Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 37

The end of summer, fall, and winter abruptly accelerated, the one into the next just after it. Suddenly there simply was not enough time for everything.

The business of building the partial room above the old ceiling of the inner room and putting a triple window in a new wall across the front of the bluff higher up turned out to be more complicated than Jeebee had thought. One of the problems he ran into was shoring to hold up the ceiling of the skylight room, the floor of which was itself firmly supported by the shoring and the walls of the inner room below. Also, with the best of his intentions, his work caused sand to filter down into the inner room below while he was busy, and Merry had to carry Paul in his chest pack or in his crib, either outside entirely or into the forge area, to get him away from it.

Meanwhile, there was still the hunting to be done. The crossbow turned out to work very well as a cattle killer, but as he had expected, its bolt killed by internal hemorrhage, without the shocking power of the much-faster bullet from a gun. The result was that on several expeditions, Jeebee needed to be thankful for being on horseback and therefore more able to dodge the charge of a wounded cow or steer.

However, Jeebee was learning how to use the weapon accurately from a greater range. As a result, with luck, if he shot the animal from far enough off, it did not connect the arrow hitting it with the distant sight of him. It also put more space between him and the wounded animal, if it decided to charge. This difference would become critical once he was back to pulling the sledge down over the snow to the flatlands for his hunting, and facing his prey on foot.

In the meantime, back up at the cave, he had to take time out to thoroughly clean the chimney he had built and erect a small but strong-roofed enclosure over the point where it emerged from the ground so there was no danger of it getting blocked by snow or windblown debris. He and Merry were one thing. But he did not want young Paul exposed to a sudden stoppage of the chimney and smoke billowing out into the inner room.

With all this handled, one way or another, Jeebee had still not finished the skylight when the first flakes of snow began to fall. Luckily it was just a snow shower, which lasted for perhaps twenty minutes and then stopped, but it told him his time was limited. He burned his electric lighting recklessly in the upper room and worked into the night. He had chosen his three windows and set them in place. Now he began the finish work around them, and the last sealing of the wall outside, working by artificial light.

He managed to get it done by morning, but he had exhausted all but one of his batteries, and he himself was ready to drop. He slept for about four hours, then went to the final job of mortaring it weather-tight. This meant taking clay, which now could not be left outside for any length of time without freezing, mixing it with water, and carrying it outside a load at a time to seal the edges around the window and the new section of upper wall.

Merry would have helped him, but there was not enough room for both of them to work up there. By late afternoon, snow had started again. He got the work finished, just in time, and nearly fell off the ladder, trying to get down it.

He came back inside and started blindly to go to work at finally opening up the ceiling above their heads. Merry stopped him.

“Have you no sense left at all?” Merry said. “You’re so close to being unconscious, you don’t know whether you’re standing on your head or your feet.”

He turned around to argue with her, and found that the movement made him dizzy. Subsiding, he let her pilot him back to the bed, and lay down on it.

“Just give me an hour,” he said, “then I can finish it.”

“Hour, nothing!” Merry retorted. “You’ve got us sealed in up there now. You’ve got all winter to take down the ceiling of this room. You sleep and just let yourself sleep as much as you can.”

He still felt that he should be arguing with her, but somehow the strength was not in him. He did not remember any more until he woke, finally, to find sunlight in his face.

He came to, startled, opening his eyes and sitting up on the edge of the bed at the same time. Above him the ceiling had been half torn down toward the front of the inner room, and daylight was streaming through and down upon them. There was a fire in the fireplace, Paul was silent in his crib, and Merry was busy sewing something at the table.

“You opened up the ceiling—” Jeebee said stupidly.

Merry bit off a thread.

“And I can do the rest of it without your help,” she said without looking at him. But her tone was soft. “Go back to sleep.”

He tried to stand up, found he was still dizzy, and lay back down on the bed. Sleep came again, at once. However, this time it was not a deep unconsciousness, in which he would even lose track of time. This time he dreamed; and it was the old nightmare that he had carried with him out of Michigan into northern Indiana and westward.

He dreamed again that he was working in the study group, and that the screen in front of him was full of the symbols of his equations. Suddenly a darkness, just a pinpoint of darkness at first, appeared near the middle of the screen to obliterate some of them. But it grew, spreading and wiping out all his work.

It was, as he had long since figured out, his consciousness of the Collapse, in retrospect coming to interrupt and destroy all that he had tried to do—he and the others. Again he dreamed of the black shape that pursued him, cornered him, over and over, looming closer and closer, to blot out everything as it came close to blot him out also.

He woke, sweating.

Merry was seated on the bed beside him, her hands on his shoulders. She had been the one who had seized him, not the darkness.

“You had a nightmare,” she said, relaxing her grip and letting him sag back against the pillow. “You were shouting—something about iron.”

