Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 24

But the trip turned out to be more than he had bargained for. He had counted on the leather thong holding the top of the crutch firmly in place. But it did not do so anywhere near as well as he had expected. Perhaps he should have been more patient about waiting for it to dry so that the cord could shrink itself tight in its wrapping—the way he had always understood leather did on drying out.

In any case, gradually his use worked the crosspiece more and more loose, so that it wobbled on the end of the vertical staff. His left leg, in spite of the Dilaudid, hurt and felt weak, and the heavy weight of the powerful binoculars swung back and forth with each step to bump his chest.

The latter was a minor thing, which he would have ordinarily scarcely noticed. But on top of the pain from his arm, leg, and scalp, it was an irritant. He found himself growing irrationally angry at anything and everything, and it was only by positive determination that he at last put the anger out of his mind.

He made the trek to the top of the ridge eventually, moving in small journeys, from point to point. He would pick out ahead a tree to which he could cling, and with which he could lower himself to a seated position on the ground, with his left leg out straight before him and the tree trunk also supporting his back, once he was down.

Then, after a short rest, he would pick out another tree farther on, haul himself upright with his good arm, and go forward once more.

The real problems came when he had to cross the stretch of loose shale on the slope he and the horses had walked over so gingerly on their way in.

He had picked the shortest possible crossing place. It was as far up near the top of the slope as he could go, before it became so steep he was afraid of slipping and falling. The very top of the slope rose at last into the vertical face of a small bluff.

Even where he chose to cross, it was a long stretch and he dared not sit down to rest partway over. With the crutch alone, and the loose rock under foot, he was not sure if he could get to his feet again. Also, even here, the pitch of the slope was steep enough so that if he fell, he might tumble for at least several hundred yards—for the shale spread out in a fanlike manner down the slope, until it brought up against a more level area, below.

He had known he must make this crossing. But he had not fully imagined what it would be like to go over it, crippled as he was. He rested, accordingly, for longer than usual before starting on the near side of the loose stone shards. Then he pulled himself up with the crutch and started out with determination, steadily inching his way across the open space.

He made most of the trip with his eyes on the ground, just ahead, examining the next few feet before him. It was necessary to pick a place between the loose stones to put down the tip of his staff. Also, he wanted firm, level spots on which to plant his good foot when he set it down.

Soon, again, he was enmeshed in a small world of sweating and straining, with his eyes almost hypnotized by the surface a few feet ahead, except when he raised his head to make sure of where he was going.

It was in a moment of such near ground-hypnosis that something dark became noticeable for a moment out of the corner of his right eye, upslope. For a second he ignored it. Only when he had found firm support for his crutch tip and his feet did he stop to turn his head for a better look.

Higher up, only about fifteen feet or so and under a natural outcropping of more solid rock among the shale, there was a good-sized dark hole that looked uncomfortably like the entrance to some animal’s den. It would have been hidden from his sight on the trip in by the night darkness, even if he and the horses had passed close at all.

He had swung the muzzle of his rifle instinctively to cover the entrance the minute he recognized the dark circle for what it was. There were a few seconds in which he waited tensely; then he made himself relax.

The hole was big enough to take a fairly large beast. But anything large enough to den up there should not be likely to be shy about coming out to defend its property, as close as he had now come to it. At the same time, he now knew that all wild animals followed no rule book, but reacted in individual manners. The cougar, which was the most likely animal to be in there, would hardly be present in the middle of the day, since the big cats were daytime hunters.

Nonetheless… he kept the muzzle on the rifle on the opening as he began to move again, working his way on past.

But nothing emerged from the den. He heard no stir of movement inside it. Looking at it from a little distance, he became more and more convinced that the den—if indeed it was that at all… but what else would dig a hole that size into the soft earth under the shale?—was not and probably had not been in use for some time. It might be a bear den. But if so, it was summer now, when bears were out of their dens and, like most large animals, having their time fully taken up by their search for the food they needed to live.

