Wolf and Iron

by Gordon Rupert Dickson

  “Come on,” he said to the horses.

  He turned and led them down the road and at last off among the trees. There was no way that the horses could have known that the night’s trek was at last over. But it seemed that their heads came up, and they moved more willingly.

  Down at the bottom of the fold he found a stream that had probably cut its way there over the centuries. It was a remarkably small stream. Only by a little was it too broad for him to jump across, and it varied from mere inches to perhaps a couple of feet in depth, purling softly among the close, branchless lower trunks of the pines. He saw the darkly pale shadows of fish for a moment flickering out toward the middle of the stream, before they lost themselves from sight.

  There was no clearing among the trees ideal for a camp. But that did not matter. Wolf ran forward and began to lap from the stream and the horses literally pushed him aside to get past and put their heads down to suck up the water. He himself watched for a second, then turned and walked a little upstream before dropping flat on the ground himself with his head over the edge of the bank, to drink. The water was icy cold. Later, he thought of giardia, of the danger of parasitic infection from the clearest of running streams. But that was only later.

  Once he had drunk, it seemed to take a tremendous effort merely to lift his tired body back to his feet. But there were things to be done, even now, before he could dare rest. Wolf had already flopped down in a little natural hollow beneath one of the pines and seemed already asleep.

  It was a great temptation for Jeebee to follow his example. But the horses had to be unsaddled and unloaded, and all the gear that had been on them made safe from Wolf’s tendency to tear them apart as soon as he had had sufficient rest to feel frisky. On their trip to gather the seeds, he and Merry had placed their loads in the center of a rope corral that had contained all the horses running loose. Wolf would not have ventured into that corral, because the horses would have taken alarm and attacked him on the assumption that he was after them. One wolf was not going to argue with half a dozen horses.

  Now, with only two horses, a rope corral was not the answer. However, back at the wagon with the help of Paul and Nick he had come up with a way, several ways of dealing with this problem, one of them to be used among trees of about this diameter.

  The horses had finished drinking. He led them to trees and tied them up temporarily—tied them on short hitches so that they would not be tempted to lie down until he was ready to leave them to their extended rest.

  Then, from Sally’s packload he took a hatchet, a block and tackle with rope, and a pair of lineman spurs Nick had made for him in the forge aboard the wagon. He strapped these last to the heels of his boots. He added a wide, long belt, that Nick had also helped him make, which he fastened around his waist and the lower, eight-inch-thick trunk of one of the pines.

  It fitted loosely enough so that there were several inches of space between him and the tree trunk. Then, digging in his spurs and hitching the belt up as he went to support his upper body, he climbed some fifteen feet up the trunk.

  With spurs dug in, leaning back against the support of the belt, he hacked two deep notches on either side of the tree trunk and anchored the block and tackle by firmly tying it strongly with rope around the tree and in the notches he had made. He climbed back down, bringing with him one end of the rope reeved through the blocks.

  Tying that end loosely to the tree, he went to get Sally and retie her to the tree he had just climbed. He loosed the rope of the diamond hitch holding the pack on her back, then brought up from underneath the load the gather ropes of a loose net that had been laid between the blankets padding her back. Now he pulled its ropes out and around to hold the load in a rough sort of bag. The net ends had metal eyes firmly fixed to them and through all of these he ran the loose end of rope from the block and tackle he now carried with him.

  Tying it tightly, he switched to the far end of the rope that now ran from the load, up through the double block tied to the tree overhead and back down and up again through the single climbing block he had fixed to the net. He began to pull down on his end of the rope from the ground.

  The rope running through the blocks took up the slack between it and the load, and then slowly, jerkily, began to lift the load toward the blocks themselves. Sally heaved a deep breath as the weight of the load came off her. The load itself rose slowly, moving upward with each jerk a fourth of the distance Jeebee had just pulled down on the end of the rope he held. It was slow, but it was certain. The distance lifted was proportionately less, but the amount of force with which Jeebee pulled down was lifting four times its weight at the load end.

  So, eventually, he wound the load in its nettinglike sack up to the notches on the tree, high above where even a leaping Wolf could reach it. He then drove his weary body to duplicate the climb and the lifting off of the load Brute had carried, and put it, also, in safety.

  This done, he retied both horses on long tethers, fastening them securely to separate trees, but close enough together so that they could reinforce each other against any undue interest shown in them later by Wolf. Right now Wolf was flat on his side by the stream, looking as if dynamite could not wake him.

  Both horses lay down almost immediately, a strong indication of their exhaustion after the long march. He himself spread the groundsheet from the gear he had taken off Brute when unsaddling the riding horse, and unrolled his mattress on it, covering himself with the two free horse blankets. Rolling himself up in this, he fell immediately, deeply, asleep.

  CHAPTER 19

  Jeebee came out of sleep like a fired bullet out of the muzzle of a gun. It was a habit he had picked up on those first few weeks of his lonely flight out of Michigan. He had gotten away from it while sleeping in the wagon. But it had returned when he and Merry had gone after the seed—and it was back with him now again. Plainly, sleeping in the open had become the trigger of a reflex.

