Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 5

Jeebee lay between two hackberry trees in a little woods just at the crest of a rise of ground about a hundred and fifty feet to the north of the interstate highway. He was using his cheap and inadequate binoculars to scan the twin roadways below him, east and west, as far as they could help him to see.

For a moment the thought of Wolf intruded. Jeebee had meant what he had felt in their moment of confrontation, earlier in the day. He would do exactly the same if he faced the situation again. But maybe he had pushed Wolf permanently away from him? He put the matter out of his mind. At least the good weather was holding.

The afternoon looked to be clear and bright at least until sunset. There was little breeze and almost no clouds at all—none on the horizon. The day before it had rained; but except for that, they had had nearly a full week of dry weather now, and spring was rushing the growth of new vegetation. Already, the fresh young grass was a good six inches high among the dead brown stalks left over from the year before.

So far, since his arrival half an hour before, there had been no sign of traffic on the interstate. It stretched, a gray double-ruler line before him, from right horizon to left horizon. Nothing moving was to be seen in either direction at the moment. This small hill with its clump of trees was only one of many such for some miles; but it was the one closest to the road, so that other clumps of vegetation did not cut off his further view of the concrete strips in both directions.

Former interstates like this were not ordinarily traveled even at night, let alone in daytime as it was now. Anyone so doing could be seen coming clearly from some distance. Any such travelers would appear while still far enough off for Jeebee to make up his mind about them.

If the individual or group traveling looked dangerous, he could lie quiet until they had passed. Or, if they sent someone to scout the woods before they passed, he should be able to see the scout coming in time to fade back off the crest and put a safe distance between himself and them.

Most of those who came by in daytime were much more likely to be in groups, to risk such visibility. Only a complete fool would travel alone under such conditions and risk attracting the attention of any looters or marauders in the vicinity. His plan was to give his afternoons to watch for traffic. Mornings, as he had today, Jeebee could give to the other necessary duties of finding food and staying alive.

But today the first requirement had been pretty well taken care of by his very lucky find of that root cellar. He had looked for that sort of underground storage at every clump of abandoned farm buildings he had investigated ever since he had left Michigan. Undoubtedly, it was now clear, he had passed some by without knowing they were there. If it had not been for Wolf’s curiosity, he would have missed this one.

Of course, there still remained the problem of finding some kind of bag or container he could put up in the tree and fill with as many of the cans as possible. Wolf, he had found, was wary of anything unknown. The trick would be to keep it unknown. So Jeebee’s trips to the root cellar for loads of cans had better be at times when Wolf had gone off on his own business—hunting or otherwise—as he had just a while ago.

Of course, there was no certainty Wolf might not show up unexpectedly at any time. His most routine appearances were at dawn and twilight. But he had also shown up without warning at all other hours. Jeebee would just have to take his chances of getting to the root cellar and back without encountering him.

Meanwhile, Jeebee’s belly was full now, and there was the highway to watch.

The most dangerous possibility in the way of daytime travelers would be a gang all armed and mounted. A raiding group. These were literally latter-day horse nomads, who lived continually on the move and sometimes numbered enough to threaten even small settlements.

That sort of gang would also be the most likely to send scouts ahead to explore the only cover in sight—in this case, his woods. Moreover, on horseback, they could easily run him down if they caught sight of him. They would be interested not only in everything he had, but in everything he could tell them about things they might want. That meant that as a matter of course, they would torture him to get whatever answers he might be able to give them; after which they would kill him.

In such a situation he could look for no help from Wolf. Not only would his companion be timid of any strangers—strange how an animal so potentially lethal and so armed by nature could also be so cautious and ready to run under unfamiliar situations—but, even if he did, a single bullet would take care of him, probably a shot on first sight by anyone taking Jeebee prisoner.

So Jeebee would be wisest to start leaving the minute he identified any such group moving down the highway. Even a couple of rifle-armed men on horseback were potentially dangerous… unless they were careless, drunk, or drugged enough to ride by these trees without thinking of the danger of being shot from ambush. Jeebee wondered, if it came to that, whether he actually could bring himself to shoot down two such men, merely for what they possessed.

He had shot before at an armed man aiming his rifle at Wolf. But if his shot had killed the man, it had been done in hot blood. Could he do the same in cold?