He was worn out and traveling on a last burst of determination when he reached the far side of the shale slope and collapsed.

But he was now at the foot of a fairly short and steady, if steep, slope with no loose rock. As soon as he could catch his breath and get a little of his strength back, he made the last leg of his journey. On the way, a thought occurred to him that he should have had earlier. It was that, of course, the den was unoccupied; otherwise the horses would have reacted when they caught the scent of its owner on the way past, coming in last night.

At the top of the ridge he flopped down on his belly and put the powerful binoculars to his eyes. He focused on the ruins of the ranch house and its outbuildings.

It was clear that the raiders had gone; and they would have left no one behind. For one thing, there would be no reason for them to leave anyone behind, alive. For another, there was not a sign of life—even, when he swept the surrounding area with the binoculars, of any neighbor coming to investigate.

Either this ranch house was far enough removed from others that its neighbors did not know what had happened, or else these had seen the glow of the flames against the night sky, but prudently decided that they probably were not in numbers sufficient to take on a hundred or more of the horse nomads from an unfortified position. Certainly, none of them were in sight now.

Looking through the glasses, Jeebee was surprised to see how much of the ranch house still stood and how much of it and its outbuildings had survived the fire.

He had noticed before, in crossing the farmlands of northern Indiana, how often a house seemed to have been put on fire and yet the flames had died of their own accord before the building was consumed. Apparently, old and solid pieces of timber, large roof beams and such, had a fair resistance to fire.

It was not simply a matter of starting an edge of one smoldering and expecting the whole thing to continue until the whole thing burned up. Often, he had been able to see where the fire had begun on such a beam and given out. So that sections of the house often still stood, often with part or all of the roof immediately above them in place. He had sheltered in a number of such isolated ruins in his first dash out of Stoketon.

Now, as he looked down, he could see that nearly three quarters of the ranch-house roof seemed intact, although all the windows he could see through the binoculars were little more than blackened holes in the sides of a black and blistered building.

He lowered the binoculars to rest his eyes. It occurred to him that it would not be in the raiders’ best interest to burn the ranch house to the ground, anyway. At least, not until they had a chance to search through it for things they wanted. The first flames to reach it might well have been accidental, blown over from one or more of the burning outbuildings. The raiders might well even have worked to put out the house fire, after resistance from those who lived there ceased, so that the flames would not destroy what they hoped to find within.

However, the more he thought about it, the more it seemed reasonable that there might well be many things still down below that would be useful to him; if and when he had the ability, time, and safety in which to search the ruins.

No live animals were visible about the place. Any horses, milk cattle, dogs or such, which might have once been there, were dead and gone. The bodies of several dead horses, beginning to bloat in the sun, were visible, but at some distance from the ranch house. Possibly they had belonged to the raiders and been killed by the gunfire from the ranch house.

In any case, they were now stripped of their saddles or whatever else they had carried, and simply left to rot.

Jeebee took the binoculars from his eyes and woke to the fact that Wolf was standing beside him. Wolf put his ears back and crouched down slightly as Jeebee’s eyes came on him. He stretched forward to look at Jeebee’s face, and Jeebee reached out reflexively to scratch in the fur under Wolf’s neck and chin.

He was putting the binoculars to his eyes again when he realized he had responded to Wolf without a thought of the guns he had carried, and Wolf must have been beside him for at least several seconds.

Wolves, he remembered from the books he had picked up, never lied. Their intent was always signaled by their body language, and Wolf’s greeting just now had been as friendly as ever.

It struck him that if Wolf was with him now, almost certainly the other had been close to him for most of his trip. It was Wolf’s nature to tag along out of sight, from curiosity. So if Wolf had ever really been instinctively prompted to attack him, it would have happened before now… and his hand would never have had a chance to use any kind of weapon.

