Wolf and Iron

by Gordon Rupert Dickson

  “No more,” she said. “Let me down.”

  He laid her back on the bed. She closed her eyes and went almost immediately to sleep. He continued to sit beside her, feeding the fire and making sure the covers stayed piled on top of her. She had volunteered nothing about Paul, Nick, and the wagon. It was obvious something had happened to them or she would have mentioned them by now.

  Plainly, there was a reason for her not speaking of them. Jeebee understood this out of his new knowledge of the world and himself. So he would not ask. When she was ready to tell him, she would. He suddenly remembered the horses.

  It was probably better to take a chance and go out now to take care of them.

  He did so, first unloading the bundle of meat from Sally. He put it safely within the latch door of the inner room, then took both horses to the corral and removed their saddles and blankets. He left them there and returned to Merry, who seemed not to have stirred. He took the pot of soup off the fire, and kneeling by the fire, filled a larger pot with chunks of the recently butchered calf meat and water.

  This time he used another rod, bent roughly into a Y-shape at one end, to help support the increased weight of the bent-over end of the first rod. He hung the pot with the water and raw meat in it above the flames and began the slow process of cooking the meat he had just butchered.

  CHAPTER 30

  Two hours later, when Jeebee took Merry’s temperature again, it was up to normal. He breathed a sigh of relief and went on with his business of cooking the meat. Wolf came and scratched at the door, but Jeebee ignored him, and after a while the scratching ceased.

  Merry slept steadily through that night and through most of the following day, waking for only short intervals. With the second evening, however, he took her temperature again on general principles and found it slightly up. It was only a small rise, barely over a single degree when Jeebee checked it shortly after eight o’clock on his watch, but it concerned him. She seemed no more than exhausted to him, but he did not trust his medical knowledge to be sure that the small temperature increase might not have some unrecognized importance. But by dawn she was a half degree below normal, which Jeebee took to be as much a sign of health as any temperature reading could be.

  Wolf scratched on the door again and whimpered outside once more.

  “Are you up to seeing him?” Jeebee asked Merry, and then realized he had mentioned Wolf in exactly the same way as he might have brought up the topic of a visiting relative, who wanted to visit.

  “Yes,” said Merry, “for a few minutes, just. But I’d like to see him.”

  Jeebee went to the door to open it. He did not know whether Merry realized that part of Wolf’s importuning to be let in was probably because of his curiosity. He would have become highly interested on scenting and hearing Merry here in the cave, when he had last seen her many days and miles away.

  “Tell me when you want me to get him out,” he said over his shoulder to Merry, and opened the door.

  Recently, Wolf had summoned up courage to venture first into the inner room of the cave, then to investigate all of it, and finally to make himself at home there. Jeebee had had to work out a method of evicting him, when his visits became too extended, or whenever he looked suspiciously like he was about to defecate or urinate. Wolf was inclined to relieve himself wherever he happened to be at the moment, and accounts Jeebee had read by people who had reared wolves in their homes agreed that wolves were extraordinarily resistant to housebreaking.

  Jeebee opened the door, and Wolf bounded up inside, boldly enough, but checked after entering. He stood, with his attention riveted on Merry in the bed and his head cocked in an attitude of uncertainty, as though he didn’t quite recognize her.

  “Hello, old Wolf,” Merry crooned softly. “Did you come to see me? Come on, Wolf. I haven’t seen you for a long time… ”

  As soon as she spoke, Wolf pushed past Jeebee and shambled toward the bed. His ears were rolled back deferentially and his tail wagged slightly, but his head was high, signaling neither timidity nor appeasement—just a friendly and comfortable renewal of old acquaintance.

  Arrived there, he licked at her face. She tried to dodge the tongue and reached out to scratch in the winter-thick fur under his neck. Wolf slipped quickly into the enthusiasm of his normal greeting, and the more Merry tried to restrain him, the more insistently he pressed his attentions.

  “That’s enough,” Merry said finally.

  Jeebee stepped forward and scooped Wolf up, one arm under his belly and the other between his forelegs. Wolf’s chest was cradled in the crook of his arm, and his neck was jammed against Jeebee’s shoulder, so Wolf could not turn and snap at his face in protest. Carrying the other so, Jeebee pushed his way through first the inner door, then the outer one. Outside, he kicked the outer door closed hard enough so it latched behind them. Then he set Wolf down.

  Wolf tried to get back in through the front door, but Jeebee stood where he was.

  “It’s no use,” Jeebee told him. “She’s got to rest. Later on you can see as much of her as you want to. How about that?”

