winter in which they had had no work at all, being neither ridden nor fitted with a packload—down to see how the buildings had weathered the winter.

It was necessary for him to pick his way with Sally. There were still spots where he had to get off and lead her, through drifts that still lay fairly deep in places where two slopes came together, but they made it down successfully. Out of curiosity he passed the shale slope and saw, surprisingly, that it was entirely clear of snow in certain places. The hole to the den, or whatever it might be high up on it, was now completely exposed.

That should have prepared him for what he would find at the ranch. But in spite of his realization of the dryness of the air, compared to what he had been used to in Michigan, and the effect of the recently sunny and warm days, he was surprised when he got there.

The ranch was already mostly clear of snow. It lingered only in shady places or where drifts had piled high. He was able to get into the outbuilding with the plastic bags and check the stack of them. Laid empty, and then piled, one on top of the other, he estimated the stack must contain at least a couple of hundred bags. He thought fleetingly that if the sealing of the floor worked, he might also eventually seal the ceiling, then after that, possibly the inside walls.

After a cursory look around the other buildings and what was left of the ranch house, he headed back to the cave, returning with as many bags as Sally could conveniently carry behind the saddle. He had more than enough to let him experiment at finding the right temperature to seal them.

It was something that would have to be discovered by trial and error. He remembered, almost wistfully, electric devices for sealing food-storage bags for the deep freezer. Once they had been for sale everywhere. If the ranch had owned something like that, perhaps with the solar-cell blanket he could have used it to seal the bag edges together.

In the next few weeks he experimented with his heated rod. The work was frustrating. It seemed the iron was always either too hot or too cool. If he got it to just the right temperature for a few moments, it had cooled again before he had completed what he had set out to do with it. But, eventually, he found the right temperature and built a rack over the forge. Then, by resting the rod in hooks on the rack at just the right height, for a specific time, he was able to get it warmed, or rewarmed just enough, but not too much, to work.

In the end he became expert at this, too.

He sealed enough bags together to make a plastic sheet a little larger in area than the floor of the inner room.

Together, he and Merry laid it down, sealing it with strips of narrow boards nailed on top of it at the bases of the vertical walls. After that, it was merely a matter of bringing up and nailing down the planks of the upper floor. They used the trailer to carry the planks. For by this time they were well into April and the ground was dry enough to hitch both horses to that vehicle for trips to the ranch.

Merry went with him on these trips. While there, she carefully planted sections of the potatoes she had saved in a cool corner of the inner room through the winter, for seed in the garden. She had some other seeds, which she planted as well, but Jeebee was too involved in his own concerns to pay much attention to what they were.

“Why do you want to do anything like this?” he asked her. “We’ll be gone by the time fall comes around.”

“You don’t dig and eat new potatoes in the fall,” Merry said.

She was right, of course.

He made no more objections to anything she decided to do, after that. In any case, there were other matters to occupy him.

With the total vanishing of the snow, Jeebee’s inner unease shifted unexpectedly into high gear. With the earth bare and new green stuff sprouting, it was now undeniable that time was on the march.

Until then he had been able to look out on the snow and say to himself, “It’s winter still. There’s a while yet. I’ve still got time to get ready.”

But the sight of the naked, burgeoning earth was like the ticking of a clock. They were little more than two months from the expected birth date.

He had memorized the books that Merry had taught him, line by line, like someone from a time before the written word had been invented. She would give him a sentence, have him repeat it back to her, then repeat it to himself again and again, until it came automatically to him. He found the repetition of the words comforting, even after he already knew the books backward and forward. Their words were something of authority, something to cling to.

At the same time, it did not tell him what he really wanted to hear—the fact that he would be able to handle his share of things when the time came. He searched between the words for that kind of reassurance, but could not find it. Then his mind went off in a dozen different directions to worry about a dozen other, different things.

He worried about Wolf. A pet dog could be jealous when a new baby came. That was common knowledge. Wolf, of course, was no pet. On the other hand, while a pet dog might be jealous, he was not likely to look on the baby as possibly something to eat.