A vast, almost guilty sense of relief possessed him. Once more, he admitted to himself bluntly that he had come to love this four-footed companion of his, as he had admitted to himself earlier that he had fallen in love with Merry. Well, he was a human. He had a right to love, because he was capable of loving, whatever other imperatives might drive Wolf’s kind.

A sudden shiver ran through him. He was also capable, he remembered, of killing, too. He had admitted that to himself a long time since, coming up from the root cellar, but he only faced it now as an abiding fact of his character, for the first time. He would kill. He would kill to stay alive, he would kill to get what he needed to survive. He would kill to protect Merry or Wolf.

He was a loving and a killing animal. It was so and there was nothing to be done about it.

His neck muscles were becoming weary from holding his head in a constant lifted position to look over the crest of the ridge. He inched forward slightly with his whole body and lowered his head so that his cheek rested on his good right hand as he stared sideways down at the burned buildings.

Everyone was dead down there. Everyone who could have been down there had to be dead. The ranch house was actually only a couple of hundred yards from him. But it was too far for him to hear anyone pinned under one of those half-burned beams who might still be calling for help, or a baby crying. Common sense said that if there had been any such, the raiders would undoubtedly have slaughtered them, for the sake of killing if for no other reason, just before they left. That kind of killer, he told himself now, he was not—not yet, anyway.

His thoughts went back to the people who had lived below. No, there could be no one alive down there.

He realized abruptly that he was trying to talk himself out of something.

It would be the worst sort of foolishness to go down there. As it was at this moment, the trail of the raiders would draw any attention, if and when the neighbors showed up after all; and if they brought in dogs. Should he go down now, his own trail would be freshest. Though, to be honest, if the books had been correct in telling him that a wolf had to be almost on top of a day-old footprint in order to pick up its scent, it was unlikely that domestic dogs could find or follow anything older.

No, again; it was mostly the thought of the long walk down that hill, the very hard climb back up again, and the possibility of what might result from his going, that made it foolish to go.

But if he did not, he would hear a hurt and abandoned child crying in the back of his mind for the rest of his life.

He got to his feet with the help of his crutch and began cautiously to descend the slope before him. The slope here was greater than the grade a few hundred yards to his right that he must have come up the night before. But straight down would be quicker and he must think about getting back to the horses.

He had gone only a few steps before he realized that Wolf was not with him. He looked back and saw Wolf still standing on the crest of the hill looking down at him.

“That’s right,” Jeebee said to him, “you’re not a damn fool like me.”

He turned his gaze and his attention back to the business of descending the slope. He went down with the end of his crutch dug in, and his feet dug in, sideways to the descent. The last thing he needed now was a fall. The pitch here was not so bad that he would slide or tumble any distance, but the very idea of a fall on the hurt leg and arm made him wince.

He reached the ranch and began his examination of what was left there. He checked all places under or behind which a body might be, and found seven of them. A grown woman, three men, two boys, and a girl—the oldest of the youngsters looking about sixteen. The youngest, which was the girl, looked as if she had been about twelve. They were all dead, and had been dead for some long hours. He did not touch them.

Leaving the ranch buildings, he once more attacked the hill behind it.

There were undoubtedly tools and other things the raiders would not have wanted but he could use, still in the house and outbuildings. Even while searching the house, he had seen a short-handled, three-pound hammer untouched by fire in one of the outbuildings. It was a one-handed sledge or maul, of the kind Nick Gage had described to him. Ideal for use with the sort of backwoods forge Nick had described and Jeebee had lusted to build for his own use someday. But he could not take it now. Even with the crutch, he would have all he could do to make it back to the horses. Besides, the afternoon was getting on.

He turned at last to retrace his way up the slope. The climb was difficult. When he came to the top at last, to relatively level ground, he sat and indulged in rest longer than he had planned. Wolf, he saw, had disappeared again and the day was moving on. Finally, he struggled to his feet and began the long, slow series of small journeys necessary to get back to the horses.

