Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 6

During the next week a number of travelers passed Jeebee’s lookout point. But they all fell into one of two categories. Those who were too dangerous to approach because they were possible aggressors, and those whom it was not safe to approach because they might be too fearful.

However, he had food from the root cellar; and in another old abandoned farm he had found a length of canvas that he made into a rough bag and hung up in the tree, so that now he could have quite a store of food by him without making too many trips to its source. Wolf made no attempt to attack the root cellar on his own. Clearly there were no scratch or dig marks around it other than there had been at the first moment of Jeebee’s discovery, and Wolf had not followed him to the root cellar on any of his trips to it, or surprised him when he was there.

Also, Jeebee was aware of a subtle change in Wolf’s behavior toward him. Some sort of watershed had been passed with the moment of Wolf’s peculiar and abjectly solicitous behavior that night—the urgent, but hesitant approach, for the first time rolling over on his back and exposing his belly to be scratched.

Jeebee had pondered this without being able to define the full significance of it. He could only feel that their relationship had changed. They were now closer and their respective positions were more sharply defined.

They had become partners in a more important sense, rather than just traveling companions, and Wolf had apparently accepted a junior role in that partnership. He still went about his own business during the day. But he had not, since that night, left before Jeebee awoke, and not until Jeebee had shown an agreement with his leaving—almost a “permission” to leave, with at least a few reassuring words and a perfunctory scratch behind Wolf’s muttonchops.

In spite of recognizing this change, Jeebee put aside any temptation to take for granted whatever new authority the other might have acknowledged in him.

He was no more ready than before to try to take food away from Wolf or to impose his will upon him in other ways. Indeed, he felt instinctively that this might now be even riskier than before, when Wolf’s most likely response was, simply, to leave.

At a deeper level, he felt that any such behavior on his part would be a betrayal of trust. But his life since Stoketon had taught him much about the economics of trust. Whatever the nature of Wolf’s allegiance to him, anything that could be eaten, pilfered, broken, or ripped would be something Jeebee would keep, as before, securely stowed out of the other’s reach. For the moment, Jeebee’s “trust” extended only so far as the luxury of no longer worrying that Wolf might leave one morning for no apparent reason, and never return. But the fact that he was able to have even that much faith, he realized, in itself was a major milestone.

In other areas, however, he began to be concerned, particularly as he went into the second week at his observation point. He still had an ample food supply. But the traffic on the road had varied widely in character, day after day, and as yet he had seen no one he trusted to approach.

He still held to his original belief that someone approachable would eventually turn up. But increasingly he felt time’s clock ticking away the minutes and days while he waited. Time was on its march. His brother’s ranch in Montana was in higher country and would be under snow as early as October. He had only the summer and early fall in which to travel, and a good ways to go yet.

Then one day as he was lying, watching the road just before noon, he got a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. It was not on the road but in the patch of woods around him, to his left and about twenty yards off among the trees.

He looked, and saw Wolf. His partner seemed to be dodging about in play behavior with some four-legged companion, but Jeebee could not make out at first who or what the companion was.

But as the romping brought the two of them closer to him, he saw that the other animal was not a wolf. It was a short-haired, yellow dog, as large and almost as lean as Wolf.

Jeebee sat up to watch. The two came quite close, and eventually Wolf, in his bouncing around, ended up facing Jeebee. Apparently reminded by this of his new obligation to his senior partner, he stopped playing to trot over and greet Jeebee.

The dog followed after a moment, slowly and warily. Coming to about a dozen feet from him, it stopped, and stood, now clearly visible.

Jeebee concentrated on scratching Wolf’s neck. The dog hesitated a moment more where it stood; then slowly it moved forward again to come level with Wolf’s hindquarters. Here it hesitated once more, looking at Jeebee. Jeebee was careful not to look directly back at it. He saw, however, that it was a female. After another moment, she apparently made up her mind to trust him. Decisively, she pushed forward and nosed Jeebee’s arm.

“Well, hello there,” said Jeebee, looking at her now.

She wagged her tail and pushed herself past Wolf to sniff at Jeebee’s jacket. He ventured to stop scratching Wolf and turned to stroke her head. She pulled back out of reach for a second, then pushed forward again and wagged her tail again, more confidently.

