Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 2

As it had when he had smelled the sheep, reflex led him to kill the motor of the bike and get both it and himself down on the ground beside the track. He lay where he was on the rough stones of the track ballast, staring through a screen of tall, dry grass at the buildings ahead and a little below him.

Even as he lay there, he knew his hitting the ground like this had almost certainly been a futile effort. If there was anyone in the little community ahead, they could have heard the whine of his electric motor even before it came into view from under the trees. He continued to lie there; but there was no sign of movement in or around the small community he had before him. Nor any sound, although the tin chimneys on several of the buildings were sending up thin streamers of gray smoke against the blue of a now mostly clear, late-afternoon sky.

Overall, what he was looking at seemed like some sort of sheep-loading station that had grown into a semivillage. There were two buildings down there that might be stores; but the majority of the structures he saw—frame buildings sided with gray unpainted boards—could be anything from homes to warehouses.

He rolled half on his side and twisted his body about to get at his backpack and take out the pair of binoculars. They were only four-power, actually a pair he had bought the previous Christmas to give to a friend in the study group; only to find that the friend, with his wife and son, were gone, hastily and in the night, before that holiday.

They were all he had been able to get his hands on before his own departure had been hurried by the antagonism of his neighbors; and they were something that in ordinary times he would not have bothered to put in his pack. But they did magnify, although the material of their lenses seemed hardly better than window glass.

He put them to his eyes now and squinted at the buildings. This time, with their help, after a long survey, he did discover one dog, apparently asleep beside three wooden steps leading up to a long, windowed building he had guessed might be a store. He stared at the dog for a long time, but it did not move.

Jeebee held the glasses to his eyes until they began to water. Then he lowered them and took his weight off his elbows, which had been badly punished, even through the leather jacket, by the gravel and stones beneath him. He tried to estimate what sort of place and people he might have stumbled upon.

If it had not been for the ascending smoke, the wild wishful thought came sliding into his head, he could almost believe he had stumbled across some community where disease or other cause had killed off the population—including the dogs. In which case, all he would have had to do was step down there and help himself to whatever property might be lying around.

The ridiculousness of such good fortune coming his way helped him push the fanciful notion aside. But certainly, the buildings seemed almost too quiet to be true. Of course, it was late in the afternoon now, and most of the people here could be peacefully indifferent to the arrival of some stranger.

But that, too, was a farfetched notion. No one in these days would be unconcerned about strange visitors. No, there were people below, just like those in Stoketon now and everywhere else. The only question was how they would react once they knew he was here. On that, he needed more evidence.

He lay and waited. In about twenty minutes the door of a storelike building—not the one where the dog lay—opened, and people began to come out. With their appearance, the dog was on his feet, in what, as far as Jeebee could tell from this distance, was a friendly greeting. The dog trotted toward them. They continued emerging until half a dozen men were out, to scatter toward and into other buildings. What they might all have been doing inside the one structure was a question impossible to answer. But it indicated an importance to the building.

Jeebee lay, watching. Shortly after the last one had disappeared, the door opened again and a final figure in skirts emerged, threw something to the dog, and went back inside. The dog ran over and lay down to chew on whatever it was.

Jeebee stayed where he was, thinking. He could hold his position until night and then push the bike around the station and continue on down the track beyond at some safe distance. While he was still thinking this, the rattle of iron wheels on rails broke open the silence below him, and a moment later a hand-propelled railcar, with two men pumping opposite ends of the seesawlike propelling lever, rolled into sight, moving away from him on the track beyond the buildings. It continued up the track, away from him and the station until it was lost to sound and sight.

Jeebee chilled, looking after it. A car like that, pumped by two men, could get its speed up to twenty or more miles an hour along good railway track. It could run down his motorcycle if his battery was as low as it must be by now.

He had been fortunate that it had not come out earlier and been headed toward him, instead of in the other direction. Of course, he could probably have gotten off the embankment and into the cottonwoods before he could have been spotted. But all the same…

Suddenly he had made up his mind. It was a decision out of a sort of emotional exhaustion. He had to stop guessing, sometime. Somewhere, he would have to take a chance on trying to trade and this place looked as good as any. He found he no longer cared what the results of his meeting these people might be.