By the time he got there, his arm and leg had begun to hurt very badly indeed. He checked his watch and was relieved to see that somehow he had used up close to six hours since his last Dilaudid. He was entitled to another, although that put him back on the four-pill-a-day dosage he had started with right after the accident. This was the last of the seven days that he had accepted was the most he could risk taking the medication, without danger of addiction.

Beyond the safe limit for Dilaudid, he could fall back on the Tylenol and aspirin that he also carried. But he imagined now how weak a substitute these would be for the more potent drug.

Nonetheless, he took a Dilaudid, rested awhile until the pain had begun to recede, then set about finding dry wood for a fire.

He got the fire going and the horses tethered in areas of fresh graze, but still next to the small stream. He sat down to gaze into the fire with his back to a tree. The afternoon was fading and he drifted off into a doze.

A large, sticky tongue slathered his right cheek unexpectedly, and a paw landed on his right shoulder. He woke to twilight and the return of Wolf.

They went through the usual ceremony of greeting and Wolf lay down by the fire. Jeebee, thoroughly roused now, set about adding some heavy chunks of dry wood to the flames and getting some of his small remaining store of food from the backpack, which he had prudently tied on top of the cinch strap he had left tied around Brute.

Wolf was by now too accustomed to Jeebee’s customary bed of tarpaulin-covered saddle and packload to indulge his instinctive urge to tear it apart. Jeebee ate, standing, then went to the load. He fished out another blanket and, rolling himself in the two he now had, lay looking at the fire and Wolf through half-closed eyes until he dozed again; and, dozing, dropped at last into solid sleep.

He slept long and hard, waking only briefly once or twice and going very quickly back to sleep again. Part of the night he dreamed that he and Merry were busily shopping to furnish a new house they had just bought.

When he woke a second time, the sun was well up in the sky, its light filtering through the upper parts of the trees near him. On first waking, his arm and leg hardly hurt, and his scalp not at all. But when he got up from his night’s bed, the now-familiar pain started.

Still, it was not nearly as bad as it had been, even on the day before when he had first woken up. Also, his watch told him it was nearly fourteen hours since the last Dilaudid. He was tempted to try to see if he could get by on aspirin alone.

Creakily, he found the aspirin and swallowed two with water from a water bag. Then he went about the business of restarting the fire. It had died in the night, the last embers probably close to morning. In spite of the fact that he was now seasoned in sleeping out of doors, the chill had crept deep inside him, and he shivered as he waited for the first small flame to build into something that would throw some heat his way.

Wolf was already up and gone, of course.

Warmed after a bit by the growing flames, Jeebee rose from the fire and went to Brute. He allowed himself another meager handful of the trail mix from his dwindling food supply, telling himself he would try to cook something once he had gotten his body warmed to full life and ready to move.

His watch informed him it was twelve minutes past ten in the morning. He was reproaching himself with having slept a good chunk of the day away when he realized suddenly that for some weeks now he must have been on Mountain, rather than Central Time, and set the digital display of the watch’s clock mode back an hour.

The aspirin was proving itself useless against the pain. Like all hurts, his seemed to bite at him ever more viciously as he began to pay attention to them. He gave in and took a half Dilaudid, telling himself he would hold off for at least another six hours before taking the second half. After taking the half he waited expectantly. Finally, the pain began to back off somewhat. In half an hour it was ignorable.

He had been lying on his bed as he waited. Now he got to his feet, using the staff of his crutch simply as a staff. The crosspiece had come completely loose as the leather thongs failed. It struck him that probably it wasonly rawhide that shrank itself really tight if it was put on wet and allowed to dry. Or, perhaps, it had been stretched as it dried because of the wobbling it had done as he walked. In any case, once on his feet with the aid of the staff, he found he could limp around that way.

The horses were still finding graze where he had tied them. He went back to Sally’s packload and routed out flour, bacon, and a frying pan. He hated to dig into the bacon this early, but he needed strength and that meant he had to have food, and this was the only reachable food left with the high caloric content and in quantities that would fill that need.

