Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 36

With the baby’s birth Jeebee went into a blur of activity. They had been concentrating so hard on the birth that they had almost forgotten the inexorable march of the seasons. Now it was as if young Paul was a calendar clock, who by his growth measured off the days for them and emphasized how much was to be done before the snow flew again.

Jeebee found himself coming to begrudge the necessary day a week he spent down on the flat, hunting meat. He could still generally locate at least one cow or calf within the sweep of a day’s ride under good conditions, but the supply would not last forever, although now there were young calves, which would be growing up and providing a future supply.

Still, though these promised well for the future, there was also the possibility that at any time a neighboring rancher might move in to take over this territory. In which case, without warning, he might someday discover armed men on the flatlands directly below him; and hunting would no longer be the safe thing that he had begun to take for granted it would be.

He started giving at least another half a day now and then to checking the foothill and mountain territory within several hours’ ride of the cave, looking for sign of deer travel or presence. He not only found what seemed to be deer trails, but sighted a number of deer.

Aiding him in this, of course, was the fact that fawns had been born with the spring. While these had already grown considerably, still to a certain extent they restricted the travel of their mothers and of such barren female deer who had stayed pretty much together during the winter past.

He decided that there was a fair amount of meat supply in wild game, which could be harvested if he needed it. He could even start harvesting them now; but there was an excellent reason for his not doing so.

The fact was, he had underestimated the amount of work he had planned to get done after the baby’s birth and before cold weather set in.

If he was going to stay here another year, there were needs he had to start facing now. One of these was ammunition for his guns, particularly if he was not going to reach any place where he could get more powder and possibly more shells.

He knew how to load his own cartridges, simply because Paul had carried the materials in his wagon, and Nick had shown him the technique. Paul had sold the cartridge makings cheaper than the finished cartridges themselves, partly because the materials were easier to transport in bulk.

He had become used to saving most of his brass for reuse, but neither primers nor modern smokeless powder would be easy to find, and they were impossible for him to duplicate.

Possibly he could make black powder, if he had to. But to the best of his present knowledge, he would have to be willing to make a long and probably perilous trip through strange territory, south, to get sulfur. The silver nitrate for the primers was there to be extracted from bird droppings. But gathering the droppings would require more time than he had to spare.

A much better alternative would be to have something else to kill cattle and large game with—something for which he could make the missiles himself. Something that would have the additional value of being silent so that he would not attract attention by the carrying sound of firing a firearm if someone was down, out of sight on the flatlands but still within hearing.

The ideal answer to all this would be, he thought, a crossbow. He had once handled and even shot a handmade crossbow, its bow part made of a steel leaf from an automobile spring. Its short, heavy bolt—or arrow—with its metal broad-head arrow point, had gone completely through a target of three-eighths-inch plywood. With the forge now operating, he could build himself such a weapon and missiles. By using the crossbow for hunting whenever possible, he could considerably stretch his remaining ammunition supplies.

In addition to this, he had planned, ever since it was clear they must stay, to make an addition above their present cave. He planned to use window frames and glass scavenged from the ranch, which like most isolated dwelling places, had its own supply of extra glazing materials.

So he could even put glass in one or several of those window frames that had had their glass knocked out by the raiders or destroyed by the fire. It would only require that the frame itself be solid. What he intended was to build a sort of skylight window in an upward-extended section of the wall of the cold room, which would let outside sunlight over a floor, sealing it off from the cold room, below, directly into the inner room.

The window he had in mind would actually be three of the ranch’s windows fastened, one on top of the other, so that essentially he would have triple glazing to keep the cold out and still let the daylight come through.

But both the crossbow and the skylight would be time-consuming jobs, and with the hunting and other necessary duties, it was hard to believe he would get them done as fast as he would have liked. The sooner he got the crossbow working, the sooner he could start saving on his firearm ammunition. On the other hand, the window would have to be finished before winter.

The work did not seem like much compared to what the two of them had accomplished the past months, Jeebee thought, but now Merry would have her hands full most of the time taking care of Paul.

It was only gradually, in the weeks and months that followed, that he learned differently.

Out of his almost nonexistent knowledge of women who had just had children, Jeebee had rather fuzzily assumed that Merry would be, except for feeding young Paul, something of a near invalid for a month or more after the birth. Able perhaps to get around in the cave and just outside it and do minor things there. But not up to any kind of ordinary work that might require heavy exertion from her.