He lifted the bike and got on it. Taking the .22 out of the bike pack, he fitted it together and loaded it.

Openly, with the rifle in one hand, he rode down the track and off, in among the buildings.

A clamor of barking broke out as he entered. A near-dozen dogs of various breeds, but all of sheepherding type, gathered around him as he rode the bike directly to the steps of the building from which all the people had emerged earlier. The original dog was one of those now following him clamorously. Like the others, it seemed content to voice alarm and challenge, but showed no inclination to bite, which was—he thought—a good sign as far as the attitudes toward strangers of those owning the dogs were concerned.

He stopped the bike, got off, leaned it against the side of the steps where the dog had lain, and climbed the steps, shrugging his backpack higher on his shoulders. He knocked. There was no answer.

After a moment, he knocked again. When there was still no answer, he put his hand on the knob. It turned easily and the door opened. He went in, leaving the yelping of the dog pack behind him. Their noise did not stop once he had disappeared from their view, but went on, only muted by the walls and windows of the building.

Jeebee looked around himself at the room into which he had stepped. The place was barely warmer than outdoors, probably unheated. This particular room, at least, was fair-sized. It held six round tables with four chairs to each. Along one wall was a short, high bar, with nothing but some glasses upside down on the shelves behind it. Beyond the bar was a further door, closed, which Jeebee assumed to lead deeper into the building. Stacked on one end of the bar were some dishes, cups, and silverware, looking as if they had just been left behind by diners.

The barking of the dogs outside had taken on an eager, high-pitched quality interspersed with excited yips, then unaccountably faded to silence, with a few isolated whines. Jeebee moved swiftly to the nearest window and looked through it.

Coming toward the steps of the entrance was a strange female figure. A woman who must have been as tall as, and heavier than, Jeebee himself, unless most of her bulk was extra clothing underneath that dress. She was dressed in a muffling, nineteenth-century-style dress, of rusty black cloth that fell to the tops of her heavy boots below and ended in an actual poke bonnet at the top. Broad-shouldered, bent-shouldered in the black dress, she walked with long and heavy strides, leaning back against the strain in the taut chain leash one end of which was looped around a dog’s neck and secured by a snap lock that just showed above the thick ruff of hair and the nape of that neck.

It was the dog itself that had aroused the rest of the pack. It was an unlikely sheepherding dog, resembling a German shepherd more than any other breed. Also, there was some kind of difference Jeebee could not pin down, in its appearance and the way it walked. It was long-legged and had a loose-gaited, almost shambling way of moving. Its massive body was half again larger than most of the other canines around it, its coat rough with the thick hair of a dog that had spent most of its winter out in the weather.

It paid no attention to the other dogs at all. It ignored them as if they did not exist, walking ahead of the big woman, its head low and thrust forward as if on some purposeful errand. Most of the other dogs had pressed forward at its approach but now drew back and sat or lay down and were watching the newcomer with intense interest. But there were four larger dogs who stood, still on all four legs, out of the path to the steps, but just barely. Foremost of these was the largest, a dog collielike in its markings, but short-haired and heavily boned with a broad skull that reminded Jeebee of the European sheep-guarding dogs he’d seen pictures of in National Geographic.

It did not withdraw as the leashed animal, pulling forward on the chain in advance of the woman, passed it. As the leashed animal went by Jeebee saw it raise its head and look left for a moment to meet the eyes of the collie. Then the leashed dog turned away again, without other movement or expression, and, still pulling on the leash, led the woman ahead and up the steps to the door.

Jeebee saw the door handle turn. The door opened and the two of them stepped into the room where Jeebee waited. The woman closed the door with a deliberate movement, behind her. The dog on the leash turned immediately to her, and she, feeling into some sort of deep pocket in her voluminous dress, pulled out something that seemed to be a tidbit of some kind, which she palmed into the dog’s open and waiting mouth.

The dog swallowed it at a gulp and turned toward Jeebee. He tilted his long nose up and tested the air with several deep sniffs.

“Guard!” the woman ordered to the dog, then looked toward Jeebee herself. She spoke again in a hoarse, deep voice like the voice of a very old person: “I saw you on your way in. I just stepped out to get my watchdog, here.”

