Wolf and Iron

by Gordon Rupert Dickson

  But there must be a more reasonable explanation than that. Jeebee’s mind sorted through his memory of what he had read in the wolf books. His memory was good, but it was not an eidetic memory, a photographic one. However, any fact he ran across that could find a way to hook onto knowledge that was already in his mind had a tendency to do so and thereafter hang on as if it was glued in place.

  But nowhere, specifically, in the books, was an explanation for a deeper concern in Wolf than he had expected, or a sudden change of attitude in the other. Jeebee lay musing as the sun climbed in the sky and the shadows about him shortened. He was still in shade now, but just barely from his feet up. Another hour—another half hour—would see him in need of a sunshade for his eyes.

  Abruptly, an answer came to him. He had been making a mistake, thinking of the situation only from the viewpoint of the complete amateur he was in all matters dealing with wolves. The wolf was a social animal, and he was a social scientist. Now, thinking about what he had read of the pack behavior of wolves from the standpoint of a social scientist, he realized abruptly that the behavior of a wolf in a pack might not necessarily be the behavior of a wolf in a situation such as existed between himself and Wolf right now.

  A wolf pack was evidently rather like an Italian court of the early Renaissance, in which everyone smiled at each other while carefully guarding their own back and keeping their eyes open for any opportunity that would expose the back of another, particularly a superior, to their dagger.

  Among wolves, ranking was important, but that was only under pack conditions. The situation he enjoyed with Wolf did not embody pack conditions.

  Now that he stopped to think of it, there had been a great deal of study of wolves in packs, but he’d read almost nothing of nomadic wolves traveling either alone or in pairs. But what operated in the case of the pack was a delicate balancing act between the advantages of belonging to a cooperative social group and competition for the privileges of high rank—especially the privilege of reproduction. He and Wolf, traveling as they did, were a pair of bachelors with no contest for reproductive rights to make rank an issue and all the natural gregariousness of their species to hold the partnership together.

  Certainly the gregariousness—the need for company on both their parts—was there.

  He had been overjoyed to have in Wolf someone who could share his life with him. He also remembered telling Merry of Wolf’s first full submissive approach to him, which had come after he had seen the people chained to the wagons. It had come when he had essentially ignored Wolf, at a time when they were usually close.

  Wolf clearly valued such social sharing as much as Jeebee did. It would make little sense, accordingly, to destroy the source of a comfort and a pleasure merely for the sake of relative ranking. Besides, if you did, there was then no point in being one up in the hierarchy because the hierarchy would be reduced to a single individual and cease to exist.

  The sun climbed steadily up the sky until he was fully in sunlight. He pulled the corner of one light blanket, which was partially underneath him, over the top part of his head to shield his eyes. It would not have to be there more than an hour or so, because by that time the sun would have moved to the point where he would be getting shade from a clump of willows in a slightly different direction. Lying with his eyes hooded, but just able to look out from underneath them, and with the growing comfort of the narcotic pill within him, he dozed off.

  He slept lightly and woke easily, this time to Wolf sniffing him all over. He opened his eyes and found Wolf now directing his attention to the wounded leg, which he proceeded to lick with a steady movement of the tongue. After which, essentially ignoring Jeebee in all other respects, as if he was busy at some business of his own, he moved up to lick the arm wound and then the head.

  This time Jeebee lay still and let him work, only closing his eyes again when the wide tongue approached them. When the tongue ceased, he opened his eyes again. Wolf was in the process of backing off. He lay down on his stomach with forepaws extended, back legs angled out to one side, and his head on the crossed paws at the end of his front legs. His eyes seemed out of focus, as if he was watching nothing. But Jeebee had learned that any move he might make would be followed by a slight movement of one ear. Actually, he had come to understand that in moments like this Wolf was watching everything.

  As it was, however, he could not move—or at least he could move only a tiny amount, and then with great pain and difficulty. The Dilaudid had not taken the pain away, but had reduced it to a level where his mind could operate. It was now early to mid-afternoon, as well as he could tell from the light and shadow around him. Possibly it might be time for another painkiller soon, but certainly not yet. Besides that, the less opiate, the better.

  He was suddenly shocked to remember that when he had woken earlier he had scrambled around for the Dilaudid but could not remember taking the antibiotic. He wondered if he had taken it at all, after that first moment of his reaching the horses on his return. Painfully, with the hand of his usable right arm, he fumbled around for the drug pouch and found it. He got out the pill bottle that held the Augmentin, and by the process of spilling it carefully onto his chest so that none would roll off and away and be lost on the ground, he got the pills in position to be counted, if he craned his neck upward and separated them in bunches of five with his fingers.

  There had been sixty of them originally, gotten on prescription through the doctor who had been on call for the study group. Now Jeebee only counted fifty-seven.

  He had taken the first one yesterday morning. That meant he must have taken the other two during the blurry waking periods he could vaguely remember. The prescription called for three a day for at least a week, for up to ten days in a severe case.