To his surprise, by a week and a half after the birth, she had not only rigged a carrying chest pack for Paul, but was doing a number of light jobs. They had reached the point where some of the seeds that she had saved from the ranch’s garden and replanted in its rich topsoil (possibly trucked in for the purpose) had begun producing food ready for harvesting.

As a result, even now, in midsummer, they had a quantity of homegrown foodstuffs to bring back to the cave from below, and to cook and store. Apparently the people of the ranch house had regularly put up much of their garden produce in glass sealer jars, in the fall. Merry also knew how to do this. While Jeebee hunted and did other necessary things, she was busy cooking and sealing a great deal of what could be preserved this way.

Where there was more of certain vegetables than they had jars for, and some that could not be stored well in sealer jars, these Merry cooked. Some of these were cooked into forms more fit for such storage. From ripe tomatoes she made tomato sauce, and even a variation of catsup. Carrots, rutabagas and such other root vegetables would keep well with their stems cut off and buried in open boxes of dry sand.

These boxes, like the sealer jars, they stored in a cool area. Jeebee had opened up the inner room’s back wall and dug the equivalent of the ranch house’s fruit cellar in the soil behind it, to house them.

Meanwhile Jeebee was busily at work at the crossbow. Happily, on the occasion in which he had seen the crossbow demonstrated and had a chance to shoot it himself, he had also been shown the plans from which the crossbow had been made, and his memory was good in that respect. He redrew them on some of the paper he had gotten from the ranch, just to make it all clear in his own mind before he began work.

The wooden stock required something stronger than pine, in his estimation, and the ordinary two-by-four would not be wide enough at the butt end for him. Happily, over the fireplace that had been at the ranch was a mantelpiece of varnished wood, which Jeebee identified as oak. It was a foot wide and some eight feet long and about two inches thick.

With a little labor he removed it from its position and brought it back up to the cave. There he sweated to saw off a length of thirty inches, which he then roughed out into the wooden part of the crossbow with an ax.

When he was finished, he had a wooden stock about six inches wide at the butt and curving up underneath to its narrowest point. The material for the bowstring he had already obtained, the brake cable from one of the cars, the loop of it at each end of the bow—a leaf from one of the automobile springs—held by the small set screws that already existed with the brake cable to hold it taut and in place in its original duty on the car.

Next he drilled upward through the stock at its narrowest point, making a place to set the trigger. That trigger would release a nut—he would have to make it—which would hold the bowstring in place when cocked. From the notch that held the nut, forward to the front end of the stock, he cut a groove in which the bolt would lie when the crossbow was strung and ready to fire.

This groove notch and the passage for the trigger needed only another slot across the stock near the front of it into which he could mount the lower edge of the steel leaf spring, once it was ready to act as a bow; plus a couple of slots lower on the stock near its front, to which he would be fixing a forged steel stirrup.

This would be needed so that he could put his toe in it to hold the weapon down while he pulled its string back into cocked position on the nut. There would be two more holes needed through which leather thongs could go, to lash the bow stave firmly in place once it was in its slot. On second thought, he decided to use animal sinew, put on wet and allowed to dry-shrink to the point where it was as tight as necessary.

The rest of the work was all at the forge. He had to do some forge work on the steel spring to put it into a slightly recurved bow shape. He also had to make the steel stirrup and the rivet that would hold it. Then, there was the trigger, which was a length of metal bent twice, once semiparallel below the stock to be pushed up against the stock to trigger the nut above in the opposite direction, pivoting over a pin halfway up the slot and pressed against a notch in the bottom of the nut, where it was held in place against the tension of the bowstring, once it was strung. To fire the bolt, he could then just pull up on the trigger, depressing the sear at the trigger’s far end and releasing the nut, which would then rotate and let the bowstring fly forward.

The last part of the mechanism he worked on at the forge was the nut itself. This was essentially a thick circle of metal, as wide as the stock, and with a pie-shaped cut taken out of it where the bowstring would loop over it, and a slot through it so that the bow could notch to the string, ready for firing.

He also added the useful, though not completely necessary item of another spring-steel finger bolt, secured on the bottom of the stock, to provide cocking tension to the exposed part of the trigger to fire the bow.

There was only a little extra forge work required once the bow itself had been made and assembled. This consisted of forging broadhead points for the hardwood shafts—made from leftover parts of the mantel—together with a forge-rolled section behind it that could be glued to the front of the shaft. The shaft also had fins, where a plain bolt would have had feathers, and these he made of wood and also glued on. The glue was something that Merry knew how to make out of cattle hooves.