Jeebee spoke to her soothingly again and reached out a hand to stroke the top of her head. Wolf crowded his body between them and wedged his head under Jeebee’s hand. Jeebee found himself beset by an unaccountably frantic bout of face licking, but there was an odd undercurrent of tension in Wolf’s behavior. His tail wagged uncertainly, and his eyes flickered back and forth between Jeebee and the yellow dog. Despite the clearly audible whimpers, Jeebee could feel Wolf’s rib cage vibrating with suppressed growls. He couldn’t tell if they were intended for himself or for Wolf’s new friend.

Jealousy, thought Jeebee? He chided himself for the suggestion—arrant anthropomorphism. But, he thought then, it was as convenient a tag label as any. Something about the situation was disturbing Wolf. Still, jealousy did not fit his character as Jeebee had seen it displayed up until now. On the other hand, his relationship with Wolf had changed, in ways he did not fully understand. Jeebee’s new role might well mean new barriers as well as new liberties. Jeebee devoted his hands and attention to Wolf.

“So you brought a girlfriend home for dinner, did you, boy? Too bad I’ve nothing on the stove to offer the two of you.”

The female wagged her tail vigorously at the sound of his voice. Watching her now, out of the corner of his eye, Jeebee decided that her fur was really not yellow but of such a light brown that the sunlight seemed to give her an overall yellowish cast. She tried to worm her way past Wolf, but he deftly twisted his body and blocked her with his hip. She gave up and trotted off into the wood. Wolf immediately detached himself from Jeebee and ran after her. Jeebee waited a few minutes, but they did not return, and he went back to his watching of the highway.

No one had shown up so far this day and it was past mid-afternoon. His eyes were getting tired of squinting through the lenses of the opera glasses. He scanned as far as he could see with his small binoculars toward both the east and west ends of the highway, where they disappeared against the line of the horizon. At the eastern end, to his left, he thought after a bit that he made out something. He could not be sure, even with the binoculars. It was merely a dot, as far off as anything on the roadway could be seen clearly—if indeed it was there at all.

He continued to study it; and the more he did so, the more sure he became that there actually was something there. If so, it should not be more than half an hour away from him. But if it was, it would have to be moving toward him at the slowest walking pace he could imagine anyone traveling.

He set himself to wait. But the hours passed and nothing changed. Yet, when he examined that end of the road, he was still sure he saw something there.

In the end, and since it had been a day of no travelers anyway, he decided to take the unusual step of moving toward that end of the highway, in hopes he could get a better view of whatever was there, if indeed it was not all in his imagination.

He began by going back away from the highway. Even to satisfy his curiosity, he was not going to take any chances. The route he followed went from the back of his observation point, on a long slant under a fold of land to where he was once more under the cover of a good-sized patch of trees set in an old watercourse, to the east of his starting point, and up toward the roadway again.

He repeated a number of these traverses between areas of good cover, until he had moved perhaps as much as half a mile eastward from his regular position. The clump of brush he was now in overlooked the highway. He moved to its outer edge, lay down, and tried his opera glasses once again on the vanishing point of the freeway.

Now he saw that he had not been imagining anything. It was definitely a vehicle of some sort—apparently quite a large vehicle, but with no horses attached to it. This was all wrong. Motorized transport of any kind had never before appeared on the road below him; nor had he expected it. Publicly available supplies of gasoline for motors had effectively dried up a little more than a year before, nearly eight months before he had left Stoketon.

The drying up of all supplies of fuel for motorized vehicles, he remembered, had been the signal for most of the last members left of the study group to try to get out. It had also marked the beginnings of Jeebee’s efforts to accumulate necessary items for his own escape. Prescription drugs for his emergency medical pack, the electric bike, and the solar-cell blanket, which recharged the bike battery, were all things he had acquired at this time. The bike itself had been an experimental vehicle that he had located, left or forgotten in a commercial research-and-develop-ment center.

Only a heavy transport truck or possibly a mobile home, he thought, could be the size of what he now saw. But the thought of either was ridiculous. Such a vehicle would be an obvious target for any human predators along the way, and totally incapable of escaping off the road. It would, in short, be nothing more than a traveling death trap for its owners.

Now he was intrigued. Moreover, he was extremely puzzled by the fact that whatever it was, it did not seem to have moved since he had first spotted it. The only possible explanation was that it was in fact a motored truck that had somehow gotten hold of enough fuel to drive this far, but had finally run dry at the spot where he saw it.