Jeebee felt the metal of the trigger guard of the .22 slippery in his right hand. The woman, he saw now that she was close, was wearing a black leather belt tight around her waist, with a small holster and the butt of what looked like a short-barreled revolver sticking out of the holster. She smelled, a dirty-clothes sort of smell. He did not doubt that she could and would use the handgun, if she thought it advantageous to do so. And, flooding all through him, was the old doubt that he could lift the .22 and fire back, even to defend his own life.

The German shepherd-like dog lay down, hind legs tucked under his body, his head erect and his weight resting lightly on his elbows and forelegs. His gaze remained on Jeebee, but that was all. The woman lifted her head, looking directly at Jeebee. Her face was tanned, masculine looking, with heavy bones and thin lips. Deep parentheses of lines cut their curves from nose to chin on each side of her mouth. She must be, Jeebee thought, at least fifty.

“All right,” said the woman. “What brings you to town?”

“I came in to trade some things,” said Jeebee.

His own voice sounded strange in his ears, like the creaky tones of an old-fashioned phonograph record where most of the low range had been lost in recording.

“What you got?”

“Different things,” said Jeebee. “How about you? Have you or somebody else here got shoes, food, and maybe some other things you can trade me?”

His voice was sounding more normal now. He had pulled his cap low over his eyes before he had come into town; and hopefully, in this interior dimness, lit only by the windows to his right, she could not see the pale innocence of his eyes and forehead.

“I can trade you what you want—prob’ly,” the woman said. “Come on. You too.”

The last words were addressed to the dog and reinforced by a tug on the leash. The dog rose silently to four feet again, and once more took the lead as she led Jeebee to the further door. They went through it into another room that looked as if it might once have been a poor excuse for a hotel lobby. A dingy brown corridor led off from a far wall, and doors could be glimpsed, spaced along either side.

The lobby-room was equipped with what had probably been a clerk’s counter. This, plus half a dozen more of the round tables, and a few plain wooden chairs, were piled with what at first glimpse appeared to be every kind of junk imaginable, from old tire casings to metal coffeepots that showed the dents and marks of long use. A closer look showed Jeebee a rough order to things in the room. Clothing filled two of the tables, and all of the cooking utensils were heaped with the coffeepots on another.

The woman led the dog to the end of the counter. There were two different lengths of chain, a long and a very short one there, with one end of each bolted to the thick wood of the countertop.

She started to snap the end of the lead chain to the shorter of the bolted-down ones, then apparently changed her mind. She connected it instead to the long chain, which Jeebee noticed would let the dog range anywhere in the room.

“Guard,” the woman said to the dog again. The dog, this time, remained standing almost as if it had not heard her. Its gaze stayed on Jeebee.

She, also, was looking at Jeebee. When he looked back at her, she nodded at the dog. “Pure wolf, he is, so don’t try taking anything.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got.” Jeebee kept his voice emotionless.

She motioned to an end of the clerk’s counter that was clear. Jeebee unbuckled his recently acquired leather jacket—the dog’s nose tested the air again—and began unloading his belt of the screwdrivers, chisels, files, and other small hand tools he had brought. When he was done, he unwrapped the metal chain from his waist and laid it on the wooden surface of the counter, where it chinked heavily.

“Maybe, you can use this, then,” said Jeebee, nodding at the dog as casually as possible.

“Maybe,” said the woman, with a perfect flatness of voice. “But he don’t need much holding. He does what I tell him.”

“You said he was a wolf?” Jeebee asked skeptically as she began to examine the tools.

She looked up squarely into his face.

“That’s right,” she said. “He’s no herder. He’s a killer.” She stared at him for a second. “What are you—cattleman?”

“Not me,” said Jeebee. “My brother is. I’m on my way to his place, now.”

“Where?” she asked bluntly.

“West,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t know him.” He met her eyes. It was a time to claim as much as he could. “But he’s got a good-sized ranch, he’s out there—and he’s waiting for me to show up.”

The last, lying part came out with what Jeebee felt sounded like conviction. Perhaps a little of the truth preceding it had carried over. The woman, however, looked at him without any change of expression whatsoever, then bent to her examination of the hand tools again.