The glue gave off an almost unbearable smell in the making—which fascinated Wolf—but when done worked very well for Jeebee’s purposes, not only in making the crossbow but in other instances where glue was useful.

All in all, the making of the crossbow was a fairly straightforward procedure. But it ended up taking Jeebee a number of weeks, counting the time involved in obtaining the necessary parts from the car and the ranch house and doing the work of assembly. One of his last jobs was stringing the bow before it was attached to the stock.

Since the bow had, he estimated, between eighty and a hundred and ten pounds of pull, he would barely be able to cock it with his foot in the stirrup and lifting up on it. Stringing the bow in the first place was therefore a problem. It was solved by putting the forged bow stave across a couple of logs and placing on top of it a long lever of a narrow log, with a rock holding down the short end of the lever that was heavier than the bow pole’s weight.

With this done, Jeebee was able to push down on the long end of the lever and weight it with another rock. This bent the steel bow stave to the point where he could loop the ready-made brake-cable bowstring over its tip, onto the leather cushioning that he had wrapped around the bow ends where the loops of the string would rest.

Finally assembled, and with about a half-dozen bolts made, with the broadhead points, the wooden vanes glued in, and butt caps made of cartridge casing, he tried it out.

He had brought a piece of three-eighths-inch plywood up from the ranch that compared, according to his memory, with the one that had been used as a target when he had first seen and fired a crossbow. He cut it in half, putting one piece loosely behind the other, since he did not want to lose the bolt if it indeed went all the way through, as he had lost the first bolt of the crossbow he had been allowed to fire several years back. Now, he cocked the device, put the bolt in the slot, and aimed at the plywood from an easy fifteen yards of distance.

The crossbow exceeded expectations. It went clear through the outer piece of plywood and its point penetrated at least a third and possibly half of the way through the second piece, so that he had to cut the wood around it before he could wriggle it out.

In the immediate days following, he practiced with his crossbow whenever he had spare time; and at last became reasonably accurate with it.

He was very pleased with this addition to their armory. He had wished for another rifle that Merry could keep with her while he was gone. While making the crossbow, he had thought that perhaps he could leave the crossbow or the rifle with her. Accordingly he let her try her marksmanship with the crossbow. But it soon became obvious that if he left either weapon with her, it would have to be the rifle.

It was strange. Merry, who was literally a superb shot with both rifle and pistol, was much more erratic and inaccurate with a crossbow than Jeebee himself. Jeebee puzzled over this. But the only answer he could come up with was that, since he had envisioned the crossbow and wanted one since he was a child, he might have approached the use of the weapon with more enthusiasm than she did. Either that, or else she was trying to use it the way she used a firearm, which fitted the shoulder differently, as well as having a definite kick and a different flight pattern to its missile.

In the end he was glad she was better off with the rifle. The bolt of the crossbow was a penetrating missile, rather than a smashing missile. For that very reason, it was slower to kill. It achieved its end by internal bleeding of its target, unless whoever fired it was lucky enough to hit dead on a vulnerable spot like the heart or an eye socket. That meant it produced a wounded animal, which could be more of a threat before it finally died.

Jeebee was in the smithy, engrossed in making some more bolts, in preparation for his first attempt with the crossbow on a hunting trip to the flatlands, when he heard a curious thumping sound from overhead. He listened tensely for a second. It was not coming from directly above him but was being transmitted to him through the earth and the wooden walls he had put around the forge. He dropped his work and ran to and out of the outer door, snatching up the rifle from just inside the door of the inner room.

Outside, the rifle held ready for use, he swung about to look at the bluff above the cave.

There, just above the cave, Merry was digging into the cliff and into the bluff face.

His hands sagged with the rifle as the tension abruptly went out of him.

She was beginning, he saw, the last of his projects for him, the putting in of the skylight to the inner room. The first step in adding the skylight was, of course, to dig an opening into the bluff above the ceiling of the inner room. An opening in which the window of the skylight could be put.

She had put the metal ladder from the ranch up against the front wall of the cave; and climbed up it until she could step out onto the sloping face of the bluff above. There, she was busily at work with a shovel. Jeebee stepped hastily back to avoid being hit by a shovelful of earth and took a calmer look at what he was seeing.

Next to where she was digging on the steep face of the earthen bluff was something that Jeebee squinted at, not understanding what he saw at first glance.