That explanation involved so many coincidences that he found it hard to accept. Finally, he decided to get even closer so that he could make sure of what he thought he was seeing.

But it would be too risky to try that in daylight. He was all right in the brush; but moving from patch to patch of it while the sun was up would leave him too exposed and vulnerable as he got closer to the vehicle.

He had picked up some of Wolf’s almost excessive caution where the unknown was concerned. It was now getting on to late afternoon. He could go back to his camp and eat something, then come back and work down the highway at night to get a look at the object. He was tempted to just stay where he was until dark and then reconnoiter, but common sense disagreed.

It would be safer to approach anything he wanted to look at closely after sunset in any case. But not at first dark. With the first approach of night they would instinctively become more aware and cautious. He had time, and a full belly was always a wise precaution against the unexpected.

So he went back to the camp, ate, put three extra cans of food in his backpack, and refilled his water flask. He hid the .22 safely out of reach in the branches of a tree at some distance from his camp, taking only the loaded .30/06, with extra cartridges. As soon as the sun set he started out on his nighttime trip of exploration.

Under these conditions, he went more openly and easily than he would have in full light. Twilight, even nighttime, had become for him a much more secure time for travel than day. At night he could go directly to his goal, down the strip of highway, staying in one of the shallow drainage ditches along either side of both concrete strips so as not to be outlined against the stars.

He would come toward them from a direction which any people there would probably not be watching. It would be most natural for them to expect any attack to be from the dark, open country on either side of them, out of which enemies could approach under the cover of trees and deeper folds of landscape.

Accordingly, he worked down the road until he had covered what he estimated to be at least a couple of miles. To his surprise, whoever was with the vehicle had lit a fire in the open beside it, which could only mean either that they felt unusually secure or that they were unusually foolish.

Just on the chance that they were unusually secure, he abandoned his roadside approach for a small woods that was fairly close to them, less than a hundred yards away. He was upwind, so no animals that might be with them should be able to catch his scent on the relatively light night breeze.

Under cover of the trees, he took out the binoculars again and tried to find out what he could with their help. They were not night glasses; and with the restriction looking through them placed on his field of vision, he had some trouble locating the spot of light that was the blazing fire. But eventually he zeroed in on it. By its illumination he was finally able to make out the shapes of at least two people. One was a good-sized adult, and the other was either a small adult, or perhaps a teenage youngster, wearing a red shirt.

There were also what looked like dogs. At his best count, there were at least five of them. This probably meant that there were more, for he had lost sight of some that moved out of the circle of firelight as he counted, and possibly missed others that had come in without him spotting their entrance. Borne on that same light, night breeze, he faintly heard the distant whicker of horses.

So, they had horses along with them, too. He had been right to be cautious. He could not hope to escape on foot in country like this from a mounted pursuer who could see him.

With the idea of dogs and horses as cotravelers with the two human shapes he had seen, he began to reassess what he could see of the vehicle. This was not easy because the firelight lit only one side of it, and the rest of it was in darkness. But gradually, studying it, he came to the conclusion that it was some kind of large covered wagon, with a boxlike body having high sides and a curving roof. It apparently ran on large wheels with truck tires on them.

It was too large to be drawn by just a couple of horses, but a team of perhaps four or six should be able to move it handily. If those wheels rolled as easily as they looked to, four horses should pull it easily on level, well-paved roads.

The more he examined the situation, the more he became convinced of two things. One, that it was indeed a horse-drawn wagon modeled on the old prairie, or “Conestoga,” type that had been common in the wagon trains of the nineteenth century, during the migration of settlers westward. The rounded, canvas-style top and the rectangular body made something like that almost certain. The second was that he must have a still closer look at it, in daylight.

He decided he would stay where he was until almost dawn. If the wind did not change so as to carry the message of his presence to the noses of those dogs, he should be fairly secure here. With the moon down, in the darkness just before the sun rose, he could get closer, look it over in the predawn light, and be safely gone before full light.

He dozed, accordingly, through the night; lying where he was, waking occasionally to drink from his water flask or empty his bladder. He woke before first light, and realizing from the utter darkness about him that the dawn was close, he began to decide how he would make his approach.

