Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 3

Jeebee plodded on through the woods. He had put a good two hours of walking behind him, since he escaped from the station. But now the westering sun was just above the horizon, and he was looking for a place to camp for the night.

He had heard two more shots from the revolver after he was among the trees and out of sight, but none of the bullets evidently came anywhere near him. Nobody, it seemed, had made any effort to follow him. Nor was there any great reason to, he had thought to himself. They had his bike; and going into the woods after him would be to risk the almost certain chance that he could kill or badly wound more than one of them before they killed or captured him.

Nor had he seen any further sign of—abruptly he found he could not think of the creature he had freed as a wolf-dog any longer. No dog had ever covered ground the way he had seen his companion do so in turning back to his attack on the collie. Dogs did not bound like deer. He, whoever he was, could only be an actual wolf, and nothing else.

Jeebee came upon a little opening in the trees, a sort of pocket-sized glade. Beyond it, the trees thinned out and he could see into more open country beyond. There was little point in trying to go further today, in any case. He congratulated himself on still having an emergency flask of water in his backpack.

He found a pair of trees on the edge of the clearing close enough together so that he could fasten his heat-reflecting plastic tarp between them. Some six feet out from the tarp, he put together the materials of a fire and lighted it. Gradually, as the small twigs with which he had started it picked up flame, he added larger and larger dead branches that he had gathered from the woods around him. At last he had a small, but warm, fire going; as well as a pile of more wood handy to see him through the night.

His first buoyancy of spirit, which had come from escaping from the people in the station, reinforced by the fact that he now had a heavier rifle and more ammunition, began slowly to leak out of him.

He took off his backpack and settled down to make an inventory of what he now owned in the world.

Beyond what was in the pack, his pockets held only the boxes of ammunition for the .22 and the .30/06 and a few packages of irradiated foods, and some underwear and socks. The great value lay in the ammunition he had picked up, and the .30/06.

Even so, he reminded himself, the store of ammunition was not inexhaustible. The farther west he got, the more difficult it would be to find any ammunition at all.

He ate a little of his irradiated emergency food, washing it down with water from the plastic flask. When he was done, the flask was only a little more than half-full; which meant that his first search tomorrow must be for a source of drinkable water. Also, he must check the next ruined buildings he came across for blankets to replace the ones that had been carried on the bike and now were gone for good. For tonight he would roll himself in the solar-cell blanket. It did not have the qualities of the heat-reflecting tarp, but it would at least help to conserve his own body heat.

Meanwhile, he found himself sitting, staring into the fire, not ready to sleep yet, but with his spirits as deeply fallen as it seemed possible for them to fall, and an exhaustion of the mind that mirrored the exhaustion of his body.

It was completely dark now. The light from the flames of the fire leaping before him made a wall of darkness around him, so that he caught mere glimpses of the trees surrounding the little clearing. He forgot about his surroundings and sat gazing only into the flames dancing above the burning branches and before the backdrop of utter blackness that was the night.

The snap of burning firewood snatched him from the uneasy doze into which he had slipped, and through the red, upleaping flames of the fire he became aware that Wolf had appeared, having approached him noiselessly, curiously, until he was almost upon Jeebee. His ears were folded back, and he stretched his long neck cautiously toward Jeebee’s boots.

Wolf—Jeebee said internally, speaking the name he had given the other in his mind, but not daring to break the spell of the moment by speaking the name out loud and possibly scaring him away.

Jeebee did not move; and Wolf’s exploratory sniffs finally gave way to an almost explosive exhalation that tickled the hairs on Jeebee’s shin. Jeebee had to fight down the impulse to pull back his leg. So! the crazy thought came to him. Wolves do huff and puff!

Little by little, Wolf’s investigation proceeded up Jeebee’s body until their noses were only inches apart. The eyes that looked like golden china from a distance, up close were kaleidoscope mosaics of brown and yellow and green. Jeebee found it difficult to breathe. The coarse fur of Wolf’s chest brushed the back of his hand, and unconsciously he began to scratch the thick ruff.