“What made you think I was a cattleman?” Jeebee asked. Her silence was unnerving. Something in him wanted to keep her talking, as if, so long as she continued to speak, nothing much could go wrong.

“Cattleman’s jacket,” she said, not looking up.

“Ja—” He stopped himself. Of course, she was talking about the leather jacket he was wearing. He had not realized that there would be any perceptible difference in clothing between sheep- and cattle-men. Didn’t sheepmen wear leather jackets, too? Evidently not. Or at least, not in this locality.

“This is sheep country,” the woman said, still not looking up. Jeebee felt the statement like a gun hanging in the air, aimed at him and ready to go off at any minute.

“That so?” he said.

“Yes, that’s so,” she answered. “No cattlemen left here, now. That belonged to a cattleman.” She jerked her thumb at the animal, swept the tools and the chain together into a pile before her as if she already owned them. “All right, what you want?”

“A pair of good boots,” he said. “Some bacon, beans, or flour. A handgun—a revolver.”

She looked up at him on the last words.

“Revolver,” she said with contempt. She shoved the pile of tools and chain toward him. “You better move on.”

“All right,” he said. “Didn’t hurt to ask, did it?”

“Revolver!” she said again, deep in her throat, as if she was getting ready to spit. “I’ll give you ten pounds of corn and five pounds of mutton fat for it all. And you can look for a pair of boots on the table over there. That’s it.”

“Now, wait…” he said. The miles he had come since Stoketon had not left him completely uneducated to the times he now lived in. “Don’t talk like that. You know—I know—these things here are worth a lot more than that. You can’t get metal stuff like that anymore. You want to cheat me some, that’s all right. But let’s talk a little more sense.”

“No talk,” she said. She came around the counter and faced him. Jeebee could feel her gaze searching in under the shadow of his cap’s visor to see his weakness and his vulnerability. “Who else you going to trade with?”

She stared at him. Suddenly the great wave of loneliness, of weariness, washed through Jeebee again. The thinking front of his mind recognized that her words were only the first step in a bargaining. Now it was time for him to counter-offer, to sneer at what she had, to rave and protest. But he could not. Emotionally he was too isolated, too empty inside. Silently he began to sweep the chain and the hand tools into a pile and return them to his belt.

“What you doing?” yelled the woman, suddenly. He stopped and looked at her.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll take them someplace else.”

Even as he said the words, he wondered if she would call on the wolf-dog to attack him; and whether he would, indeed, make it out of this station alive.

“Someplace else?” she snarled. “Didn’t I just say there isn’t anyplace else anywhere near? What’s wrong with you? You never traded before?”

He stopped putting the tools back in his belt and looked at her.

“Look!” she said, reaching under the counter. “You wanted to trade for a revolver. Look at it!”

He reached out and picked up the nickel-plated short-barreled weapon she had dumped before him. It was speckled with rust. When he pulled the hammer back, there was a thick accumulation of dirt to be seen on its lower part. Even at its best, it had been somebody’s cheap Saturday-night special, worth fifteen or twenty dollars. Jeebee did not really know guns, but the value of what he was being offered was plain.

His head cleared, suddenly. If she really wanted to trade, there was hope after all.

“No,” he said, shoving the cheap and dirty revolver back at her. “Let’s skip the nonsense. I’ll give you all of this for a rifle. A deer rifle, a .30/06 and ammunition for it. Skip the food, the boots, and the rest.”

“Throw in that motorcycle,” she said.

He laughed. And he was as shocked to hear himself as if he had heard a corpse laugh.

“You know better than that.” He waved his hand at the pile on the counter. “All right, you can make new hand tools out of a leaf from old auto springs—if you want to sweat like hell. But there’s one thing you can’t make, and that’s chain like that. That chain’s worth a lot. Particularly to somebody like you with stuff to protect. And if this is sheep country, you’re not short of guns. Show me a .30/06 and half a dozen boxes of shells for it.”

“Two boxes!” she spat.

“Two boxes and five sticks of dynamite.” Jeebee’s head was whirling with the success of his bargaining.

“I got no dynamite. Only damn fools keep that stuff around.”

“Six boxes, then.”