He thought again about the depth of his hunger and his sudden complete readiness to turn on Wolf, himself, back at the root cellar. The sudden, deep, instinctive emotion of that moment touched him again in raw memory. Yes, if a parallel need occurred with humans in front of him, he could kill his own kind, too, if that was the only way to survive.

But deeply he still hoped and believed what he wanted could be got without killing. It must be a matter of just picking the right traveler, or travelers.

Ideal would be a family with women and children and only one person armed. Probably too ideal. A group like that would have sense enough to travel at night, and as much out of sight as possible.

Whoever it ended up being, he must pick a group with which there was some reason to believe he could risk showing himself and trying to parley. Also a group that had what he needed to trade for or buy.

His mind drifted as he lay in the warmth of the sun. It had now sent fingers of light among the trees to uncover him from shadow. It was hard, even now, for him to realize how much he had changed since he had fled from Stoketon—

The even current of his thoughts, almost drowsy in the warming noontime, was broken abruptly as he caught sight of movement at the far end of the nearest strip of highway to his left. It was not possible yet to tell who or what was causing it. But it was undoubtedly movement, and it was toward him.

He waited, watching patiently, as it got closer, and the movement resolved itself into a gaggle of adults on foot, moving forward more as a loose mob than anything else.

As they came closer Jeebee studied them carefully. They were not a prepossessing bunch. Some of them had rifles, some showed no weapons at all, and in between there was everything from kitchen knives stuck through belts to axes in hands. They were rather a tatterdemalion bunch. One large man, surprisingly clean shaven in a time when most men had simply let their beards grow, marched at the front and seemed to be as much in charge of the others as anybody else was. He was flanked by two slightly smaller, bearded individuals, who could be subleaders of some sort.

Jeebee thought he had not a great deal to fear from them. They clearly were not sending out scouts to protect their flanks, apparently depending simply on their numbers for protection. There must have been between forty and fifty of them, equally divided between men and women. The latter were hardly distinguishable from the men, wearing roughly the same assortments of clothing—pants, shirts, jackets, and hats—and in most cases had their hair cut short. In addition, the layers of clothes nearly everybody wore nowadays, including Jeebee himself, disguised bodily differences.

There was something famished looking about the whole group. Jeebee felt a touch of coldness at the thought of being discovered and captured by them; but if in any strange case they did pay attention to his hillside, he could simply head back off the crest and into the folds of the land. He was pretty sure that he could outrun them. At least he could keep away from them for long enough so that it would not be worth their while to keep chasing him. Otherwise, if he could string them out in chase until there were only two or three of them dangerously near, then firing from the ground with a steady rest for the rifle, the .30/06, he should be able to take care of them.

Accordingly, he watched them pass with some tenseness, but no extreme alarm. They moved on westward, to his right, until they began to dwindle in the distance, and he slipped back into his thoughts.

Now that they had gone by he was pleased that he had been as little frightened by them as he had. He had indeed changed.

It was hard to say how much, but it was not a small change. He was as ready to bolt now as he had been on leaving Stoketon, but there was the difference that now there might be situations in which instead of running, he might turn and become an aggressor. Hard to believe. At odds with everything his whole life had taught him up to the moment when he had first begun this run for safety to Martin’s ranch.

That had been the Jeebee that was. But now—he took a hand momentarily from the binoculars to touch the thick curly black beard on his chin. Perhaps growing the beard had something to do with it? No. He took his hand away. That was ridiculous.

What was actually making him different was the mere fact that he had survived this long. The process of continuing to live had taught him daily lessons that made his chances of living better. The old Jeebee, running from Stoketon, packing much more in survival gear than he owned in the world now, had given himself almost no chance at all to last in this new world. Now he was beginning not only to think he might make it safely to Martin’s ranch, but to take it for granted he would, and concern himself only with the problems along the way.

Greatest of these had been his sudden discovery of the necessary savagery in himself under the patina of twenty-five years of civilization—

Hold it. Some movement in the eyepieces of his lenses had brought him abruptly back to the present.

He squinted hard to make out what it was. Something else was coming into view at the eastern end of his view of the highway. Damn these little opera glasses! All he could make out was movement; and since it had not been visible a moment before, he assumed it was movement toward him. He would have to wait for it to reveal itself in finer detail.