  He woke to find Wolf with his teeth set in a corner of the groundsheet, trying to tug it from underneath him.

  “No!” Jeebee shouted instinctively—and, as instinctively, sat up and drove his fist at Wolf’s head.

  His knuckles jarred on hard bone. Wolf let go and backed a step, his eyes on Jeebee’s without animosity, his head cocked slightly to one side.

  “No! Leave it alone!” said Jeebee.

  He lay down again, ready at any minute to feel again the tugging that had woken him. But it did not come, and when he lifted his head to look, Wolf had disappeared. Still too steeped in the need for sleep to worry further about it, Jeebee closed his eyes and was instantly in slumber again.

  When he woke for the second time, there was still no sign of Wolf. The two horses were on their feet and looking at him. The sun was high overhead. But so thick together were the branched tops of the lodgepole pines, in their fierce competition for daylight, that down here on the thick carpet of dead brown pine needles all was in pleasant shadow. Brute lifted his head and neighed.

  Jeebee struggled out of the confines of his bedding. Of course, the horses needed to drink from the stream from which their tethers kept them, and what little fodder they had been able to find in the needles underfoot was now cropped close.

  He threw the last of the entangling blanket aside and staggered to his feet. He was suddenly aware that with the warming of the day, he had become drenched in sweat under the blankets. He stumped over to the horses, untied them, coiled up the now-loose ends of the ropes that had held them to their trees, and led them down to the stream.

  They drank thirstily, and reminded of his own dryness of mouth, he stepped upstream to drink, himself, then remembered the danger of parasitical infection. He paused only to empty his bladder, then retied the horses, lowered the load with the water bags, and drank from the disinfected contents of one of these.

  These primary needs taken care of, he reloaded the horses, gave them nose bags supplied with some of the grain in the loads, and let them eat.

  For
himself, he got from his saddle pack the last of the shortbread Nick had made for him before he had parted with the wagon. These hard, floury little cakes, rich with fat and sugar, tasted delicious in his mouth after the long, almost mealless day and night preceding. His conscience troubled him a little for eating them now. He could, he told himself, have saved them for a day or two and hoped to either pick up some game, or find an abandoned farmstead with the latest generation of crops run wild, to fill his empty stomach instead.

  Instead, he finished off all the cakes, even licking the crumbs from the palms of his hands. He went back to the water bag, drank as much more as he could hold, then emptied what little was left. He refilled it from the stream, adding one of the disinfecting tablets he had gotten from Paul. In a couple of hours it, too, would be safe for him to drink. With Sally now carrying the full packload and Brute once more saddled, he led both horses down to the stream to give them also a chance at a final drink—which both took.

  The trees about him were still too thick and the ground underfoot too sloping for easy travel off the road. He mounted Brute and headed them all back up onto the cracked pavement, heading downhill toward Ten Sleep.

  It took him eight days, traveling north at an easy pace, to reach the neighborhood of Glamorgan, where Walter Neiskamp, the man who had kept wolves and been Paul Sanderson’s customer, lived.

  The little town—it was barely more than a couple of blocks on either side of the main street, with no more than three rows of houses behind the stores—was close below the border of Montana. He approached the town just as night was coming down and made camp in the closest patch of trees to it, which was about a half mile distant. The next day and night, he spent observing it. Caution had come to be second nature with him now. However, he saw no signs of life about it. No movement of people in the daytime, no smallest flicker of light from a window after dark.

  Finally, gingerly, he approached it. Wolf, who had caught up with him again, followed him perhaps a hundred feet out from the trees and then stopped, leaving him to go on alone. It was all open country, but he had picked the time just before twilight to make his approach. If it turned out that for some reason he had to run from it, after all, at least he could count on darkness closing down around him to aid his escape. He approached in a series of zigzags, keeping below the crests of the open but rolling land that surrounded it. He was puzzled by the lack of appearance of life around it. The cities, even the larger towns, had effectively destroyed themselves once their power, water, and communication with the outside world had been cut off, as the people in them had fallen to fighting among themselves for the necessities of life that were still available where they were.

  But tiny towns like this had normally survived. For one thing, they were close to the country, which meant that they could draw upon or trade with their rural neighbors. For another thing, they were country people themselves, and more accustomed to being self-sufficient. Finally, there would be very little at a place like this for people to fight over.

  So he thought. But, as the shadows deepened and he ventured at last around the houses and the stores into the main street, he had to face the fact that the town was entirely dead, and several of the houses at the far end had caught fire and burned down to shells. The stores themselves had their windows smashed and inside each of them things were strewn around as if a hunt had gone on for anything that might be useful or valuable.

  For the first time the complete silence of the town impressed itself on him. He had been moving with extreme caution, out of the habits ingrained in him these last few months and the possibility that someone might be hidden in this otherwise deserted-appearing place. Now an absolute certainty settled in him that there was no one here. A faint breeze whistled softly through some of the broken doors and windows, but that was all that reached his ears, and for the first time he accepted that he was utterly, completely alone.