“It’s good you’re going to have the baby in June,” Jeebee said to Merry. “It’s a stroke of luck.”

“Stroke of luck, nothing!” Merry answered cheerfully. “It’s a matter simply of counting the days forward. It takes nine months to produce a baby. That’s all you need to know.”

“Yes, yes,” said Jeebee, “I know that. That isn’t what I’m talking about. June’s the time when the testosterone in wolves is at its lowest. They’re at their least aggressive then.”

Merry, who had been cutting cloth for clothes for the baby, stopped abruptly in what she was doing.

“Aggressive? What do you mean—aggressive?”

“Oh, just what I say,” said Jeebee. He was suddenly upset at having mentioned the matter at all to Merry. “The high testosterone season is during the early winter months. January, February—like that. That’s when the wolves in a pack compete for position and breeding rights. Just the opposite in May and June.

June more than May is the time when they’re least competitive, and it’s at that time that the pups are born. Then all the wolves in a pack are concerned with all the pups. I’ve told you about this. They all help to feed the new ones, and baby-sit them if the mother has to go off for a while. What I was saying, was that we’ll be having our baby at just the time when Wolf is at his most friendly and helpful.”

“You mean he’s the least likely to be aggressive toward the baby?” Merry looked at him with narrowed eyes.

“Well, yes,” said Jeebee, “but aggressive isn’t the word. Just the opposite. It will be a time when Wolf will be most likely to be protective and helpful.”

“I see,” said Merry, and the frown that had drawn a line between her two eyes smoothed somewhat.

Jeebee still felt uneasy at having perhaps planted a worry in her mind. He made a mental note not to bring the subject up again. Merry was perfectly capable of making sure, permanently, that Wolf was not a potential danger to her baby. He did not want any reaction as drastic as that.

On the other hand he, too, was determined that Wolf must be agreeable to adding this newcomer to their pack. It would have to be a matter of being completely on guard against him when the time came. Jeebee primed himself for that moment, among his other preparations.

Meanwhile, there was an endless list of things to make. He built a framework around the bed, and an extra area of floor next to it that would be the actual birthing area. He set up sheets of plastic made from the bags that could be used to enclose it completely, like a tent within the room, if necessary to protect against dirt or sand.

He had already put a plastic layer tight against the ceiling and the top of the walls of the room. It was impossible to double-plank from underneath, but the ceiling was already as well sealed as was possible. Now, in addition, this tentlike affair would be ready. Merry would probably not want it with its sides down most of the time, simply because it would become intolerably hot inside and possibly shut out a sufficient air supply.

At any rate, there it was, ready to go. It was not difficult to build or to make, after his experience in plastic-coating the floor.

Merry had also wanted an enema syringe for herself, when the pains would first begin. First births, according to the books and her experience, were usually more prolonged than the births of children born later to the same mother. They found such a syringe with a plastic nozzle and a rubber bulb down in the ruins of the ranch house, but the rubber was so old that it had cracked and no longer worked. They kept the nozzle and instead attached a bag Jeebee made up from plastic sealed into the shape of a long, rectangular bag, fastened to the nozzle with tight thongs of rawhide that had been allowed to shrink around the inner end of the nozzle to the point where it was watertight.

Filling the bag was a laborious process of immersing it in a container of warm soapy water and simply holding it under the surface until the air escaped upward and water took its place in the bag. Once the bag was full, it could be emptied simply by rolling up the bag.

Merry had also asked him to build what was in effect a type of birthing stool that had been used for centuries under primitive conditions, with a solid vertical rod before it, with a solid crossbar she could cling to, to help in the muscular effort of the delivery.

Jeebee eventually came up with a tripod with the requisite bars. She drew him a sketch of the birthing stool she wanted him to build for her. This was simply a three-legged stool with a seat. However, the seat was to be cut out in half-moon shape to give the baby room to emerge and to give Jeebee room to reach in and help when the time came.

