Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 38

Back at the cave all was well. Jeebee congratulated himself silently on having the common sense to continue his sweep instead of simply heading back here. He unsaddled Sally, put her in the corral, and returned with the saddle and the things he had gathered from the ranch to the inner room.

“We’ve got a hibernating bear for a neighbor,” he told Merry, once everything was put away.

“Bear?” Merry said, frowning. “Where?”

“More than half a mile from here,” Jeebee answered, “maybe a kilometer, or even a bit more than a kilometer. You know, the hole in the shale slope?”

“That?” said Merry.

“That,” Jeebee answered. “You remember I thought it might’ve been used as a den, before. I saw the tracks going in, just today. There weren’t any coming out. It must be a pretty big bear. It might be a grizzly.”

“Grizzly!” Merry stopped what she was doing. “I don’t like that. A grizzly, this close!”

“You know, the year round,” Jeebee said, “they could come within fifty yards of the cave here and we’d never know it. There can’t be too many grizzlies, and bears move around a lot anyway. They have to find food. Besides, remember I told you that the tracks led into the hole but not out? Whatever it is, if it’s a bear, it’s started hibernating and won’t come out until spring. We’ll just keep it in mind, and I think I’m going to insist on going hunting with just the pistol and the crossbow. You keep the rifle here from now on.”

“There ought to be some way of killing it while it’s still asleep in there,” said Merry, “if it’s a grizzly. I don’t want a grizzly anywhere near Paul.”

“I can’t think of any way,” Jeebee answered, “but if it is a grizzly, the .30/06 is rather light to kill it with a single shot unless you reach a vital area. And I don’t like the idea of trying to hit a vital area in a pitch-dark hole, particularly if it’s curled up, the way I imagine it would be if it was hibernating.”

“We could take the floodlight with the battery,” Merry said. “I could hold the light on it, while you shot it—as many times as it took.”

“And what if it came out after us in spite of the fact it had been shot several times? I’d have a rifle that was already proving it was too light, and you’d just have a revolver.”

“I could take that crazy spear of yours,” said Merry.

Jeebee snorted.

“If it came to that,” he said, “I’d take the spear and the light. You’d do the shooting. You’re the better shot.” He took a deep breath.

“In any case,” he said, “the very idea of trying to shoot it now is ridiculous. We’d just be borrowing trouble. We’d be giving it a chance to kill us both—and then what would happen to Paul? On the other hand, if we just leave it alone, it’ll sleep till spring. Then when it comes out, it’s likely to go in any direction but here. It wouldn’t have denned up here unless it belongs in this territory. If it does, then it knows that there’s cattle down below, and its first instinct on waking is going to be to head down onto the flat. It’ll know that after a winter there’ll be a number of dead cattle that’re still eatable because they were frozen and covered with snow until spring. A hungry grizzly that’s been hibernating is going to think of that dead meat first, and go for it. There’s every reason he should go straight down there, and no particular reason to come our way.”

Merry plainly was not convinced, but neither did she continue to argue. Jeebee had a sneaking feeling that it was his question about what would happen to Paul if they were both killed that had really changed her mind about going after the bear now.

He felt a little guilty, as if he had unfairly bludgeoned his way to winning the argument. But he consoled himself with the fact that after all, what he said was no more than the truth. A bear that size had to be more than a year old. If it was in this district, it knew about the cattle and had seen more than one spring, with its frozen carcasses gradually being uncovered as the snow melted. It would certainly head for the flatlands when it woke.

So they left the matter there. Jeebee sat back and waited for the next snow. Once his tracks were covered, he could relax. But instead of producing more snow, the weather perversely decided to get warmer.

Not only that, but the warming weather continued into the next day, the next, and the next. This unusual spell was then interrupted by a sudden cold snap lasting overnight, followed the next morning by a heavy, but short-term snow shower, the results of which lay on the ground for perhaps half an hour in the already bare spots exposed to the sun, and then vanished. The days went back to being warm again.

The renewal of the warm spell was an unexpected gift from the weather that gave them time to do the last-minute things that Jeebee’s collapse and the first snowstorm seemed to have lost to them.

In one of the outbuildings of the ranch, there had been the dusty, obviously long-unused potbellied stove from which Jeebee had gotten the flue for his forge. For the sake of young Paul, Merry had wanted to bring this up and vent it out their chimney as a replacement for the fireplace. As she pointed out to Jeebee, it would be much better for cooking, and much more efficient at providing heat to the inside of the cave.