“The iron years,” he said dully.

“The iron years?” She looked at him narrowly.

“It was just my name for this time we’re in, that’s followed the Collapse,” Jeebee said. “That’s all. I thought—I told myself we’d gone back to the time of iron. You understand?”

Merry nodded her head.

“I think so,” she said. “You mean we’ve moved into a time when things are hard, when everything is hard, like iron?”

“That’s it,” Jeebee said, remembering even as he spoke to her. “Maybe a little more than that. I meant—you know, there was a time once when iron ruled the world. Men with iron weapons, in iron armor, ruled everything. And in some ways we’ve gone back to it now, and it will last at least for decades, maybe for a couple of hundred years—”

He broke off, looking up at her concerned face.

“Oh, we’ll go back to civilization, back to technology,” he said. “It’s inevitable. It won’t be exactly the same, but the knowledge’ll all be built up again. It’s always been that way.”

“Always?” said Merry. “This never happened before—the Collapse with everything falling apart, the whole world going bankrupt, transportation and communication and everything failing, all at once.”

“No,” Jeebee answered, “but that’s just the shape it’s taken in our time. Before that there was pestilence, or barbarians who took everything, including life, from all but a few lucky ones, and each time the race built back to get pretty much on the track it’d been on from the start. We’ll do it again. But it’s going to be a hard time, in between. That’s what I was thinking of when I started calling them ‘iron years.’”

She took a corner of the top sheet and wiped his damp face, gently.

“It’s my fault,” she said.

“Your fault?” Jeebee stared at her.

“Oh, I don’t mean the iron years. I mean, you overworked. You drove yourself to the dropping point. And that was my fault because I started you out by shoving you in that direction. I was so full of thinking what we needed for Paul through this winter. I should have known you don’t need prodding, that you’d go to your absolute limits anyway, without anyone shoving you from behind.”

“Well, then.” Jeebee reached up and pulled her down to him so that he could kiss her. “I would have done the same thing anyway then, wouldn’t I?”

“Maybe,” Merry said, laying her cheek alongside his, “but if you do, from now on, you’ll only have yourself to blame.”

Jeebee looked around him. There was a strange quality to the light coming down on them from the skylight. It could not be just that they were later in the afternoon; the angle of the light had not changed that much. He could have only been asleep another hour or so at the most.

“I’ve got to get up,” he said.

Merry’s hands pressed his shoulders softly back toward the bed.

“It’s snowing. Snowing heavily,” she said. “We’re locked in for a while. Besides, it’s time for you to do nothing for a few days and mend. Give yourself time.”

“Still, I—”

“No still,” Merry interrupted. “It’ll be hard to stop the wheels spinning at first, but you’ll just have to wait until they do. Now lie back, take it easy, do nothing; at least till the storm stops and probably for the next few days. We’re in no hurry, now. We’re sealed in, nice and tight and warm, the three of us. We’ve got plenty of meat and vegetables stored. There’s all the time in the world for us, now.”

She was right, of course. It took Jeebee a little time to admit it to himself, but the way he had collapsed physically before his first long sleep was something with which he could not argue.

He worked at resting. For the first two days, it was indeed work. He had to fight to keep from getting up and doing things; and in the end, about the third or fourth day, he did let himself finish opening up the whole ceiling of the inner room to the skylight. He also let himself do small things like bringing in wood to keep the fireplace fire going, and making sure the solar blanket was not covered by snow, but hung up against the front wall of the cave, where it could get the full benefit of the sun to recharge the batteries he had depleted during his last orgy of work.

Little by little, he relaxed. It did not come easily, but gradually the urge crying out inside of him to be busy, always busy, muted and fell silent. He reread his wolf books, he watched Merry, he thought, and above all he studied young Paul, sitting in a chair by the cradle and watching the baby, both asleep and awake, for long periods.

There was a healing element in this period. He could feel it, but the machinery of it did not come out into the open of his conscious mind until he felt Merry’s arm around his shoulder one day as he was sitting watching Paul and saw her gazing down at him.

He looked up at her.

“You know,” he said, “I told you about that moment I had with him during the birth, when his eyes opened? That moment of bonding?”

Merry nodded.

“He gives me something every time I look at him,” Jeebee said slowly. He looked back down at Paul now. “It’s strange… I’m just trying to put things together, trying to figure out how something as large as this could happen to me—you, and then him.”

He looked back up to Merry.

“I’m just trying to make sense of it,” he said.

Merry leaned down and kissed his cheek.

“That’s one of the things that’s so lovely about you,” she said. “You’re always trying to understand.”