He had been lucky enough to find a keyhole saw down at the ranch, and with this, since it was small and rather a flimsy saw, but would cut in a curve, he carved out three identical seat shapes from light plywood and glued them together, reinforcing the glue by nailing them together and countersinking the nails. He finished by padding the seat with cloth covered by leather they had tanned themselves from cattle hide.

The tripod, the bars, the stool with its special seat ended up as sturdy pieces of equipment, and Merry was pleased.

His final and most important concern, as they moved on into May and then through May toward the early June date of the birth, was for the lighting in the cave.

He had kept as many as possible of the batteries on standby at full charge ready for use.

He estimated that he had battery enough for light, even using the headlamps, for at least thirty hours.

Still, the illumination he got this way, while good, was not what he might need at the actual moment of birth. For that time he was relying on the solar-powered yard floodlight that had apparently been overlooked by the raiders.

Why this was, Jeebee did not really know. It was true the floodlight had been tucked up under the eaves at the back of the house. But unless the defense of the ranch house, together with the fire, had kept the raiders from looting until daylight when the floodlight would have automatically shut itself off, Jeebee had no idea how they could have missed it.

However, the fact was they had. When he first found it, and tried it, it was dead. He had been about to give up on it when he noticed that its receptor surface had been completely coated with a sort of tarry black substance, which seemed to be ashes mixed with a resin that had possibly bubbled out under the heat of the fire from the roofing material of the ranch.

Carefully, he cleaned this off and exposed it to sunlight, and was impressed at the bright light he got from it, after a full day of exposure to the sunlight.

Its battery was only good for about ten hours; but it would not be required, he thought, until the moment of actual delivery itself, so all its power could be kept in reserve.

Merry was equally delighted with it. Like the bike Jeebee had ridden out of Michigan, it was powered by the most advanced type of solar cell, and it could be switched to various intensities. At high intensity it would be a good equivalent for what would effectively be an operating-room light. He rigged this to its own bar on the tripod, near the top, with a clamp so that it could be rotated into any position necessary. Meanwhile, Merry had finished making baby clothes and blankets, and had insisted on building, by herself, a small, high-sided crib to keep near the fire so the baby would always be warm. It was late spring now, and to Jeebee the nights were only pleasantly cool. But he could understand how a baby might have different needs as far as warmth was concerned.

Unexpectedly, Jeebee found himself with nothing more to do but wait. He puttered around with the bed, the stool, the tripod, and the lamps, essentially making work for himself, until Merry literally drove him out of the inner room.

“Go find something to do someplace else!” she said finally. She was not angry but she was definite.

“What, for instance?” said Jeebee. The expected date of birth was only a week away.

“Find something!” said Merry. “Build something in that forge of yours!”

Jeebee went to the forge and found himself with no ideas whatsoever. Running through his mind were only the words of the various books that Merry had made him memorize. For want of anything else to do he built a fire in the forge. Some weeks since, he had removed that part of the roof that was closest to the bluff, preferring to be soaked by an occasional sprinkle of rain to being roasted alive by the heat of the forge in the enclosed space.

With the fire going, he examined the pieces of metal he had brought up. There was some angle iron, some steel rods, some lengths of steel water pipe, and a couple of pieces of axle stock from one of the older cars.

He examined the shorter piece of axle stock, which was about a foot and a half long and about an inch and a half in diameter. It suggested nothing useful to be made from it, and he looked at it morosely. It was too bad, he thought, he did not have some means of drilling it out and then tightly wrapping it with wire. He could make at least, then, some sort of single-shot equivalent of a rifle, which Merry could have with her after the baby came, when he was gone and had left her only with the revolver.

The episode with the cougar had made a large impression on both of them. The big cat might run away from a full-grown adult—or might not, next time—but if cougars were like wolves, a child would be in worse danger.

Jeebee still felt guilty for being absent at the time. His conscience had been troubling him ever since. He had considered—and discarded—a number of possible ways to leave Merry adequately armed while he hunted down on the flats. He had even considered leaving the rifle and trying to get cattle with the revolver alone.

Now, as he looked at the piece of axle stock, a wild idea came to him. Merry had told him to find something to do. He might as well do this. He had envisioned something like a long spear before this. Something with which Merry could at least hold off an animal like the cougar.