  The doctor had given it high marks, very high marks indeed, for effectiveness. It was supposed to be, he had said, effective against gram-negative bacteria and gram-positive bacteria as well as against staphylococci and against anaerobic bacteria.

  Laboriously, he got the pills—all except one—back into their bottle, the bottle safely closed again and put away. Then, with a minimum of movement, he managed to wash down the remaining pill with water from the lighter of the two water bags.

  Gingerly, for every movement was jarring to the sore side of his body, he tried lifting both bags to estimate how much water remained in them. The one from which he had drunk was nearly empty. The other was down somewhat but was at least three quarters full. He estimated he should be able to last until tomorrow without feeling any serious shortage of water.

  For a short while he thought about rationing the water that remained. He decided against it. He was unclear, in cases of severe bruising, whether an adequate intake of water was needed for healing. Probably it was better to drink whenever he felt thirsty and let his body tell him how much and when.

  Surely, by tomorrow, with Dilaudid freshly in him and the urgency of empty water bags facing him, he would be able to pull himself along the ground to the stream and refill both bags.

  Once more he struggled to delve into his backpack, checking that the large, yellow, water-disinfectant pills were available and that there were plenty of them left. He had taken as many of these from the wagon stores as he thought would see him through a year. He must have several hundred left. Once those were gone—well, he could always boil for five minutes any water he wanted to drink or use in cooking. He wished now he had not lost the drinking tube with the ceramic filter he had carried from Stoketon in his backpack. With that, he could have risked drinking directly from the stream. But about two weeks ago he had looked for it and been unable to find it.

  His semidrugged mind went off to other things that needed to be done. Wolf was still lying, apparently oblivious but actually alert. The big problem, Jeebee thought once more, would be loading Sally before he took off. An alternative, of course, would be to cache his supplies, to dig a place to hide it and cover it up so that neither Wolf nor any other wild animal
would dig it up.

  But he was in no better physical condition to do that than he was to load the horses, right now. A final solution would be to take what was absolutely necessary from it that Brute could carry and simply abandon the rest. Bringing Sally herself, of course, along for future use. That, and hope that he would be able to go back and find at least part of what he had owned.

  But knowing the open country as he now did, he knew how unlikely it was that he could come back, even after a single day away, and find a pile of goods and food undisturbed. Humans might not find it, but the wild creatures would, and in less than a week, even if he did come back, there would be nothing worth picking up—probably.

  Well, he would wait and see how much, if at all, he had improved by tomorrow. In any case, tomorrow he would be faced with the crawl to the stream. To a certain extent it all depended upon the effectiveness of the antibiotic and whatever aid in recovering he would get from the fact that he was in fairly good physical shape from the last few months of living an active physical life.

  His mind went off on another tangent, triggered perhaps by Wolf’s presence. The trouble was, the focus of his interest in his four-legged partner had been sharpened, rather than satisfied, by the wolf books. He had begun just by wanting to understand Wolf because of his own emotional bond with this four-legged partner. Then that had developed into a genuine scientific curiosity about Wolf and his species. Now it had gone even one step further. He could see now that it was not going to be merely satisfying to understand Wolf better, but perhaps vitally necessary—perhaps a matter of life or death somewhere along the line.

  For example, Wolf had turned out to astonish him by attacking the bear when Jeebee himself was attacked. A wolf’s instinct for self-preservation should have kept him prudently out of a battle with any predator larger than himself. What had overridden that prudence? It was only in the movies that Jeebee had ever seen one normally wild animal come doglike to the rescue of the human being with which it was familiar. Doglike—maybe that was the answer. Dog behavior had its roots in wolf behavior, and the evolutionary linchpin of wolf survival was social organization and cooperation.

  Sharp’s chapter in the parallel evolution book had highlighted the similarities between wolf packs and human hunting bands. Was Wolf’s intervention the instinctive act of a cooperative hunter? Hell! Speculation was a useless self-indulgence. For all he knew, wolves—or some wolves, like some people—were just disposed to help their friends.

  The scientist in Jeebee shied away from conclusions based on insufficient data. And the survivor in Jeebee realized that if he were wrong about situations in which Wolf might turn out to aid him, he might be wrong about other situations. Situations in which Wolf might turn out to be an actual threat to him—not merely standing aside in the face of some outside threat, but even attacking him suddenly without warning, because of some unthinking cue Jeebee did not even realize he had given.

  What he had to do was read the books again, looking at their contents with different eyes, and do a great deal of comparing and searching to separate the elements that were basic to wolf character from those that were imposed by their social relationship, man and wolf associated as free individuals.

  There could be advantages to their being together. If they could work as a team, they could tackle larger animals than either could take on alone. But then they would no longer be independent, and the problems that might arise between two individuals who saw the world through such different eyes were infinitely more difficult to anticipate than those that might arise between human partners.

  He thought he could exclude reproductive competition from his worries, but what about competition for food? Did pack mates or nonterritorial pairs quarrel over division of the kill? Probably not, or the lowest-ranking members of a pack would be better off on their own, and the group would soon collapse. But were there other, less obvious sources of tension he ought to consider? Was social ranking, which was evidently so vital to a wolf in a pack, important to a traveling pair such as he and Wolf were… his thoughts abandoned the question of Wolf. The pain was really getting quite bad again; and the idea of more Dilaudid was tempting.