A small part of his mind noted with some surprise that the collie’s teeth seemed to have left neither scratch nor puncture. Hesitantly, almost shyly, Wolf’s tongue flicked the end of Jeebee’s nose. In that instant of contact, the exquisite tension that had held Jeebee, burst.

Impulsively, overwhelmingly, grateful for this tiny hint of trust, he threw his arms out to hug Wolf’s neck.

Wolf jerked away with a growl of startlement and a clack of jaws that closed on empty air. He hesitated for just an instant with one foreleg raised. An uncertain, quizzical expression was written momentarily on his face and form. Then, suddenly, he was gone, vanished from the small circle of firelight.

For a moment Jeebee could not believe he had lost Wolf again. Slowly, the reality of the other’s going dawned on him as he sat waiting, listening, hoping in spite of himself that Wolf would return. But he did not. After a little while, Jeebee rolled himself in the solar-cell blanket and slept.

When he woke, stiff and chilled beside the dead fire in the early morning, Wolf was there, lying on the other side of the clutter of burnt wood and ashes. When Jeebee sat up, however, Wolf was instantly on his feet and lost into the brush and trees surrounding the campsite.

Nonetheless, Jeebee felt a great upbounding of happiness inside him. The other had come back. He had not been driven away for good by Jeebee’s attempt to hold him.

I don’t blame him, Jeebee thought as he got to his feet and began to urinate on the gray, dead ash of last night’s fire. If someone he hardly knew tried to grab him, he, also, would have avoided the attempt. He wondered if there was any chance of Wolf staying with him. He must remember to let Wolf make the advances, in his own time. If he was not scared off, the other just might share Jeebee’s travels—for a way, at least. Jeebee had not realized until now how hungry he had grown for any kind of company at all.

The sun was barely up. Jeebee drank as little as possible from his water flask, took a strip of irradiated beef from his pack to chew on, and began to move. Awake and revivified, his mind was at work again. He had perhaps half a pound more of the beef in his pockets. Enough for two light meals for him—probably a gulp and a half to Wolf. They would both need food; but if Wolf was going to share his journey for any distance at all, he surely could be trusted to find his own food.

Jeebee could concentrate on his own needs. Water was the most urgent of these. But while looking for water, he could also watch for signs of game. Anything—squirrel, porcupine, groundhog—along their way. It was too much to hope for signs of deer, or any prey at all large. But if it appeared, he now had the .30/06.

Even if he found, and could shoot, something as large as a deer, it would only be a temporary solution. So far, he had been lucky in finding food as he went in looted houses and their storage places. But that was a luck that probably would not last in this less populated country.

He dreamed of Wolf choosing to stay in touch with him. If Wolf did, Jeebee wondered, would there be any way, assuming they could become a team, that Wolf could help him find game? He now remembered reading that a pair of lions would work together in their hunting, one driving game toward where another was lying in wait. Did wolves work together that way? Or, if not, was there still some way Wolf could be brought to drive meat animals into his gun sights?

He sighed. The whole idea was nothing more than wishful thinking. Wolf was clearly no dog to be either controlled or trained. In any case, until Wolf would trust him more, it was all supposition. But the working engine of his mind stored the possibility for future reference, in the days that followed, as Jeebee moved on westward and Wolf continued to touch base with him, most twilights and dawns.

There was only one realistic answer for him now, Jeebee realized. He had been avoiding the more traveled east-west routes for fear of being ambushed. Such routes sometimes used—but more often paralleled—one of the old highways. Most road surfaces were still good, but beginning to be overgrown with vegetation from lack of use. Still, they usually indicated the best route across the countryside. Unfortunately, such routes were usually the most direct way to the next town or city.

He could not risk entering any inhabited or formerly inhabited place, again. His last experience was a gentle example of what might be encountered. But along any road, with the weapons he now had, he could possibly find other travelers from whom it would be safer to trade—or buy.

Or rob. He put that thought from him. He had not yet become that desperate. Not yet, at least.

Luckily he had not dared show it to the woman back where he had gotten the gun, but in a money belt around his waist under his shirt were twenty-three gold coins he had bought long ago, as a result of casually answering a coin-of-the-month plan in a magazine advertisement. He had paid for the coins regularly until, one day, he had realized he really had no great interest in belonging to such a plan and had dropped out.