As the image took a firmer shape in his mind, he began to envision the axle hammered out, drawn and flattened to perhaps half again or more its length, and then perhaps cut in half and formed with a spearhead. Spearhead, and part shaft, of metal, that could form the front half of such a spear. The back half could perhaps be made from one of the pieces of water pipe, cut to length and one end fitted around the butt end of the front piece and then forge-welded to it.

He started heating the axle stock in the fire and hammering. As it began to flatten under the hammer blows he had a further inspiration. The spear should have a crossbar. In fact it should be something like the boar spear of the Middle Ages, in which a crossbar kept the boar from charging up the shaft of a spear embedded in the animal, in its frenzy to get to the man holding it and use its tusks on him.

The piece of axle stock was approximately one and a half feet long and one and a half inches in diameter and round. He hammered it out until it lengthened and flattened into what looked like a two-and-a-half-foot metal paddle with a one-inch-square handle some six inches long. The paddle end was three inches wide and three-eights of an inch thick.

He made two lengthwise cuts in the paddle end, using the hardy, that same small chisellike device that Nick had given him back at the wagon to start him in backwoods blacksmithing. The hardy had a square handle about an inch in diameter, which fitted through a hole in one end of his anvil with its triangular head pointed upward, its chisel edge providing a blade against which he cut the forge-heated metal. The paddle had now become a handle that had three pieces running forward from it.

Two of the pieces he spread out at ninety-degree angles, then cut them off at lengths of three inches. What he had left looked something like a rough metal blank for a sword, or cross, the handle being the top leg of the cross, the three-inch extensions on either side forming what would be its crossbar and the center section of the original paddle being either the long leg of the cross or the rough for the blade.

In this case, it was neither. The long leg would form the spear shaft and head.

He used the hammer to make this shaft definite, and hammered the far end of it into a wickedly barbed spearhead with backward-pointing tines a good four inches in length.

From one of his lengths of one-and-a-quarter-inch water pipe he cut off a two-inch length and fitted it over the short handle end of the front spear piece. Heating pipe and end together in the forge, he set them together on the anvil and hammer-welded them until they were one piece.

Finally he had a finished spearhead, ready to be mounted on a shaft, which preferably should be hardwood.

The woods all around the cave were pines. But he had brought up from the ranch last fall a number of the tools, including a rusty hoe, with a metal blade that was half broken off. He had had thoughts then of mending it in his forge; half as an experiment, half as an attempt to produce something useful for gardening.

Now he decided to sacrifice it as a hoe and simply cut off four feet of its wooden handle. Trimmed down somewhat, this slid into the end of the hollow pipe section he had just welded to his spear. After that it was merely a matter of using a punch to make a couple of holes opposed to each other on either side of the water pipe and then hammering a nail through the holes and wood. When it protruded through the further hole, he cut off the nail and flattened both ends so that it became a rivet, fastening the wood shaft into the metal spear end securely.

By the time he had reached this point it was just about noon, four days later, and he had become completely engrossed in making the spear. He was just flattening the ends of the nail he had cut off to use for a rivet when he heard Merry calling.

He threw the spear aside and ran back to the inner room. Wolf had already greeted them and left some three hours earlier, for which Jeebee now was grateful, because there was a note in Merry’s voice that had suddenly driven thought of everything but her from him.

He burst into the inner room, distractedly shoving the door to behind him, to find Merry sitting on the bed, smiling happily at him. The smile lasted for just a second before it disappeared in a moment’s stare of great intensity.

“It’s time, Jeebee,” she said in a remarkably calm voice. “The pains have been coming for some time, but I wasn’t sure. Now, I think the baby’s really ready to come!”

Jeebee stared at her. Abruptly, his mind was a complete blank. He could not remember the words of the books he had memorized, he could not remember what he was supposed to do.

“But it’s supposed to be three days yet—” he said stupidly.

“Well, it isn’t,” said Merry. “It’s now. Come, help me up on my feet. I’ve got to walk as much as possible.”