During the warm days of fall, Jeebee had put off bringing it up from day to day, until suddenly he had found himself racing the onset of winter to get the skylight finished in time. By the time he did, it had been no longer possible for the two horses to take the trailer down.

The trailer had been absolutely necessary. The stove was too great a weight for either horse to carry alone. The feet would come off it, and a few other extraneous parts, but the main weight of the cast-iron body was more than even Brute could bring up the slopes. With the trailer, on the other hand, the two horses could transport it handily, provided snow had not made the slopes impassable.

Now, thanks to this freak warm spell, there was enough bare ground all the way down to the ranch so that Jeebee could try to take the trailer for it. So he did. Meanwhile, up at the cave, Merry was busy taking down some shelves and putting up new ones, to fit the cooking process more conveniently around a stove rather than a fireplace.

There were a few slippery spots and patches of ground that had been iced by the freeze, then lightly covered with the new snow, that Jeebee had to get the horses and trailer over on the way down to the ranch. Otherwise he had no trouble and found nothing that would keep them from pulling the stove back up.

On the way down, at a point at which he could do so, Jeebee used his binoculars to check on the shale slope from a distance. To his relief, there were large bare patches on it, too, and with the powerful binoculars he was able to focus in closely on the mouth of the hole. All sign of his being near it had already gone.

He noticed for the first time that on top of the bluff that crowned the slope, there was still the unusual, tremendous accumulation of snow. More than he would have thought would have come from the snowfall alone. Perhaps there had been a snow-slide from the slopes higher up, which were more steep, and it had found a natural barrier to pile up against in the upturned lip of the bluff.

He continued to the ranch. It was even more clear of snow than he had expected. He loaded the stove with its flue, and everything else that belonged to it, on the trailer, and lashed the pieces tightly into place. Luckily, all its necessary parts were there, including lids for the two cooking surfaces in the top of the stove, through which fuel could be added, as well as through the door in front.

The horses made relatively easy work of getting back up to the cave. Jeebee, with Merry’s help, spent the rest of that day and the next two, setting the stove up and getting it working.

Jeebee found he regretted losing the open fire of the fireplace. On the other hand, there was no doubt that the stove was more efficient, more practical, and a great deal safer to use. He was pleased that he did not have to rob his smithy of flue sections to get enough to vent the stove up the chimney, and more than pleased to be able to get rid of the smoke up the flue of the fireplace rather than up the nakedly clay-mortared stone walls of his homemade chimney.

He set up the flue within the chimney, pushing it up until it poked into the little weather top he had built aboveground on the top of the bluff for it. The flue would be easier to take apart, section by section, when spring came. It would need to be cleaned then of tars and possible flammable soots. Just as the interior of the chimney had been, though he had done his best to scrub the latter as clean as possible.

The batteries were mostly back on full charge. As a result, he and Merry could work into the evening if they wanted to. After they got the stove set up and cooked their first meal on it, they did just that. There were a number of odds and ends to finish with Merry’s new shelves, and a rearrangement of furniture to be made and distributed around the stove rather than the fireplace. Jeebee promised himself to dig the room bigger during their stormbound days in the winter.

Wolf had had more than a few opportunities to investigate the stove while it was being moved in and set up. He had been wary of it at first, as he was with anything strange. However, by the time Merry and Paul had eaten their first meal to be cooked on it, he had become more or less reconciled to it. Although Jeebee secretly felt that Wolf, like himself, missed the open flames of the fireplace—to lie before and gaze into.

One of the reasons it had taken them so long to put up the stove was the fact that the flue of the original chimney startedrelatively low down, and the flue, the round flexible piping from the stove, had been designed to go out through a wall at about head height.

Jeebee had needed to remove a section of the wall and dig into a point at which he could make a new entrance into the chimney for the piping of the flue. It had also been necessary for him to go on top of the bluff and partially dismantle his weather cover in order to fasten the flue at its top. Moreover, the round metal piping had to be secured to the chimney wall, below, where it entered it.