“Three.”

“Five,” he said.

“Three.” She straightened up behind the counter. “That’s it. Shall I get the rifle?”

“Get it,” he said.

She turned and went down the corridor to the second door on the left. There was the grating sound of a key in a lock, and she went through the door. A moment later she reemerged, re-locked the door, and brought him a rifle with two boxes of shells, all of which she laid on the counter.

Jeebee picked up the gun eagerly and went through the motions of examining it. The truth of the matter was that he was not even sure if what he was holding was a .30/06. But he had lived with the .22 long enough to know where to look for signs of wear and dirt in a rifle. What he held seemed clean, recently oiled, and in good shape.

“You look that over, mister,” said the woman. “I got another one you might like better, but it’s not here. I’ll go get it.”

“Guard!” she said to the wolf, or whatever it was. It was a male, he saw. It did not move, and its gaze remained fixed on Jeebee. She passed through the door, closing it behind her.

Jeebee stood motionless, listening until he heard the distant slamming of the outside door reecho through the building. Then, moving slowly so as not to trigger off any reflex in the dog, he slid his hand to one of the boxes of cartridges the woman had brought, opened it with the fingers of one hand, and extracted two of the shells. He laid one on the counter and slowly fed the other into the clip slot of the rifle. He hesitated, but the dog had not moved. With one swift move, he jacked the round into firing position…

He could hear it click loosely inside the gun as he lifted it.

Slowly, he took the shell out again and laid the gun thoughtfully down on the counter. The proper-size ammunition, probably, would be in that room down the corridor, but his chances of getting there…

On the other hand, he might as well try. He took a step away from the counter toward the corridor. The wolf-dog did not move.

It stood like a statue, its tail motionless, no sound or sign of threat showing in it, but neither any sign of a relaxation in its watchfulness. It was the picture of a professional on duty. Of course, he thought, of course it would never let him reach the door of the room with the guns, let alone smash the door lock and break in. He stared at the animal. It must weigh close to a hundred and twenty pounds, and it was a flesh-and-blood engine of destruction. Some years back he had seen video film of attack dogs being trained.

The distant sound of voices, barely above the range of audibility, attracted his attention. They were coming from outside the building.

He laid down the .30/06 and took a step toward the door to the outer room. This moved him also toward the wolf-dog, and at this first step the animal did not move. But when he stepped again, it moved toward him. It did not growl or threaten, but in its furry skull its eyes shone like bits of golden china; opaque, he thought, and without feeling.

But his movement had brought him far enough out in the room so that he could squat and see at an angle through the windows and glimpse the area in front of the building where the three steps stood to the entrance door. The woman stood there, now surrounded by five men, all with rifles or shotguns. As he stood, straining his ears in the hot, silent room, the sense of their words came faintly to him through the intervening glass and distance.

“Where y’been?” the woman was raging. “He was ready to walk out on me. I want two of you to go around back—”

“Now, you wait,” one of the men interrupted her. “He’s got that little rifle. No one’s getting no .22 through him just because you want his bike.”

“Did I say I wanted it for myself?” the woman demanded. “The whole station can use it. Isn’t it worth that?”

“Not getting shot for, it ain’t,” said the man who had spoken. “Sic your wolf on him.”

“And get it shot!” the woman shouted hoarsely, deeply.

“Why not?” said one of the other men. His beard hung down to his belt. It was as black as Jeebee’s, but there was a thickness of body to him and wrinkles around his eyes that suggested he was as much as twenty years older than Jeebee.

“You’re soft on that wolf,” he went on, “always have been, ever since you bought it as a pup from that trapper and raised it for the first few days before Callahan bought it off you—”

“That’s enough!” said the woman.

“No, I mean it,” the man went on. “If you weren’t soft on it, why’d you stop us killing it when we trashed Callahan’s place? It’s no damn good, that wolf. Killed my Corduroy, and he was next to being the top dog here—”

“I said, that’s enough!” The woman seemed to grow until she towered over all the men, and her voice chilled even Jeebee, through the glass. “I’m soft on nobody, Jim Carlsen! Remember that! At Callahan’s none of you had the guts to kill his wife and baby? No, but you’d shoot his wolf! You want to find out for yourself how soft I am?”