But now, they were there, under his shirt. If he could find someone safe to buy from, he would rather do that than rob—and perhaps have to kill.

But he told himself now that if necessary, he would do even those things to stay alive and get safely to the ranch.

His knowledge of QSD must live, therefore he must. Life had no meaning for him otherwise, now.

He began to scheme as he walked, a rifle in each hand. He badly missed his maps, most of which had been with the motorbike. But memory said the nearest large east-west highway had been south of where he was now.

It was strange how the study group at Stoketon had already become almost dreamlike in his mind—like a childhood memory of a home lived in once, but for a short time and long ago. Jer Shandeau, Peter Wilbiggin, Kim Allen—these and all the others he had worked with there—had acquired the sort of sunset aura that had always seemed to surround people in fables and fairy tales. It was hard now to believe that they, and the life he had shared with them, had been real at all.

He caught his thoughts sharply up from their wandering. A necessary change of route was what he had been thinking of. This day would be warmer than the one before. The gentler weather of spring was moving inevitably northward. So far, today was a day of sunshine and an occasional cloud, and the warmth caused his spirits instinctively to rise.

He had become used to using the sun as a timepiece. Though he still wore his watch with an experimental hundred-year battery, he had gotten out of the habit of glancing at it. The sun told him that the morning was perhaps one quarter of its way toward noon. South would be less than a half turn to his left.

To check that fact, he lifted the cord holding his compass around his neck and took the compass itself on the palm of his hand. It agreed with what he had read from the sun’s position, but was a little more precise in what could be read from its poised needle.

He had instinctively been moving within the woods since they had left their camping spot of last night. The turn south would take them out into the open grassland.

He regretted more than ever the loss of his South Dakota map.

What would be the type of east-west road he would encounter first, going south? He wanted a former freeway, or some kind of road that ran far to the west, not just something that had been a two-lane strip of asphalt joining two small towns together.

The routes of the former interstates would attract more travelers and give him a greater choice. He was, he thought, somewhere below what had once been the city of Pierre, South Dakota.

Pierre was too large a place to approach safely, these days. If anything was left of it at all, those leavings would be divided into territories by well-armed and watchful gangs at feud with each other, and all on the lookout for any easy prey such as he, alone, would be.

The change in direction unfortunately took him out of the occasional cover of trees in which he preferred to travel, when these were available. Wolf seemed to do so, too. One thing was certain; he could come and go like a shadow.

But he was clearly following a roughly parallel course to Jeebee’s; and sometimes, now that nearly two weeks had passed since they met, he stayed the night.

Jeebee was now traversing land that had once been largely farm- or pasture-land. Occasionally he crossed country roads, and every so often he sighted farm buildings in the distance.

It made for swifter, if more open, going.

But as if to compensate for this, the rainy weather that had given frequent showers, let up, and he went through a succession of days that were both warm and sunny. The dead grass in the untilled fields was drying out and a few blades of new green were among it.

These fields he circled, staying under cover or below the horizon as much as he could. It was in the process of going around one such that Jeebee learned his first lesson from Wolf. It was mid-to-late afternoon and for once Wolf had joined him early. They had come to a narrow band of brush and trees stretching off to his right, and without thinking, Jeebee had turned into it with the intention of bypassing the farmhouse he could see ahead, behind the leafy cover.

Wolf had hesitated. After a few steps Jeebee had realized the other was not with him and looked back to see Wolf standing and looking after him. Jeebee stood still; and after a moment of uncertainty Wolf trotted forward to join him.

But Jeebee was beginning to be able to read Wolf’s body signals. Right now, they were broadcasting definite wariness about going this way.

Jeebee himself had stopped. Now he studied the four-legged form beside him to figure out exactly what was giving him that impression of wariness. He recognized after a moment that Wolf was standing very tall, craning his neck, ears pricked forward to hear and see and smell anything that might signal danger, but his hind quarters were just a little crouched and his tail was down, indicating what Jeebee had learned to recognize as uncertainty. Overall, his body was tense, and Jeebee thought that he read in Wolf’s expressive face—and Wolf’s face as well as his body was very expressive now that Jeebee had come to know the other better—an expression that Jeebee read as reluctance or hesitation.