For this, Jeebee had already forged thin metal strapping, lengths of flat metal that could be bent around the pipe and anchored by spikes driven into the clay between the rocks, and then mortared tightly with fresh clay. Luckily, the metal-clad asbestos collar that had been designed by the stove factory to protect the wood of any wall it went through—as it did in the inner room before reaching and entering the chimney further up—had been among the rest of the dusty parts available. Jeebee could have forged a metal collar, but no insulating material like asbestos was to be found anywhere around the ranch.

As a result, that last night, they ended up working almost until midnight.

Luckily, Paul had finally taken to sleeping straight through the night, now. They both tumbled gratefully into bed and Jeebee fell soundly asleep.

He was wakened, unexpectedly, and sat up in the darkness to switch on one of the headlamps that was within arm’s reach of the bed, its light directed away from their eyes. Merry was also awake and starting to sit up beside him.

“What was that?” Jeebee said to her.

“I don’t know,” Merry answered. They looked at each other. It had been an extended roar, far off, like the sound of a freight train, amplified and compressed. Now everything was utterly silent once more.

“Whatever it was,” said Jeebee, “it was some ways away from here.”

“Yes,” said Merry.

Slowly, they lay back down on the bed again, side by side.

“I’ll take a look around in the morning,” said Jeebee.

“That’s a good idea,” Merry said. “Whatever made that noise, I want to know what it was.”

Jeebee lay for a little while before he could drop off again. Long before he managed it, he could hear Merry, breathing slowly and steadily in her own sleep beside him. He had switched off the headlamp, and they were in utter darkness. Finally, slumber claimed him also.

He woke again—suddenly.

There was early dawn light coming through the skylight above him, and Merry was not beside him. For a second he lay, wondering what had woken him. Then he heard it again, and recognized it as he had, even in the depths of his slumber. It was a frantic almost-scream of horses, neighing in terror from the corral. In the same moment he heard Merry’s voice from beyond the wall that separated him from the front room.

“Jeebee!”

The word was no scream. It was a shout. But it carried the same note of alarm that had sounded in the voices of the horses. At the same time, he heard the bark of the .30/06 from beyond the wall at the head of their bed.

His reaction was instinctive and immediate. He grabbed the revolver from the two pegs on the wall behind the bed, as two other pegs above these had held the rifle, now gone.

Holding the handgun, he flung himself out of bed and through the door to the outer room. Merry was firing the rifle through one of the loopholes he had built into the front wall for that purpose. The outer door of the cold room was slightly ajar, showing a slice of gray, beginning daylight through it. He made two racing steps through it, out into the open, and saw, less than fifty meters off, the massive shape of a grizzly, coming toward them fast on all four legs.

“My God!” he said out loud, without thinking. “It’s the horses! It’s come for the horses!”

“Get back in here, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice cried behind him.

But the bear had already seen him, and was now aiming, not in the general direction of the cave and the corral, but directly at him. Jeebee ducked back into the outer room, swinging the outside door half closed, but leaving himself room to fire through it with the revolver. He and Merry fired almost together.

“You were right, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice was tight. “It’s like throwing rocks at him, using this rifle!”

It was true, Jeebee saw through the crack in the door, even as he was aiming with the pistol and firing again. The grizzly was paying no attention to the bullets that must be hitting him. Even if he was missing, Merry would not be. Not at this short range and with a rifle.

“Try to get him in the eye or mouth!” said Jeebee. Where was Wolf? It was dawn, his time to come in. If nothing else, he could harass and distract the grizzly, as he had the black bear down by the willows.

The pistol clicked empty in his hand. He threw it away, snatched up the crossbow, then threw it down again. The single bolt he would have time for might damage the bear enough to kill it, eventually, but it would not slow it down now. A wildness exploded in Jeebee. He snatched up the boar spear from where it leaned against the front wall beside the crossbow and burst out again through the door out into the open.

“Jeebee, come back here!” he heard Merry shouting. But in this moment he knew enough not to listen.

Just then, as if out of the dawn light itself, Wolf did appear. He burst onto the scene from between the trees behind the bear and to Jeebee’s right. It was his usual time, and he came.

The dawn wind was from the cave to the bear. Wolf could well have scented the other creature from several hundred yards behind on his way home—scented it attacking his pack territory—and come instinctively to its defense.

Now he was coming at the bear from behind, not as he had come at the one down in the willow bottoms, but as he had attacked the part-collie at the station, in his fantastic ground-eating leaps of approach.