Slowly, while he watched with a tension that in the end had his eyes beginning to blur with protective tears, it resolved itself into not one, but a group of figures on horseback. They were still too far away to count, but it seemed as if there must be four of them at least, if not more.

There were more. Slowly, it became clear in his binoculars that there were six of them, all but one of them men and all of them riding at a trot with the unconscious ease of people long used to horseback. Behind them trailed a number of packhorses, each with its load. More important, from his point of view, as they came more clearly into focus, he could see that each rider had a rifle scabbard fixed to his saddle, and the butt of a weapon protruded from each one.

These were exactly the sort of travelers he had been fearing, though in a smaller group.

There was a chance, of course, that they were a perfectly harmless group simply traveling the old right-of-way because its shoulders and median made for more open, smoother going than an off-road route.

But anybody who would bet on that would be willing to believe that a grizzly would enjoy having his ears pulled.

Jeebee was up, squatting on his toes, ready swiftly to rise and retreat. But he found curiosity holding him in his place. The group was still a distance from him.

He decided to stay where he was for the moment.

The riders came on. As they got closer to the woods, one of them suddenly separated from the others to ride off to Jeebee’s left, to investigate something. The rider disappeared in some trees farther down the road which hid the area back from the highway.

Jeebee began to become uneasy. He was aware that the rider could be circling to investigate his patch of woods from behind. If so, he had perhaps made a mistake in letting himself get too interested in these riders. He might no longer have time to escape back across the open patch between these woods and those where he had camped.

He got to his feet quickly and went deeper into the clump he was in, looking for an appropriate tree to climb. It had to be one with limbs low enough for him to get started up on, and yet big enough so that he could get high enough that the leafy branches below would hide him from anyone passing beneath.

After a few minutes he found one, a cottonwood. The lower limbs were ideal in that they were within reach of him if he jumped up and caught hold of one, but not so close to the ground that they would suggest the tree was easily climbable. He pulled himself up—suddenly grateful for the extra arm muscle that the past few months had built into him.

He commenced his climb. Cottonwoods were usually easy to climb and this was no exception. He made it high into the tree, into the crotch of a limb where it joined the trunk. He was a good twenty-five to thirty feet off the ground, and while he could look down through the leaves and see the immediate ground area, he doubted that anyone looking up would easily make out the shape of his body through the intervening greenery.

He sat, and time went by slowly. But the past three months had conditioned him to patience. He had carried the .22, moving it ahead of him to keep laying it between the next two limbs above him as he climbed. Now, seated near the tree top and hidden, he traded it for the .30/06 slung on his back, put the .22 in the sling, and held the .30/06 loaded, across his knees.

If the single rider did have suspicions about the tree, he wanted to be able to take whoever it was out with a single shot. He was still far from being as good with a rifle as he would have liked, with shells as hard to come by as they were. But he was fairly confident of his ability to fire a killing shot from this short a distance, at a slowly moving target.

When the rider finally came, he heard hoofbeats in the distance, from deeper in the woods behind him. For a moment he thought horse and stranger would pass beyond the area of ground he could see through the leaves below him. But in the end they both came almost directly below him. The rider was a woman.

Though he would not have been sure of this if she had not glanced up—at the sky, as it happened, rather than into the tops of the trees around her. She was lean as a man, and dressed pretty much as a man from the jeans and heavy checkered shirt and the wide-brimmed hat, which may have had long hair tucked up under it, or may have had hair cut short. A very serviceable rifle rode in the saddle holster by her right knee.

Jeebee had her in the sights of his rifle almost from the first moment he saw her, and tracked her until she passed out of sight farther on. She was not riding as if she really expected to discover anything, but rather as if this was half a duty to be done, and half a pleasure to ride alone by herself for a change.

It was not until long after her hoofbeats had faded from his hearing that he ventured to begin the climb down.

He kept the .30/06 free, and ready to use, however, until he was safely on the ground, and even then changed his mind about putting it back into the rope of the sling on his back and instead carried it as he went cautiously toward the front of the woods and looked up and down the road with the opera glasses to see if the group of riders was still in view.

They were, at the very limits of identification by the cheap binoculars he was using.

Slowly he put the opera glasses away. It was time to be heading back to camp soon, anyway. He might as well go now. As he turned about and struck back through the woods, he wondered if she had been the only woman in the group, one of several—or whether, perhaps, the group might consist all of women, which was also a possibility.