Jeebee frowned, looking ahead through the impenetrable screen of trees. At that moment there suddenly began the barking of a dog distantly ahead but off to the right someplace.

Jeebee looked back for Wolf, but Wolf was gone. Jeebee had developed his own wariness over the months since he had left Stoketon. The wind was roughly from the direction of the barking to him; nonetheless, Wolf had seen fit to steer clear of it, and it would do no harm for Jeebee to do likewise. He turned and went off in the direction Wolf had taken. If nothing else, the barking of the dog ahead had signaled the possible presence of living human beings. And any humans at all were likely to treat him as those back at the station where he had lost the electric bike—and there was no telling how they might react to Wolf.

Wolf did not appear again until Jeebee had camped for the night and was putting a last log on the evening fire he had built within a protecting patch of trees. Over the days they had been together, Wolf’s evening and morning greetings had progressed from the cautious sniffing that had marked his behavior both in the store and at the campfire of the first night after their escape from the station. Now Wolf appeared as silently and as suddenly as he always did. He walked slowly up to where Jeebee was sitting, sniffed at him, examined him for a moment, and then advanced a little further—enough so that he was within reach of Jeebee’s hand.

Jeebee slowly put out that hand and scratched in the ruff under Wolf’s neck—that ruff seemed to fairly call out to be scratched. From the neck, as Jeebee had gradually ventured to do over the days, he moved down Wolf’s chest and rib cage—cautious about handling this volunteer partner of his more freely than that. As his fingers moved, he scratched and plucked out the tufts of loose fur that were signs that Wolf now was beginning to shed his winter undercoat.

Wolf moved closer, to let himself be touched. His air was one of relaxed anticipation. His tail wagged briefly, just a little from side to side—but it was a wag. Jeebee continued now to scratch and groom him on both sides, but when he plucked a few tempting tufts from his lower ribs, Wolf swiveled his head toward the intrusive hand, drew back, stared at it for a long moment, then moved away and lay down beside where Jeebee was sitting.

The move was a clear statement that Wolf had had enough of being touched. Respecting it, Jeebee merely sat where he was, occasionally poking the fire and thinking his own thoughts while feeling a pleasure from the simple fact that Wolf was with him. It occurred to him now, sitting here before the fire with Wolf beside him, how much he was changed from the man he had been when he had fled from Stoketon.

When Jeebee had left that town with Buel Mannerly’s pellets whistling over him to speed him on his way, he had thought of himself as leaving with only a handful of the tools he needed to survive in this newer, cruder world. Now he found himself surviving with even much less.

Of course, it had never occurred to him that he would have to protect even this little he now had from his best and only friend, as he had come to think of Wolf. By now Jeebee had discovered that his tarp, and everything else he carried, ran the risk of being shredded by a curious Wolf, if he left them available to the other. He had learned from experience that the gnaw and chew marks he had seen in the woman’s store were not entirely, if at all, signs of Wolf attempting to escape, but simply an expression of his kind’s instinctively perverse, destructive nature.

He had believed then—and, in fact, he still thought so in retrospect—that he had less than was necessary of the muscle, the skills, and necessary combative instinct to survive in the new world that had come. But it was undeniable that he was toughening up and learning. It was curious that in some ways, survival in this harsher world required more sensitivity, rather than less.

Life had not trained him to fight his fellowman for survival. But it had trained him to be a superb and close observer, to note everything that was to be seen and put the observations together to produce conclusions that were based on the best understanding he was able to achieve; and this was a possibly critically useful ability.