He made a bannock with the flour, water, and bacon fat and rolled the fried and rewarmed bacon inside it.

With the food inside him, he literally felt as if he had been given a new lease on life. He went through the complicated procedure of rigging up the block and tackle as high on the trunk of one of the lodgepole pines as he could reach to chop notches for its holding rope. With this, he finally lifted the packload, once more enclosed in the net, onto Sally’s back again.

He saddled Brute with his one good arm and a knee in the horse’s belly as he tightened the cinch strap.

He was ready to travel.

What he was looking for now was a site for a semipermanent camp. Someplace a little larger and more suitable than where he was. Water was the first requirement, and he already had that in this stream. The only question about where to look therefore was upstream or downstream? Upstream, then.

Curiously, although they were getting higher into the foothills, for a little while the slopes became gentler and the going easier, with even some spaces among the stands of trees that surrounded them on all sides.

They went slowly. Jeebee’s leg still bothered him when it hung down in the stirrup, and was not really very comfortable pulled up and crooked around the pommel of the saddle. But the little stream led them at last to what could fairly be called a mountain meadow. Jeebee estimated it at something like three hundred yards in length and about half that in width.

Here the stream split of from a much wider one. In fact, the other was one that might even be called a small river. It was shallow, full of large boulders, but fast running. There would be no way, Jeebee thought, sitting Brute and looking through its clear water at its bed of large boulders, of leading the horses across it. Even if he was physically able to do so, which he still was not, the boulders were impassable. They were too large and unpredictable and would be too slippery for hooves. The chance of a broken leg for either animal was almost certain.

He tied Sally to a tree at the meadow’s edge and rode Brute around the rest of the area to look it over more closely.

He went first to examine the point at which the little stream split off from the larger one. It was as he had suspected on first seeing the two streams. The smaller one showed clear evidence of having been deliberately man-made. He suspected it had been deliberately diverted to provide water directly to the ranch, the dead ranch now some distance behind and below them.

He continued with his survey of the meadow. It was more or less a wide aisle between the trees, with the end at which he had entered being fairly sparsely treed, and open; the trees gathered in closer beyond and were overshadowed by two rises of the hillside that began on either side and continued beyond the trees surrounding the meadow and up ahead, leaving only space for a narrow bed for the larger stream—so that the meadow was almost enclosed in a natural rampart of landscape, beyond its belt of trees.

The banks of the lower part of the stream were at present only a couple of feet above the water level, but farther up toward the end of the meadow that bank rose, almost abruptly, as the slope of the ground there itself rose, to a small bluff like that which had crowned the shale slope Jeebee had twice crossed the day before to take a look at the ranch.

The bluff became almost vertical in its last twenty or thirty feet, and here, as in the one above the shale slope, there was a hole, that might once have been the opening to some animal’s den. Jeebee rode closer, and as he got close enough, the daylight was enough for him to see that while the hole was at least a couple of times larger than the one on the shale slope, it was only a shallow opening into what seemed soil that was nearly pure sand. He changed his mind about it possibly being a onetime den. It looked far more likely to be the result of some natural spill of the loose material of the bluff—possibly freezing and thawing of the earth.

Certainly, it was empty. There was no animal sign, and no vegetation inside it, or any indications that there had been, recently.

He was intrigued by the sight of it. With a little work and use of the tarpaulin and his other plastic cloths that he had gotten from Paul, it was the sort of place that he could make into a rain-proof, halfway comfortable chamber for himself to bed down.

As a matter of fact, that sandy earth he saw looked as if it would be easily diggable. Perhaps it had indeed been dug out by an animal at one time, after all, or at least the digging of it started by some animal. It would not be difficult to dig more deeply and make more space within. Then with something to cover the opening, Jeebee would have a den of his own for the first time since he had left the wagon.