There was a moment of absolute stillness and silence outside the building, that stretched out. Then the black-bearded man looked away from her, cleared his throat, and spat on the ground to his side.

“Hell! Have it your own way,” Jeebee barely heard him say. The man kept looking away from the woman.

“All right!” she said. “I don’t want to hear anything more about killing it. That’s a valuable animal! Like this’s a valuable machine!”

The woman waved at the motorcycle. “You got to take some risks to make a profit.”

“All the same, you go in and send that bastard out here!”

One man said stubbornly. “You send him out not suspecting, and give us a chance to shoot him, safe.”

“If he comes out,” said the woman, “he’s going to want to come out traded, with a loaded .30/06 instead of just that .22. You want that to face after I let him go? I did my share, facing him. Now it’s up to all you—”

The argument went on. The loneliness and emptiness mounted inside Jeebee. He closed his eyes, wanting everything in the present crazy world just to go away…

And opened them again on a feeling of instinctive urgency, to find the muzzle of the dog almost touching him and the golden eyes fixed on his own—not sixteen inches between their faces.

For a moment the animal stood there. Then it extended its neck and sniffed at him once more. Its black nose began to move over his body above the waist, sniff by sniff exploring the leather jacket. Casually, he closed both hands on the .22 still in his lap, and with his left one tilted the rifle’s muzzle toward the head of the wolf-dog above it as his right hand felt for the trigger. At this close range, even a small slug like this ought to go right through the brain of the animal…

His finger found the trigger and trembled there. The wolf-dog paid no attention. His nose was pushed into the unbuttoned opening at the top of the jacket, sniffing. Abruptly he withdrew his head and looked squarely into Jeebee’s eyes.

In that moment Jeebee knew that he could not do it. Not like this. He could not even kill this creature to save himself. It had done him no harm. It was now even acting almost friendly. His buck fever was back on him… and what did it matter? Even if he killed it, the men outside would kill him, eventually. What kind of an idiot guard animal was it, that would let him put a gun directly to its head and pull the trigger?

The questing nose had now changed its attention and was working down his right sleeve. It reached the end of the sleeve, the long jaws gaped, revealing teeth twice the size of those Jeebee had seen on any dog, and these teeth closed gently on the cuff of the jacket and tugged. It shifted the grip of its jaws on the cuff to further back in its mouth, so that the wide carnasials now closed on the leather. It chewed for a moment; then let go and tilted its head back, looking up at Jeebee with golden eyes.

Jeebee’s mind suddenly made sense of the situation. It was the jacket, of course, his mind told him. The jacket, and the dog alike, must have come from the ruined house where he had found the chain and taken shelter that night. The jacket must still smell of the cattleman the woman had mentioned, who had no doubt been killed by the woman and her friends. A man who had owned this wolf-dog originally. Now, several days of wearing the leather garment had mingled its original owner’s scent with Jeebee’s; until they were one scent only. Also, above all, the jacket and Jeebee both would not smell of sheep and sheep handling, of which all this station, its people and buildings, must reek to the creature’s sensitive nose.

However else the wolf-dog might react to him, it seemed—tentatively, at least—ready to accept him, and should not attack mindlessly. For the first time he remembered what he had noticed but paid no attention to in this room. Around the end of the counter where the two chains were stapled, around the space of the short line, particularly, everything within reach of the chain had been chewed or torn by canine teeth. The heavy wood of the counter had been pitted, a brace to one of the legs of a nearby chair had been gnawed almost in half. For the first time it occurred to Jeebee that this animal might be as alone and friendless as Jeebee himself.

On a sudden impulse he reached down and unsnapped the closure that fastened the chain around the other’s neck.

The wolf-dog shook himself, like one of his kind coming out of water, but briefly, and looked again curiously up at Jeebee.

Now, however, Jeebee felt time pressing on him. He was reminded of the danger close by, in which he still stood. Still holding the .22 in one hand, he snatched up the .30/06 from the counter in the other and ran with both rifles to the door of the room the woman had entered. The wolf-dog went with him.