Now, Wolf was equipped to be a survivor. From the first night when the attention of Jeebee’s mental engine had engaged itself with the question of whether Wolf was a dog or not, Jeebee had automatically noted, and tried to make sense of, everything he had seen the other do. Following that moment of escape from the station, and Wolf’s killing of the collie, he could not do otherwise than accept the fact that Wolf was, indeed, a wolf. On the testimony of the words Jeebee had overheard through the window from the black-bearded man, he had been caught by a trapper, then hand-raised from a pup by the same man who had owned the leather jacket Jeebee now wore. That same leather jacket that had caused Wolf to take to him in the first place. But if he had come to learn more about Wolf, what he had learned had merely opened the door on even greater puzzles. There must be a specific reason for Wolf’s continual leaving—as there must be a reason for his coming back. Just as there would be a reason for the meeting and touching ritual he expected to go through with Jeebee every time he showed up.

There was, Jeebee’s mind told him, a great deal more in meaning to Wolf’s facial and body expressions than he had ever expected in any animal. Dogs might or might not learn to read human facial expressions. Certainly they learned to read human tones of voice. But Wolf was an observer to a degree Jeebee had never seen in a dog.

It would be up to Jeebee to learn to act like a wolf, to think like a wolf—in the end, to “talk” as wolves talk, if he wanted to really communicate with Wolf. He could make a start by beginning to try to see things the way a wolf would see them.

Putting two and two together now, it struck him that Wolf had to be hunting on these absences of his. But the hunting must not take him too far from Jeebee’s line of travel, or else it would be more work than it would be worth to come back and find him—particularly if the reward was no more than Jeebee’s companionship. In short, he must gain something from being with Jeebee, since he was so superbly fitted to survive on his own. But what?

His thoughts were interrupted by Wolf just then getting to his feet. His head lifted, testing whatever odors the breeze brought him for a moment. He lowered his head but stayed standing.

Twilight was giving way to the darkness of night beyond the illumination of the fire. Suddenly, from far off, a banshee cry rose on the still air, quavered, and dropped, ending in a series of yips. For once, Jeebee recognized something heard or seen. It was the howl of a coyote. Radio and television shows had made it familiar.

Wolf got to his feet, lifted his own muzzle into the air, and opened his jaws. A howl, less full-bodied than Jeebee had expected, came from the furry throat. It was, in fact, a high, trilling, almost soprano howl. There were no yips at the end of Wolf’s howl; and, hearing it, something bone-deep stirred in Jeebee. He found himself tilting back his own head, cupping his palms on either side of his mouth, and howling back, himself, at the distant coyote—a long, drawn-out howl.

Wolf immediately howled again, with Jeebee—his voice harmonizing, working in and around Jeebee’s.

Silence flooded in. Jeebee looked over across the fire to see that Wolf had lain down again on his side, his eyes looking once more at Jeebee.

“You know what I hate—” Jeebee began softly and lovingly, then corrected himself, “what I hate and envy about you, you bastard? It’s your damn matter-of-factness about everything!”

For a long moment more the golden eyes continued to watch him while the silence about them filled with the little sounds of the night wood. Then the lupine eyelids drooped sleepily and the eyes closed. Jeebee settled down himself with his pack as a pillow—both for that purpose and to protect it from Wolf’s teeth.

When he woke, somewhat after sunup the next morning, Wolf was gone again. The fire was out and the ashes cold. He felt both cold and grumpy himself, and the thought came that somewhere, right now, Wolf might be finding food, while he had nothing. It put him in an ill humor.

He folded his solar blanket, which he had wrapped around him for sleep, and stowed it in his pack, put the pack on his back, then slung the heavier of the two rifles also over his back with a length of cord hacked from the coil he had carried to make a tent out of the reflecting tarp.

But the .22 was always in one hand or the other, ready for small game or any other use. He carried it loosely, by its middle, in his right hand at his side. More and more, he carried it this way, as he became more and more expert at reading the ground over which he passed, for signs of animal passage over it. So far he had gotten nothing but a couple of ground squirrels or gophers—he was not able to tell one from the other; and these he had eaten hastily, raw, before Wolf might happen to return and he would feel obligated to share his kill with the other.

As he took up his travels again, however, the walking began to warm him and some of the ill humor left. His mind began to work to some purpose.

Somehow, he must come to grips with the food problem. He chewed on dried grasses as he went along, having read somewhere that this would help. But it did not seem to. There was an answer to his need to fuel his body, if only he could think it through.

