Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 39

As he turned toward the door to the inner room of the cave, however, she stiffenedsuddenly.

“You don’t have to carry me!” she said. “I can walk!”

Jeebee grunted a negative, pushed through the door with his shoulder, and laid her down on the bed. At his refusal to let go of her, she had relaxed against him again, with a little sigh; but the minute she touched the bed she bounced up off of it onto her feet as if it had been a bed of live coals.

“Paul!” she said.

She darted past Jeebee across the room, switching on the small lamp over Paul’s cradle. But it was not really necessary. Jeebee blessed the skylight. The daylight coming through it now was bright enough to see the interior of the room clearly.

In that second, Merry reached the crib where Paul lay, checked herself with her hands on the side of it, and gave a long, slow sigh of relief.

“He’s still sleeping,” she said fondly. “He slept through it all.”

Jeebee sat down on the edge of the bed. A weakness had suddenly taken him. He was lost in the moment in which he and the grizzly had come together, and he stayed lost in it. He was only dimly aware that Merry had come back and climbed past him onto the inner side of the bed again.

“Well?” she said warmly, after a long moment. “Are you just going to sit there?”

The imprisoning shell that was his memory of the moment that held him, broke. He felt a sudden deep hunger for her flooding all through him. At the same time the weakness he felt was still there. Numbly he became aware that the stockings in which he slept for warmth were soaked through from the snow. He was still in the underwear he had been sleeping in and in which he had fought the grizzly. His feet felt cold—they had not felt cold until now. It was almost like being two people at once. Numbly he bent to strip them off and lay back on the bed, rolling over on his right side to face Merry. He put his arms around her, abruptly with the same kind of urgency and need with which she had held him, when he caught her turning from the loophole. She put her arms around him now again, and the palm of one hand up against his face.

“You’re like ice,” she said.

It was true. He felt chilled all the way through now, but he had not noticed it until she had mentioned it just now. He held her warmer, living body close to him.

“It must be the reaction,” he said dully. Something wet, rough, and almost hot stropped the back of his neck and he almost leaped from the bed at its touch, spinning around to receive Wolf’s tongue, this time right across his face.

Jeebee spluttered and sat up, holding him off even while falling into the familiar pattern of stroking and scratching his back and behind his ears that was part of the regular dawn and twilight greeting ceremonies between themselves and this four-legged partner.

“Can’t you put him out?” Merry said, behind Jeebee, and Wolf switched his attention to her, attempting to climb over Jeebee and upon the bed to get to her.

“Not now,” said Jeebee, holding him off. “Not after what he’s been through right along with the rest of us. He’d never forgive us.”

He was himself again. The weakness was gone. Merry lifted herself up and moved around to sit beside him on the bed, and Wolf crowded against her, making greeting noises and licking at her hands and face. She, too, responded as Jeebee had, and the normal routine of the greeting ceremony—that was now also a general congratulation ceremony—continued, with Wolf ending by rolling over on his back and exposing his belly to be scratched.

“The bear caught him on his left shoulder,” Jeebee said. “Feel it down there. It’s a considerable bruise. At that, he was lucky he got hit with the back of the paw instead of the front, otherwise those claws would have ripped him up.”

Merry scratched along Wolf’s side and, under the guise of grooming motions, explored the stricken area.

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s a bigger swelling than I can cover with my hand. And he isn’t even limping!”

“He’s probably just ignoring it, the way he’s feeling right now,” said Jeebee. “He’d react fast enough if we made a fuss over it.”

“You’re right,” Merry said, taking her hand away from the injured area. She glanced at her fingers. “And no blood. That’s just fine.”

Jeebee nodded. He knew what she was referring to. He had not only found it in the wolf books he had rescued, but he had had some experience with it in the case of some minor cuts and illness in Wolf’s case. The only way to get a pill into Wolf was to hide it in a piece of meat that he would swallow whole. Also, even if he would have stood still to have a wound cleansed and bandaged, the bandage would come off more quickly than it went on, the minute he was able to get his teeth on it. Happily, there was no worry about that just now, as Merry had said.

At their feet, now, Wolf decided he had had his fill of belly scratching, scrambled to his feet, gave Merry’s closest hand a perfunctory farewell lick, and trotted, grinning, over to the crib to thoroughly sniff over the sleeping Paul.

Merry, long satisfied now that Wolf had accepted Paul as one of the family, made no move to stop him. A few weeks earlier she would have worried about Wolf licking the baby’s face and waking him. But Paul had recently graduated to the clutching stage, and he found Wolf’s muzzle irresistible. His small fist had learned to fasten on the hair there with surprising strength, and consequently, Wolf now only made a few small sounds to encourage the pup from a safe distance, then headed for the door.

“Will you look,” Merry murmured, “at who killed the bear all by himself.”

And, indeed, Wolf was visibly strutting as he left.

Jeebee got to his feet, and hastily, by the gentle illumination of the morning light, stripped off his clothes. As he turned back to the bed, he saw Merry had already gotten rid of hers. She lay under the bottom blanket of the number they used to cover themselves at night in colder weather, the edge pulled up to her chin and her eyes bright in her face above that edge.

Jeebee slipped in under the blanket himself and reached for her, feeling her turn toward him as he did so. There was a deeper longing in him now than he had ever felt before, and a pleasure greater than any he had ever experienced as his upper arm closed about her body and back. In fact everything was the same, but at the same time everything was different.