  The place had been raided by some considerable armed force and was presently no more than a ghost town.

  Without bothering to continue being particularly silent or trying to stay in the shadows, he ventured into several of the stores and buildings along the street. But they were all empty. There were no signs either of living people or dead bodies.

  He worked his way down the street and at the very end he came across a small cemetery. In one corner of it a large area had evidently been dug up, at one end of which a rough wooden cross had been driven into the spaded earth, but with no sign or message upon it.

  So, somebody at least had either escaped and come back, or come along, found the dead here, and buried them. It could not be otherwise. As for who had sacked the place, it had probably been raiders, a good-sized group to take even a small town like this so completely.

  He shivered. He had been lucky so far not to encounter any such post-Collapse gang.

  The further end of the tiny town reached into the fold of the foothills below which the town was set. A gravel road, already beginning to be overgrown with small plants of the spring, led off up into the fold. He followed it. Walter Neiskamp, the customer of Paul Sanderson who had kept wolves, had lived out just such a road at some little distance from this town—perhaps half a mile.

  Jeebee had gone only a couple of hundred yards, however, before the turn to the road put hillside between him and the dead town. It was at this point that Wolf came out of the shadows and rejoined him. Together, they moved on. A small night wind whispered and muttered about them in the dark shapes of the trees flanking the road as the last of the daylight faded, and little patches of moonlight showed them enough to keep Jeebee from losing his way.

  The road ceased even to be gravel and became simply a rutted path, now thick with small ground-covering vegetation. This narrow way ended finally in an open, bowl-shaped area, clear of trees and, as Merry had described, completely surrounded by the close slopes of the foothills, an area barely large enough to contain the house and grounds the hillsides enclosed.

  A little stream chuckled in the moonlight, down along the far side of the house and out of sight into the trees on Jeebee’s right. This place had also clearly been visited by the raiders. Jeebee went forward to examine the house, Wolf following more cautiously, a little behind him, but showing—Jeebee noted—an unusual willingness to investigate this unknown, in contrast to his usual caution.

  However, well short of the point at which he would have entered the dead house before them, Wolf balked. Jeebee himself had paused for a moment before the entrance, the door of which had been reduced to nothing more than a few shreds of wood hanging from the hinges, evidently as a result of some interior explosion. Then he stepped through, himself.

  He would have been stepping into utter darkness if it had not been for the fact of the same explosion—perhaps the raiders had thrown a grenade, or something with more than the destructive power of a grenade, perhaps a stick or two of dynamite taped together, through the windows beside the door. Certainly the windows were all broken. Likewise, the roof overhead had been blown half off the room into which he stepped, and the light of the now-rising moon shone down brightly through this, to reveal, in shades of black and gray, a scene of utter devastation.

  Apparently there had only been one piece of furniture in the room, which was itself rather large. This one piece of furniture was a sofa, with its cushions now torn apart and its underframe broken. It lay in two halves at about a thirty-degree angle to each other against a further wall.

  The floor also had holes in it, but none large enough to fall through. Jeebee made a decision and reached into his backpack, took the risk of lighting a candle.

  The wavering light from the candle flame showed him a slightly smaller door in the shadows of a further wall. He went through it. It led him into a hallway, which in turn took him into two bedrooms, or at least one had been a bedroom, for it held a bed apparently completely untouched, except that there were no blankets or covers upon it, and the other had been some kind of storeroom full of papers. He p
assed a couple of other rooms full of what seemed to be odds and ends of leather and metal junk and came at last to a room with shelves all around its four sides. Shelves that were filled with books, none of which seemed to have been touched or taken.

  Jeebee’s breath shortened. If this had been the library of Walter Neiskamp, then there was a good chance that the books he wanted would still be here. They would have been of no interest to the raiders. But the sensible thing was to go through them in daylight.

  He was about to turn around and leave the house again, but he was out in the corridor and only one door was left. He yielded to curiosity and stepped through it, to find himself in the kitchen.

  The windows of it had been smashed, and it, too, had been blown apart, though apparently with somewhat lesser force than that which had torn apart the living room. More importantly, on the floor of this room lay the remains of a human being. Small scavengers at least had been at it, for it was barely more than a skeleton, but the clothes seemed to indicate that it had been a man rather than a woman.

  Suddenly glad that Wolf had not come in with him, since Wolf was attracted to carrion of any kind, Jeebee turned about and retraced his steps back through the house. He stepped out into the open, blowing out his candle and returning it to his backpack. Wolf was waiting there and greeted him like a long-lost comrade. Turning, Jeebee headed toward the area behind the former house.

  Surprisingly, out here, Wolf showed far less hesitation. Behind the house there had been an arrangement of wire pens, a number of small ones individually capable of being locked; those led by further doors within them into a larger pen that seemed to have been some sort of runway. If the man, Neiskamp, kept wolves, here was undoubtedly where he had kept them; and, in fact, Jeebee could catch in the moonlight here and there a glint of white bone on the nearer dark ground of a couple of the wolf pens.