As usual, however, his mental engine, faced with one problem, immediately went off on another. As it frequently did, it had to do with Wolf. How far afield did the other go when he was gone like this? On impulse, Jeebee stopped, lifted his head, and cupped his hands around his mouth.

As he had done the evening before, he howled.

The sound lifted, hung, and died on the soft morning air. It was another bright day with only flecks of clouds to be seen; and howling seemed ridiculous. The long moments went by, and Jeebee was about to stop listening and go on. Then, from some distance, but so obviously an answer that Jeebee’s hair stood up on the nape of his neck as he heard it, a howl came back in answer. But it was not the high-pitched trilling response Wolf had made to the coyote, the night before. This, while lower in pitch than last night’s, had more in common with the mournful plaint of a train whistle.

Was it Wolf—his Wolf who had answered? It could be another wild one of the same breed. Jeebee lifted his hands to his mouth to howl again, but something very like an instinct seemed to caution him against pushing his luck.

Not now. Later, sometime, he could try again, and if he again got an answer, he would be ready to see if he could be sure it sounded like the answer he had just gotten. It would be unlikely that there would be a strange wolf answering close to him and Wolf far off—and if Wolf was likewise close, why had he not likewise answered?

The question was suddenly wiped from his mind by the glimpse of a small form scurrying out of his sight into the tall grass ahead and to the right of him.

The .22 he had carried in his right hand so long leaped to his shoulder and fired almost before he had registered the movement. Jacking another shell into the chamber, he went forward as cautiously as if he was stalking a wounded bear and came upon a porcupine with its head almost torn off by the .22 slug.

Carefully, he flipped the carcass on its back with the muzzle of the gun. He had read about porcupines. In some states they had been protected as “survival food,” since they were slow enough for a human to run down and kill with a club or heavy stone.

Now, remembering what he had read, he slit the carcass down its belly, hooked a finger in the slit and dragged it back to an open space where he could build a fire. He was overjoyed by the dead weight of it pulling against his finger.

He built a small, hot fire with his tinder sticks and some dead branches from a nearby bush. Then he began, unskillfully but more or less successfully, to get the meat of the animal out of its quill-protected body. He had nearly managed to complete this job when Wolf appeared.

Jeebee stiffened in reaction, knife in hand. He had literally forgotten the other’s existence in the glory of suddenly having a possible full meal in hand. Whether Wolf had returned as a result of the exchanged howls, or simply chanced to come back, this was one time Jeebee intended to fill his own belly first, before anyone else. Wolf approached, but came to a stop less than two feet from him. He whined.

Jeebee tensed, expecting Wolf to make a try for the porcupine meat. Ready for anything, but determined to hold on to his food, Jeebee finished loosening most of the chunk meat from the bones and cut off as much as he thought he could eat at one sitting. He dropped the rest back in with the carcass and pushed it with his rifle barrel toward Wolf.

Wolf buried his nose in the carcass. Jeebee set about trying to cook the chunks of raw meat he had, by impaling them on sticks that he held out over the fire.

Wolf went through the eatable parts of the porcupine that had been given him in what seemed to be no more than a couple of seconds. Finished, he moved close to the opposite side of the fire; and Jeebee warily withdrew the sticks he held, holding them as close to himself as possible while still keeping them in the heat of the flames. A sort of madness of hunger was on him and he found he regretted having only the knife in his hand that did not hold a food-laden stick. In that moment he was quite ready to kill Wolf if the other tried to take the food from him.

Wolf did not try, however. Instead he stretched out his muzzle with laid-back ears and made a series of small whines, almost puppyish whines.

Jeebee did not trust him. He took one stick from the fire and gulped down the half-burned, half-raw meat that was on it, then devoured the other one. Wolf continued his appeals until all the food was gone; but once it had disappeared, he stopped, stared companionably at Jeebee for a moment, then turned and disappeared off into the brush again.

Jeebee sat back, conscious now of singed fingers and a burned tongue, but with an incredible sense of satisfaction in him. He had never before known such a feeling. To have his belly filled, as it was now, was like being lord of all the world.