The difficulty was that he was not closely acquainted with the area where he was lying, although he had passed by it in his searches for abandoned farms that might have buildings that would yield things he could use. In the darkness, the wind was still in his favor, and he thought he remembered from his earlier trips up and down along the highway that there was another small stand of trees closer to where the wagon was now. If he could reach those further woods in good time, he could look the outfit over in the first predawn illumination and still be able to get clear away before sunrise.

Accordingly, he began to move. It was almost a matter of feeling his way. But his night running on the first weeks out of Michigan had taught him how to do just that over unfamiliar territory. Necessarily he went slowly, but also directly, down alongside the highway and only about twenty yards off it. Eventually, he reached what he thought was the patch of trees he remembered. He worked slowly through these until he was at their edge, where the open ground to the highway began. He lay down to wait.

His waiting was no more than a matter of minutes. The extreme darkness of predawn had begun to lighten as he entered this final patch of woods, and very shortly along the eastern edge of the sky a paling began, which trumpeted the eventual sunrise.

He looked down in the direction of the freeway at the point where he believed he should see the wagon emerge from the darkness. The fire had died out completely, so there was no help there. He lay utterly still, and—blessedly—the wind stayed in his favor.

Slowly around him the predawn brightened. Slowly the shape of the wagon emerged out of the darkness like a sketch in black and white. It was a little farther down the freeway than he had expected it to be when he finally saw it.

He waited. The light got stronger and soon he could use the opera glasses. The vehicle was as he had thought; an oversized wagon, of the Conestoga type, rolling on eight pairs of large, rubber-tired wheels.

Behind it, enclosed in a sort of stake-and-rope corral, was a herd of perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty horses. Both of the riding and pulling variety. Three other horses were unaccountably together close to the back of the wagon. There was something strange about the shape of those three horses. But the light was not yet strong enough for Jeebee to tell what.

The dogs were sleeping shapes on the ground around the wagon and the ashes of the fire. The wagon, he thought, studying it with the glasses, was really oversized. The top of its roof could be no less than twelve feet above the road surface. Also, its front behind the wagon seat was not open, but closed by a wooden wall. Forward of this, a tongue projected only far enough for a first pair of horses. But Jeebee was confirmed in his guess that it would take at least four to pull it handily.

No people were in evidence this early. They must all be in the wagon; and again he thought that they must be very secure, or else they would have had someone posted on guard. He had been wrong about the number of dogs. He counted eight—no, nine—shapes sleeping around where the fire had been.

As the day brightened, the black and gray of the wagon began to acquire colors and he could see words on the side that faced him. A little more light confirmed that the words had been made in black or red paint against the white surface of the side, which formed a continuous curve up and over the roof.

Perhaps the white was cloth after all. Cloth over an open wooden box. The letters of the words spelled out Paul Sanderson and Company, Peddler.

The letters were a good three feet high, painted in what, as the morning brightened broadly, he saw to be a very brilliant red indeed, upon the white cloth. They looked almost as if they had been freshly painted. Overall, there was an air of unusual cleanliness and competence about the wagon and everything connected with it. It seemed stoutly built, well maintained, and strangely businesslike in this newly disorderly and dirty age.

Just then one of the dogs stirred, got to its feet, and shook itself. It was time to go; but Jeebee wanted one more look at those three horses by the back of the wagon. He swung the binoculars on them and saw they were tethered to the wagon; each one saddled and bridled with a full pack behind each saddle, and a rifle in a scabbard at the right front of each one. This was something to think about. Jeebee began his retreat.

In the brightening light he made it back quickly to the trees where he had spent the night before. From there, he took a longer, and much clearer, observation of the wagon, now aided by the daylight.

Now that the sun had risen, the inhabitants of the wagon evidently began to stir. Smoke rose from a metal flue through the wagon’s roof. Following that first dog on its feet, all the others had roused. Now they began to move around and congregate closely near the front of the wagon. After some time, Jeebee thought he smelled cooking on the breeze that was still toward him from them. Eventually, the smaller—and Jeebee now saw—beardless figure came out and threw a panful of scraps of some kind to the dogs. They dived hungrily at them and gobbled them down.

While they were still eating, another dog burst from the trees in the same patch that Jeebee had been in earlier, and raced down to the wagon. It was the yellow dog Jeebee had seen with Wolf. She jumped up on the slight figure, greeting the human effusively, and receiving a vigorous scratching and petting in return.