He concluded there was no way of telling. If she was the only woman, the reason the rest had probably chosen her to search was probably because either she was the most likely to find any watcher in the woods, or possibly she was the one who could most easily be spared, in case there was an ambush waiting.

He would never know, just as he would never know the composition of their group. The next few following days had little to offer. One was completely void of travelers. On another the only passersby were a family with a father and mother and three children about half-grown, two girls and one boy. Jeebee considered approaching them, for they were leading packhorses that seemed to have a fair amount of possessions upon them and therefore might be willing to enter into some kind of a trade.

But there was a wild gaunt look about them and an impoverished air to both them and the horses. They were not exactly what he was looking for, and now he had food from the root cellar to supply him. He could wait.

The next day it rained and there was no movement until late afternoon, when the rain let up and then an old man went by on a bicycle, alone and wearing short pants, dressed rather like a Boy Scout, but with untidy gray hair flowing halfway down his back. His hair mixed with the gray beard that fell almost as far down his chest in front. He seemed to have no other possessions except what might be in his pockets, or concealed about the red-and-black lumberjack shirt, tan shorts, and tennis shoes he wore.

Even though he had nothing worth taking, except the bicycle, anyone wanting to along the road could have killed or taken him prisoner simply for the sport of it.

Just before Jeebee was about to stop and the sun was on the horizon, a line of five well-made, heavily laden, horse-drawn wagons went by, each with its own driver and accompanied by somewhere between fifteen and twenty armed riders, male and female, as well as a number of fit-looking horses for remounts and wagon pullers, herded along behind by some of the riders.

For a moment Jeebee was tempted. They did not quite have the appearance of a raiding group, though their weapons and discipline made them look formidable enough. Rather, they seemed more like a group of people who had decided to travel in convoy, like the wagon trains of the nineteenth century during the settlement of the west. Such a group should be the least likely to be spooked by a single man coming toward them making peaceful intentions clear with his hands holding his rifle over his head.

Then as they got close, his binoculars picked up something very interesting. The man driving the front wagon had a chain attached to his ankle and to the footboard of the wagon seat. Jeebee checked as he got a better look at the rest of the wagons and saw that all the drivers were chained.

Instantly his understanding of the whole picture changed. Plainly, the drivers were people who had been enslaved, leaving the others, who must be a sort of modern version of the Comancheros of north Texas in the mid-nineteenth century, all free to use their guns or pursue anything interesting, if necessary. After they were gone, he got up, somewhat stiffly after his long hours in a prone position. There was a chill in him from what he had just seen. He had come close to driving one of those wagons with a chain around his ankle—or worse.

Soberly, he returned to his camp and busied himself starting a fire. Later in the evening he piled several larger logs on the fire, slung the .30/06 across his back, and moved off, away from the flames. He counted off fifty paces, then, relying on the luminous dial of his compass, made a full circuit about his campsite. If slavers were in the neighborhood he wanted to be trebly certain that the light of his fire could not be seen.

He had just returned to the campsite and settled down in front of the fire—now a small, comfortable blaze—when Wolf returned. Jeebee barely nodded his acknowledgment of the other’s arrival. The rush of pleasure he ordinarily felt when his companion appeared was blunted by the haunting memory of the slaver procession. He stared unblinkingly through the wisps of smoke, through Wolf and the trees beyond, unable to shake the vision of chains.

The sound of deep, throaty vocalizations mixed with whimpers brought him sharply back to the present.

Wolf was approaching him in a strange, half-sitting crouch with his back hunched and tail tucked between his legs. His head was low and the corners of his mouth were drawn back in the mockery of a smile that exposed the ivory expanse of his back teeth. Jeebee’s first thought was that he’d been injured, perhaps shot by one of the armed travelers he’d seen today. He reached out an exploratory hand, and the moment he did, Wolf folded onto his side and rolled over on his back, whimpering abjectly. Jeebee ran his fingers through the coarse hair of Wolf’s exposed chest and belly looking for wounds and his heart sank as his hand encountered warm, sticky wetness he first thought to be blood.

Wolf was urinating copiously, his half-closed eyes and fixed grin signaling an absolute relaxation and utter contentment.