The grizzly heard him and whirled, standing up on his hind legs, but not before Wolf reached it and made a dart at its hindquarters.

The bear struck at him. Not so much batting, as reaching suddenly with both great paws, as if to catch Wolf between them. But Wolf was already back out of reach, changing his angle of attack, and as Jeebee shouted and the bear looked for a moment at him, darting in on the larger animal once again.

Once more the grizzly grabbed at him, and missed. Still at full extension, it threw one paw outward, catching Wolf with the back of it, high on one shoulder—just barely touched him, it seemed, but Wolf went tumbling down the slope of the meadow toward the nearby stream.

The grizzly, still on its hind legs, turned again toward Jeebee. Merry’s rifle continued to sound, and the bear continued to ignore the bullets that must be striking it. It came toward Jeebee on its hind legs.

Jeebee saw it coming, appearing to grow enormously as it got closer. Head and shoulders towering over him, it seemed to swell to mountainous proportions, blotting out the earth and sky, black and invulnerable.

Its blackness was the blackness of his dreams, but now, here in daylight and reality. As a formless void in his dreams, that blackness had destroyed all his work. It had ridden his sleeping hours and pursued him out of Michigan and westward across the devastated land. It had never left him permanently, and now it had taken living shape. Merry and Paul were behind him, and he was the only thing that stood between them and it. A wildness inside him picked him up and drove him. He lifted the boar spear and ran toward the grizzly.

In that second there was no fear or fury in him, nothing but purpose. What was, was before him; and their coming together was inevitable. He ran full at the bear with his spear in one hand.

In the moment before they reached each other he jerked the spear up into both hands, hurled himself forward—“Aim for the balls,” Nick had said. He remembered the black bear in the willows. As they came together at their combined speeds, he shoved down the butt of the spear to brace it against ground.

It was like hurling his body against a wall of rock; and then the spear, its point now buried deep in the soft lower body of the grizzly, kicked in his grasp so strongly that it threw him away, tumbling as Wolf had tumbled.

He scrambled back to his feet and saw the grizzly, all its attention now removed from any human target and focused only on the visible shaft of the spear that stuck out from its body. Wolf was dodging in, out, closing his jaws on the thick legs from behind; but the bear ignored him, also.

All its attention was on the visible part of the spear. The shaggy black head and open jaws were lowered to bite at it, but the jaws could barely reach down that far, and its teeth scraped ineffectively upon iron. The bear battered and pulled at the shaft with his paws, roaring each time he struck it, and the point tore and cut inside him. The wooden part of the shaft snapped and splintered, but the backward-pointing tines of the spearhead kept it from being pulled free.

It fought the embedded spear like an enemy, the only enemy there was. Wolf continued harrying from behind, and from the loophole Merry was still pumping rifle shots into the great body. Jeebee stood, empty-handed, less than four paces off, staring, hypnotized by the massive, wounded creature.

The bear began to stagger, still struggling to rid itself of the spear with teeth and claws. It stumbled drunkenly for several steps as if fighting to keep its balance. Then it lifted its head, opened its mouth, and gave utterance to a strangely humanlike, moaning roar of agony and frustration.

One of its legs buckled. It fell to the ground on its side, with one spasmodic jerk moving its hind legs up toward its belly like a man with a cramp. It lay still.

Merry’s rifle stopped firing. Wolf darted in, snapped at the throat of the fallen animal and leaped away before it was possible to know if his jaws had actually touched it. He made another snarling, half dart forward, then checked, still some feet away, tensely staring, bright-eyed, at the still beast.

For a long moment he stood there, jaws open and panting, gazing at the bear with a sort of alert disappointment. As if he waited for the dead animal to get up and threaten them again.

The grizzly did not move. Wolf stepped closer and sniffed at it, waited, sniffed again. Suddenly he darted his nose under one heavy forelimb, lifted it slightly and dodged back—all in one quick movement. He waited. The foreleg lay where it had dropped.

His tail and ears rose. His head lifted. The tension began to leak from him.

But Jeebee was already heading away, back into the cold room. He was just in time to catch Merry as she turned toward him. She dropped the rifle and her knees sagged. He caught her and held her tight against him. Her arms wrapped around him and clutched him, with the grip of someone finding refuge, at last.