With the morning formalities concluded, the human turned toward the front of the wagon. Jeebee could not hear anything, but he got the impression that the person he saw had called out. Within moments two more figures appeared. One was the larger person Jeebee had seen in outline by the fire the night before, clearly a large, somewhat blocky man of middle age, with a short, square beard. He was followed almost immediately by a smaller man, clean shaven and carrying something that turned out to be more scraps, which were fed to the yellow dog.

After a consultation among the three figures, the smaller man went back inside the wagon, the one who had met the yellow dog as she returned went back to the rope corral. This person ducked through the rope and selected six of the heavier of the horses, who allowed themselves to be caught with no protest whatsoever. They had halter ropes loosely about their necks. They were led out of the rope corral and toward the front of the wagon.

They were met halfway by the larger man, who took the horses over, led them to the front of the wagon, and began the process of harnessing them two by two to the wagon tongue. Meanwhile the one that brought the horses to him was now back, bringing three fresh riding horses up to replace the ones who had been tied to the wagon back.

The replacement horses were tied to the end of the wagon, and the handler transferred saddles, bridles, guns, and all gear from the ones who had stood there during the night to the three just brought up. Halter ropes with short, loose ends were put around the necks of the ones just stripped of their gear and they were turned loose. They followed like dogs as the handler returned to the corral and began to take it apart. The horses released from the wagon joined the others, but they all stayed in a close group.

It was plain that the wagon was at last preparing to move on. Whether the decision to start going had anything to do with the return of the yellow dog or not, Jeebee did not know. But he knew that he wanted to start getting away from where he was and back into familiar territory. He crawled backward, stood up, and went off at a slow jog, keeping a fold of land between him and the wagon.

Now that he understood more about the vehicle and those with it, he was less concerned about keeping out of sight as he returned. Simply going back from the highway, he went west in a straight line, shielded by the land between him and the wagon, until he was back among his familiar trees.

As he went, he made some mental computations of the time it might take for the wagon to get under way and to get up level with where he was now. He decided that there would be time to circle back around his own camping place. He could make sure everything there was all right and the .22 was still safely hidden in the tree, as well as the bag of food he had hung up separately.

He did so. All was as he had left it. He took the .22 with him when he returned to his observation point. The .30/06 was still in the rope sling on his back.

Lying down at his usual observation point, he used the opera glasses to study the wagon’s three people as it got closer. There was just a chance these were the kind he could risk approaching.

The legend “Paul Sanderson and Company, Peddler,” was in itself reassuring. It implied that those with the wagon were used to meeting people at all times and in all places. Consequently, they should not be startled into defensive action by someone showing up along the roadside. On the other hand, they had looked like a very efficient outfit. And if they had survived with that kind of a rig to get this far, they must be in a better state to take offensive action, if they wanted to, than they appeared.

With the advantage of the angle from which he viewed their approach, and the small but definite added height from which he viewed them, he began to see not only the wagon, but what was behind it.

The extra horses he had seen earlier were following the wagon in a herd, apparently keeping station there pretty much of their own will. The man who had greeted the yellow dog was now mounted on horseback, and riding gracefully back and forth between the herd and the front of the wagon, where the large man sat driving the team of six horses that pulled it.

The little man had been sitting with him on the wagon seat earlier, but now there was nothing to be seen. Obviously he was inside the wagon. The three new horses that had been tied to the back of the wagon and furnished with bridles and saddles, packs and rifles, came along pretty much at the length of their tethers, but without putting any strain on them. Apparently they, too, were used to following the wagon under certain conditions, and in a certain pattern. All in all the wagon gave the curious impression of being a self-contained community; highly organized and time-tested, to a high pitch of efficiency.

Jeebee found himself still of two minds about approaching it. The very order and discipline he saw was a factor in urging him to make contact here. On the other hand, he remembered the wagon train with the several wagons, all of their drivers chained to their seats. In a way, what he saw was too neat and reassuring to be true, just as the wagon train had seemed at first glance. There was always the danger that there could be something un-obvious in the situation now approaching him down the road that he would find out, too late, that he did not like, at all.

On the other hand, he had to take a chance sometime. This was by far the most promising and attractive set of travelers he had seen since he first started his watch on the interstate.