There was a preciousness to her, now that they were both alive and the bear which might have destroyed them both was dead. They were alive because of each other, and it was as if they had gained each other fresh for the first time, with the gaining bringing them both something of far greater value.

He had known that he had loved her since long before, back during the days at the wagon, but never had he loved her as much as in this moment, just after a time in which he might have lost her forever. Her skin was like silk under his hand and her breasts fitted the curve of his fingers, their nipples waking desire even, it seemed, in his fingers. When, after they had held each other, and touched each other for some time, he entered her, there came for him a new sense of blending together—a climax, a unification between them that seemed to make them for the first time actually one living being bound and made into a single person.

Their time together was timeless. But when they released each other at last, and lay, side by side, still holding each other, weary and happy, that singleness still held them in one indivisible unit. And together, like one person, they slid imperceptibly into sleep.

When Jeebee woke again, the day was far advanced, but still the whole room was illuminated. For the cave faced westward, and now the light of late afternoon was striking at a long angle through the skylight he had built above them.

Merry was up and dressed, stirring something in a pot on the stove, her hand moving almost automatically while she crooned softly and tunefully to Paul hidden within the high sides of the crib beside her. A Paul who was evidently awake, for he giggled and made small noises back from time to time—obviously wanting to sing, himself, as his mother was doing.

Jeebee lay there, still feeling the wonder that had been the feeling of oneness, which still enclosed him and Merry—and also Paul, now that he was awake and contributing to it. It was, Jeebee realized suddenly, the beginning of a new appreciation of being alive. They all became closer now, and would continue to be so from now on, than they had ever been before; because they had defended all that was valuable to them, and won in that defense.

Just about then Jeebee may have made some small noise himself in his throat, because Merry looked over toward the bed and saw him lying there with his eyes open.

“No hurry about getting up,” Merry said softly. “We’ll have something to eat in a little while, but not just yet.”

Her face held the same softness that had been in the note of her crooning to Paul, and in the gentleness of her touch—the sometimes fierce gentleness of her touch—when they had been in the bed. Jeebee, who had, indeed, been planning automatically on getting up and dressing, suddenly realized that there was indeed no hurry. She was right. From the angle and color of the light, it was still some little time until twilight. Wolf would not be back for a while, scratching and whining at the door for his regular day-end greetings, if indeed he came at all. It was true there was work to be done. There was always work to be done. But there was nothing immediate calling him right now, and even the bear carcass could wait to be taken care of.

All the pressure he had felt the last few long months of breakneck struggle to get the cave ready for winter was gone from him.

He luxuriated in this sudden rare and wonderful idleness, lying in the bed, feeling his wife and child close to him, enjoying the light and the moment. And there grew within him a kernel of discovery that expanded abruptly all through him, to burst out and encompass the cave, his life, and all their lives, together.

He had faced, through the summer now gone, the fact that it was impossible to continue the search for his brother’s place with Paul so young. But he had taken it for granted, as if it was still a fixed and unchangeable element of their plans, that they would all three take up that search next summer when Paul would be older and stronger.

Now it burst on him as an entirely new thought—an understanding like that of someone who becomes suddenly aware that the world is round when he had always believed that it was flat—that they need not go next summer, either.

They need not go on at all.

Why leave here? They would be giving up all that they had made together, all that was familiar and useful, and which had now proved its ability to survive in the face of an attack by a creature that could have destroyed both them and it.

Small as it was, it was a fortress. Armed, only as they were, he and Merry could defend it. Here, Paul could grow older in safety, instead of running the risks of traveling through unknown territory, where people might shoot all of them first, and come to find out who they were later. It was even not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might actually win to the very borders of his brother’s ranch and be shot down there by men who worked for his brother, but did not give Jeebee time to explain who he was.

Why leave all they had made here, to go hunting an uncertain future? Why take on a journey in which the three of them, and particularly Paul in the helplessness of babyhood, would be at the mercy of strangers whose attitudes and reflexes they had no way of knowing in advance?

Even if they were safely welcomed at his brother’s, once there, they would be bound to whatever the ranch itself was committed to. If Martin was at war with another rancher for some reason, Jeebee and his family could end up trapped in that war whether they liked it or not. Here, Jeebee was his own master, and Merry her own mistress.

Also, here they were safely hidden. No one knew they existed. No one was likely to come searching for them or expecting to find anyone here. If anyone did stumble across them, it was not likely to be more than a single person—and any single person they need not be afraid of, with the two of them together.

Moreover, here he had his forge, and much to learn and do with it and the cave. There were problems to be solved, of course, but none he now felt he could not handle.

He must carefully get to know his nearest neighbors below and find ways to trade forge work for things he might need from them. He must learn to make black gunpowder and firearms that could use it.

There would be much to do, beginning right away.

Then, in the long run, there were many more things to be done or to make in order that this home of theirs would be more livable. He could put to use a great deal more from the ranch, like its backup, water-driven electric generator, which he had originally believed was too heavy to carry up here.

He could bring the generator up piece by piece and dam the stream to make an artificial waterfall. Here, anything was possible. Away from here, everything would be limited.

Here they were free and life was good.

Jeebee smiled, abrim with gladness, gazing up into the sunshine from the windows.

“What are you so happy about all of a sudden?” he heard Merry’s voice asking.