The door resisted opening when he reached it. But a blow of the butt of his .22 was all that was needed to break the cheap lock of the door handle; and the door itself swung open to show him a rack of rifles and shotguns. He found boxes of ammunition for the .22 and changed the .30/06 rifle the woman had given him for one that also accepted the same ammunition but had been customized to have a square magazine about the size of a box of kitchen matches under it, that would hold sixteen shells instead of the ordinary clip.

He stuffed his pockets full with ammunition for both the .22 and the .30/06.

He would have to give up the bike and the carrier pack that was on it, with all its contents; but perhaps he could still get out of this with his life. Hastily, he loaded the rifle’s box magazine. He went to the single window in the room and found, as he had hoped, that it looked out on the back of the building. Through its dirty pane he saw a slight, grassy slope upward to trees that crowned a low hill, trees that were the beginning of a wood that stretched northward. They were part of the same woods the railroad tracks had curved through before emerging here.

Taking a rifle in each hand, he used their butts to smash out the window glass, then clean as many as possible of the glass shards from the bottom and sides of the window frame. He threw the rifles out, and taking a grip on the inner edge of the window sill, he made a twisting jump out and down onto the grass about four feet below.

He snatched up the rifles and began to run for the trees. The wolf-dog appeared beside him, having clearly followed him out. Although Jeebee was running at top speed, the other was barely loping along with him, and still looked more interested than concerned. Run, you idiot! thought Jeebee, but did not have the breath to say it.

He heard a shout behind him, and glancing briefly back over his shoulder, saw the man with the belt-length black beard had come out around the corner of the house behind him, carrying a rifle. The shout was unintelligible. Jeebee ignored it, continuing to run as fast as he could.

The outer line of trees loomed close before him, perhaps only a dozen more strides away, but now there was also the clamor of barking dogs behind him, and Jeebee knew that dogs could run him down easily. A sudden panicky fear made him skid to a stop and swing around. At least he would go down looking as if he was willing to fight.

The man he had seen a moment before had been joined by another, this one holding a pistol in one hand hanging down at his side. But between those two and Jeebee was a good-size pack of the local dogs he had seen earlier.

They swarmed up the slope after him, the large, short-haired collielike dog in the lead. The two men were merely standing with their firearms, apparently content to let the dogs catch Jeebee and pull him down. It was plain that it was more agreeable to them to have him as a captive, to explain the workings of the electric bike, than it would have been to bring him back as a nontalking corpse.

Now, he thought, was the time when he should shoot. When the two before him were not ready. But he could not do it. He could, however, fire on the dogs.

But, now that he had halted, he saw the collielike dog well in advance of the rest of the pack. The wolf-dog, stopped beside him, had also turned back. Suddenly it moved. It became a blur of gray rushing toward the oncoming dogs. The awkward-looking, shambling gait he had noticed through the window was gone. The wolf-dog, its head and ears erect, was closing the distance in great fluid bounds that reminded Jeebee of dolphins he had once seen, breasting the bow waves of a cruise ship—“lads, before the wind,” Herman Melville had called them in Moby Dick, and those words, strangely right in this moment, came unexpectedly back into Jeebee’s mind.

The dogs right behind the collie spun and bolted, tails between their legs. The collie, however, which Jeebee recognized as the one who had stood forth against Wolf’s entry to the store, checked, lowered its body into a half crouch, and sprang for the wolf-dog’s throat.

The wolf-dog made no effort to evade the attack. He simply closed his jaws around the back of his attacker’s neck. There was no sound, but the collie’s legs suddenly went stiff and its body jerked once as the canine teeth pierced the spinal cord.

It fell.

The wolf-dog stood over it for a moment. The man with the rifle had lifted his weapon to aim at Jeebee after all. Now his aim swung instead to point at Jeebee’s companion, who was now turning from his dead opponent.

Jeebee dropped the .22 and jerked the .30/06 to his shoulder. The imaginary line across the horns of the rear sight and the tip of the front blade bisected the beard above the man’s chest. This time Jeebee fired without hesitation.

Then he snatched up the .22 and turned away himself, hearing the pistol bark behind him, and made it into the shadowed protection of the woods. The wolf-dog had run at the sound of Jeebee’s rifle. Now he was far ahead of him into the trees and out of sight.