The wagon was only about a hundred and fifty yards down the road now, and coming along with the horses pulling it at a slow trot. Evidently those horses must be changed frequently, for they could not keep up this pace for too long. Then Jeebee found his attention suddenly attracted away from the horses to the dogs alongside the wagon.

The other dogs were pestering the yellow one. None of them was as large as she was. But five of them were attempting to get close enough to mount her. She kept turning back her head over her shoulder to snap at them, and occasionally stopped and literally drove them back before she turned on again, but they came after her once more. Her rather lean, short-haired tail was tucked protectively down between her hind legs. She was female and must be in heat. That would explain Wolf trying to keep her and Jeebee apart, particularly if he had designs of his own on her. Clearly, the other dogs were males; and it was becoming more and more obvious they were pestering her to the limits of her patience.

They and the wagon were almost within a hundred yards or so of the first edge of Jeebee’s protective trees when the female, apparently at last completely out of patience, turned and made a bolt. All at once she was in a flat run, away from the other dogs, the wagon, and everything else, toward Jeebee and the woods itself.

The other dogs raced out after her, but were shouted back by the man driving the wagon. Only the female herself ignored his voice and continued her flight toward the woods.

The rider on horseback abandoned the following equine herd and galloped after her. But the female vanished into the woods some twenty yards to the left of where Jeebee lay, before the rider could catch up with her. Another shout from the wagon train made the rider pull slowly to a halt and turn back before entering the trees. The slim figure in the saddle was apparently unhappy about doing so, but obeyed. Jeebee guessed that the rider might be a son, or some younger relative of the wagon driver.

The driver pulled to a stop as the rider came up to him. What appeared to be an argument ensued. Little snatches of it reached Jeebee; but what he was able to hear was too fragmentary for him to make out more than a few of the words, even though they were speaking in fairly high-pitched and somewhat angry tones at each other. Clearly the wagon driver was forbidding any attempt by the rider to follow the dog into the woods.

The wagon stayed stopped, however, and the argument continued. From what little Jeebee could catch of the argument, the driver was claiming that the rider would only be safe staying with the wagon. The rider, on the other hand, was arguing that the woods were perfectly safe.

Then a snatch of the conversation came clearly to Jeebee’s ears. They were only about a hundred feet away from him. He did not catch all the words but what the rider said, in a high-pitched voice, was that they were definitely not going on again until they had Greta safely back with them.

Just then the voices were drowned out by the yelping of a dog in the woods to his right. Jeebee swung his opera glasses swiftly in that direction, but the trunks of the trees and the stands of bush hid whatever was going on. Then the yelping moved past him, out toward the highway again, and he saw that the yellow dog had emerged from the woods, tied to Wolf, who was now breeding her.

Greta headed back toward the wagon, and Wolf had little choice but to follow since she weighed at least as much as he did. The wagon driver reached back and drew a rifle from the wagon. He was putting it to his shoulder before Jeebee finally recognized his intention was to shoot Wolf, who was now being towed to within about fifty feet of the wagon.

Reacting completely without thought, Jeebee scrambled to his feet. He had taken the .30/06 off his back earlier and laid it up in a tree behind him. Grabbing it, he dashed out of the woods toward the wagon, himself.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot! He’s mine! It’s all right!”

He continued on at a run toward the wagon.

The rifle in the driver’s hands swung to cover Jeebee himself, and a revolver was suddenly in the hands of the rider, also aimed at him. Jeebee threw the rifle away and continued to run toward the wagon, calling out to them not to shoot.

But before he reached there, Wolf came loose, and was immediately set upon by the other dogs. To Jeebee’s surprise, the yellow female immediately wheeled about to his defense and began snapping and snarling at the others.

They fell back before her. Apparently she had rank among them, as well as being the largest. Jeebee, panting for breath, had just reached the wagon.

He caught hold of one edge of the wagon seat to hold himself upright, panting. Looking up, he saw the face of a broad-shouldered, stocky man with a salt-and-pepper beard trimmed short, and hair of the same color; and the nearby round, young face of the rider, whom he now saw was unmistakably a woman rather than a man. Blue eyes looked at him from under a light brown hat.

“Don’t shoot!” Jeebee cried in one last, breathless gasp.