  He found suddenly he was weary of speculation. He tried to remember just when he had first been brought fully awake by Wolf licking him.

  He looked at the sun now, then suddenly cursed to himself internally for being so stupid.

  He lifted his right wrist and looked at the watch upon it. He had completely forgotten that watch with its valuable battery, hoped to have a hundred-year lifetime. It was a digital watch with several modes to it. Countdown, stopwatch, and alarm were the three extra modes. The regular clock mode could show the hour and minutes in either a.m./p.m. fashion or in so-called “military time,” where 1:00 p.m. became 1300 hours.

  With this, from now on, he would keep track of his doses of medication. Also, tomorrow, one way or another, he would drag himself to the river, fill his water bags, and get to work on plans to move out of here. He had had enough of playing invalid; and thinking.

  CHAPTER 22

  The third day after meeting the bear, to his infinite joy, the swelling of his arm and leg had decreased. It still looked like about a third more than normal size. Definitely, however, the wooden stiffness that had come into both the damaged leg and arm from the engorgement of the blood vessels had relaxed somewhat. His torn scalp also felt better under its stiff cap of dried blood and hair.

  It was too painful to attempt much flexing of either arm or leg, but he experimented to the point of convincing himself that the improvement was actual, and not just a product of his imagination.

  Buoyed up by this and his latest dose of Dilaudid, he was able to creep off his erstwhile bed and drag the unusable parts of his body, with the two depleted water bags, to the river. There, he refilled them one by one and put in each a couple of sterilizing tablets.

  It would be half an hour before the water so medicated would be safe for him to drink. But he had drunk most of what had remained in them before he made the attempt to reach the bank and he could easily wait out those thirty minutes or even a bit longer if necessary.

  He also had brought along the rough bandages from his leg and arm, by the expedient of tucking them into his belt. He now soaked them in water and wrapped them again in place. The icy touch of the liquid was welcome upon the wounds.

  He realized suddenly that while he had remembered the Dilaudid, his mind, occupied with the business of attempting the journey to the riverside, had made him forget his Augmentin.

  But a delay of half an hour in taking the antibiotic would not be so desperate a matter to endure.

  He had aimed at a slight dip in the bank, which gave him a rise to his left where he could sit down and elevate both the left arm and the left foot. With these up, the wet cloths around them, and the water bags beside him, he relaxed. Having gotten through the difficult journey to the river, there was no point in going back until he had to.

  Luckily Wolf had been gone when he started the trip, otherwise Jeebee could imagine the other objecting to the arm and leg being covered again. Jeebee had made up his mind that if Wolf did, he would simply unwrap the limbs himself and let Wolf get at them. The idea of Wolf tugging at the cloth wrapped around his left leg, in the sensitive state it was in at this moment, was something he did not even want to think about.

  He would in any case, he thought, unwrap the limbs the moment he saw Wolf, and leave them open. If Wolf went through his process of licking them, no harm should be done. If not, he would simply fold the cloths into a pack and lay them directly on the torn areas of skin so that they could be pulled off by him or lifted off by Wolf’s nose easily.

  The current Dilaudid was just beginning to take full effect. He was beginning to approach comfort to an extent that he had hardly thought possible for the last thirty-six hours when he suddenly realized that he had reached the point where he could no longer avoid evacuating his bowels.

  With a gr
eat deal of discomfort and awkward crab crawling on the ground, he managed to get away from the place where he was lying to a spot at the edge of the riverbank just down from him, and satisfy the natural requirement.

  Having done this, he re-dressed the lower part of his body and got back to his riverside hollow, with the arm and leg elevated again.

  The awkward movements had done the two damaged limbs no good. It was some time, even with the Dilaudid in him, before the pain started to abate again. He lay full in the sunlight, and—particularly with the cold cloths on him—the heat was welcome. He half dozed; and later on, when Wolf did come back, he uncovered the wounds. But Wolf merely sniffed at them without licking. Jeebee dozed off again, and woke to find himself once more in shadow, chilled by the absence of the sun, and with Wolf also gone.

  He made the slow pilgrimage back to the stack of bedding that was the load and settled himself there for the night.

  The next day he was a great deal better. He had less pain, and the arm and leg had definitely gone down in their swelling to the point where he could bend knee and elbow perceptibly. There would be one more day at least before he could think of trying to move out. To leave at all meant at the very least he would have to saddle Brute, and that would require his standing, lifting, and doing a number of other things that were still beyond him.

  The next day, however, he had improved to the point where he decided to at least experiment by trying to saddle Brute.

  It would be necessary for him to make a crutch, first. The trouble was that not even the thickest of the willow stems growing around the stream was strong enough to hold him up. Happily, however, he had some folding tent-pole props. He was able to unfold one of these and tightly wrap it with leather cord so that it was not too likely to buckle under him.