Then he recognized that it was a platform of stakes driven at a slight angle deep into the bluff face. Supported by those stakes and firmly tied to them was the chest pack in which Merry normally carried Paul, outside the cave. It was just possible to catch sight of Paul’s face above his wrappings, and then his arms waved suddenly.

He was dressed inches thick in warm clothing, and seemed to be enjoying the open air, the sunlight, and the vigorous activity of his mother, next to him.

“Merry!” Jeebee shouted to her. “What are you doing that for? That’s my job!”

“When you’re ready to get to work on it, fine,” Merry said a little breathlessly, without stopping her digging. “Meanwhile, I’m making a start. Don’t worry, I won’t dig down into the top of our room.”

“Well, I’ll take over now!” Jeebee shouted.

“When you’re done,” Merry called back. “Until then I’ll keep on working.”

“I’m done now,” Jeebee said, guiltily conscious that he had been lingering over last-minute touches on the crossbow bolts.

Jeebee went up the ladder after her. She continued to work until he was right beside her, but then stopped and passed the shovel over without protest. It was not one of the tools he had gotten around to making at the forge yet. This was a rather rusty one they had been fortunate enough to find in the ruins of the ranch. They also, of course, had the small collapsible entrenching shovel that Jeebee had carried down with him on the horse or sledge when he went hunting over the snow on the flats in wintertime. But this old, full-sized shovel was a great deal more effective up here, moving several times the load of earth that the entrenching tool was capable of lifting.

Jeebee took over and was soon hard at work digging back into the bluff over the ceiling of the inner room. The supports he had put up earlier to hold back the earth above them were probably sufficient so that he would be able to stand and work on the two-by-fours that made the rafters of the ceiling, but just to be on the safe side he added a few extra supports and planks between them.

The result was that the outer room’s ceiling became a solid floor as he gradually cleared dirt out to a height of about five feet at the front of the opening in the bluff, shallowing down until it met the wall in the back of the ceiling.

In this new space he set up new shoring timbers and support for the earth that would be above it.

He was still hard at work, but ready to quit, when Wolf returned with the evening. Seeing him up there inside the hole he had made, Wolf was instantly interested and started to climb the ladder toward him, then changed his mind before his hind legs were off the ground. His partner, Jeebee had found out sometime back, could climb ladders with no trouble or worry at all, but he was not at all happy about climbing down them.

Jeebee shouted the news of Wolf’s arrival to Merry inside, went down the ladder, and after preliminary greetings, the two moved inside the room where Merry and Paul were.

Merry had gradually relaxed her concern over allowing Wolf close to Paul. Far from being a threat to the child, Wolf was very gentle and solicitous toward Paul. He would, in fact, endure more from Paul than he would from Jeebee or Merry. He insisted on sniffing the youngster over thoroughly each time he came in for greetings; and if one of Paul’s waving arms happened to stick a finger into his eye while he was doing this, he merely squeezed the eye half shut and went on about his examination.

Wolf’s fascination with Paul did not seem to fade with familiarity. He was clearly ready to continue being full of wonder about him. From the wolf books, Jeebee had learned that this was typical of wolves, that they were all very interested in the young of their own species and would be both caring toward them and willing to play with them for hours at a time. From Wolf’s point of view, Paul was plainly one more member of the community.

This attitude had been very clear in all of Wolf’s behavior toward Jeebee and Merry, but it evidently had some stretch in it as regards Paul. Not that Wolf was ever close to the baby without Merry and usually Jeebee hovering over the two of them. Wolf’s instinct, for instance, had been to try to pick up Paul in his jaws. But Merry put a stop to that.

Wolf was apparently ready, at least within limits, to adapt to Paul, who was still lying there in his crib, not yet up to crawling, when young wolf pups would already have been tumbling around outside the den in which they were born.

According to wolf rules and patterns they had become a pack. Wolf and Jeebee by themselves had simply been a traveling pair. Fixed in position, territorially, but with the addition of Merry and now Paul, the social climate had changed. Wolf clearly looked on Jeebee as the alpha male, Merry as the alpha female, and himself as the beta male of the pack. Paul, he probably considered a somewhat strange wolf pup—that was, if he had ever had any acquaintance at all with wolf pups himself from the time he had been very young.

If he had been raised almost completely by humans, thought Jeebee, he might even not recognize a real wolf puppy for what it was, at first seeing. Though, once he had gotten over his initial caution toward it as toward all strange things, he would be sure to investigate it and come to accept it quickly enough.