She ruffled the hair on the back of his head with her hand softly, and left him for some knitting she had been working at over a period of time. It was to be a warm, balaclava-type helmet, leaving only his eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered, to wear while hunting. It was being made of dark blue yarn. Not, he thought, as bright as those flashing eyes he’d uncovered just after Paul was born. Not as blue, because nothing could be quite like that in his experience again.

The snow had stopped after several days and it was followed by unusually intense cold. He stayed in the cabin, intending to wait this out, but when it did warm, it warmed in the night along toward morning, and with daybreak, snow was beginning to fall again.

It was not a heavy snowfall, but it lasted. It was the second day after that before he finally went outside to see how things were. The weather was cold, but normal for this time of year, climbing a few degrees above freezing in the daytime and dropping to ten to fifteen degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, at night. However, the snow was not so deep that he would not be able to ride one of the horses through it.

As Merry had mentioned, they were already well stocked with meat, and the freeze hole held the nighttime ground-level temperatures all day long at the bottom of the pit, so that the meat stayed frozen hard.

They did not need a hunting trip, therefore, but there were some small things he thought he might want to bring up from the ranch, and he wanted to have a look at how thickly the snow lay in various parts of the foothills and down on the flat itself, since this would give him an idea of how it would build up and drift down there in future hunting trips.

He saddled Sally accordingly and set out. He intended to take only the revolver and the crossbow, but Merry insisted on his leaving the pistol and crossbow with her and taking the rifle instead. It was possibly more sensible, but he had an uncomfortable feeling at leaving the two of them alone there, with less defensive firepower than he was taking along himself, particularly since he did not intend to hunt.

The sky was almost clear of clouds. It had that high blue look that sky gets in winter, where it seems to go on and on forever upward. In many places the snow was only about four to six inches deep. Only under the cliffs and in blocked corners had drifts piled up. He had to descend from Sally’s saddle and lead her by the bridle in only a few spots.

One of these was the shale slope. Ordinarily he went around this. But it remained the most direct route to the ranch. Now, as usual, it was a slanted white sheet from far below up to the bluff where already a drift had piled high. The mouth of the hole that he had guessed had once been a den was still visible as a blackness about halfway across it, but to his surprise, and with a certain amount of shock, he saw animal footprints leading to it—leading to it only.

He examined the prints. He was even now not an expert in reading prints to know what animal had made them. But these, he could be fairly certain, were bear-paw prints, and they were prints made by the feet of a bear much larger than the one who had attacked him down in the willow bottoms. It could even be that they were the prints of a grizzly.

He shied away from the thought. Blowing and drifting altered prints in snow, but these were fairly fresh and he was almost certain they were bear tracks.

No tracks led out at all. If it was a bear, it had already begun to hibernate. In any case, the damage done by leaving his own and Sally’s trail was already done.

But he had stopped to examine the prints at a point a good twenty feet from the entrance to the cave. He now turned about and led Sally softly back the way they had come, while making a mental note not to venture near this area again until there had been at least one other snowstorm to cover his tracks. There should be no trail then, for whatever was in the hole to follow back to the cave.

By the time he left the shale close to where he had originally stepped onto it, his first fears had subsided to a great extent. If the bear had not come out—he might just as well assume flatly from the start that it was a bear of some sort, grizzly or black, though it was hard to believe a black had left tracks that size—it had to have already started its hibernation. And it was not likely to break that hibernation until spring. Unless something disturbed it, they could forget about it until then.

His first impulse had been to return himself and the rifle directly to the cave so that Merry and Paul would not be at the mercy of the bear, with nothing but the revolver and the crossbow to hold him off—and little good a .38 handgun would do against something like a grizzly. In fact, Jeebee doubted that any weapon they had could do him any real damage, unless a bolt from the crossbow, planted into its lower body area, would eventually bleed it to death. But by that time he could have destroyed not only the cave but both Merry and Paul.

But it was ridiculous to return, he thought, now. He could not stay forted up with them all winter. He would have to leave on hunting trips and various other things. It was not even sensible to go back and sit tight until it snowed again. They might, at this time of year, go as much as a couple of weeks without even a light snowfall.

Accordingly, he continued on his swing down to the ranch, which had been lightly touched by the snow, except for those corners where it had drifted into the exposed parts of the house or outbuildings. He got the small things he had intended to pick up—they consisted of some shingles he had rescued from the ash pile on the floor of the ranch’s former smithy and a bathroom scale that he and Merry had talked about bringing up to the cave several times but somehow had never gotten around to taking.

With the relatively light weight of these, he made a swing out into the open range and found as he had expected that except where the land dipped enough to accumulate drifted snow, the going was not bad at all. With little deep snow, and without a strong wind to herd them in a particular direction, his experience now told him, the wild cattle would be following their normal pattern of roaming freely. He swung back into the foothills at last and returned to the ranch by a route that avoided the shale slope entirely.