  As usual, neither the words nor the tone of Jeebee’s voice made any visible impression on Wolf, where they might have soothed the ruffled feelings of a dog. But, also as usual, Jeebee felt better voicing his thoughts aloud. After a few seconds, Wolf gave up trying to open the latched door, gave Jeebee a petulant stare, and stalked off. As suddenly as ever, he pulled his vanishing act, and the meadow was empty.

  Jeebee waited a moment more to make sure he was gone, then let himself back in through the outside door, latching it behind him again and returning to Merry.

  “I guess I’m weaker than I thought,” Merry said as he came in.

  “You’ve got plenty of reason to be,” Jeebee said. His voice sounded gruff in his own ears. “Sleep, now. Or would you like something more to eat first?”

  “No more food,” said Merry. “You’ve filled me up to where I could go five days without eating.”

  “You’d probably gone five days without when I met you,” said Jeebee.

  “Not quite,” said Merry. But her eyelids fluttered as she said it. A second later she was asleep again.

  On the morning of the fourth day, her need for sleep and her general exhaustion seemed mostly to have left her. She woke when Jeebee roused himself. They could not see out the window he had put in the front wall with both doors closed, but Jeebee knew from habit that it was barely dawn. This morning saw Merry bright-eyed and looking almost as he had last remembered her at the wagon.

  She insisted on rising, and frying some of the bacon herself, then making what she christened as their “deprived” form of pancakes, with the melted bacon fat, flour, and water.

  Jeebee ate, feeling extraordinarily domesticated, and went out to harness the horses to the trailer. It was a bright morning. Cool now, but it would warm with the day. When everything was ready, he left the revolver with her. “I’ll hunt in close to the foothills,” he said. “I ought to be back by midafternoon.”

  “I wish I could go with you,” she answered.

  “In a day or so, when you’re stronger,” he said.

  They clung together tightly for a moment.

  It was with an effort on both their parts that they let go of each other. Jeebee picked up the reins of the two animals shortly in front of their mouths, wrapped the excess around his arm, and led them away across the meadow and down toward the flatlands.

  When he got back, in midafternoon as he had promised, he found the cave and its contents straightened up and as cleared of loose sand as possible. He delivered his raw meat, which she started cooking, and they went through the ending routine of the day, including Wolf’s twilight return and greetings and finishing up the cooking of all the meat he had brought back.

  Jeebee had been sleeping rolled up on the earth floor of the cave so as not to disturb her during the first few nights. This night, she made room for him in the bed. For a moment they lay looking into e
ach other’s eyes in the firelight, then came together as naturally as shadows from the sun outside a room approach each other and merge at the end of a day.

  It took her a full week to recover to anything like normal activity. They had no way of weighing her until she could get down to the ranch, or Jeebee could bring back up the bathroom scales that he knew to be down there, ignored by its attackers when the ranch had been looted. It was obvious that she had lost more than a little weight. Her clothes hung loosely on her, and she looked even more lost in some of Jeebee’s clothes she borrowed to wear while she washed her own.

  She urged Jeebee to return to his normal routine, whatever that was.

  “I’m just fine by myself,” she said. “I can make a fire if I want. I can cook anything I want to eat. I’m completely taken care of here. You can keep leaving your revolver with me, if you’re worried about my being safe. But the snow will be five feet deep before you turn around. I want to get down to that ranch with you, too, as soon as we can. I’ll bet I can find a lot of things you didn’t think to bring up here.”

  “You might,” said Jeebee.

  He thought he heard a note in her voice that was somehow wrong, and could be connected to whatever had happened to Paul, Nick, and the wagon—and to her as a result. It was as if she was trying hard to act as if there was nothing unsaid between them—a sort of unnatural brittleness. But he said nothing. He took the rifle, the horses and trailer—for the snow was now almost gone and the good weather held—and went back to his hunting. Now that she was here to do the cooking for him, he could simply drop off a load of raw meat at the cave and return to the flatlands without waiting. With the two of them and winter coming on, there was a more urgent need for stockpiling meat than ever.

  The days were still sunny, but it was getting colder. It was now frosty in the mornings, and the cooked meat could be hung in places where it was in the shade all day. So it could be kept at close to ordinary refrigerator temperature.

  So Jeebee spent the next few days hunting. Up at the cave, Merry gradually recovered her strength, although the strange brittleness of character stayed with her. She was almost overbusy, cleaning and recleaning the inner room, cooking the meat he brought in, and—although he did not know about this until she was halfway into it—she began enlarging the hole in the cold front room, at the opposite end of that long, narrow passageway from the blacksmithy, and had it half-dug before he found out.

  Still, she seemed finally to have become fully rested. So that, while Jeebee by himself had been in the habit of going to sleep shortly after sundown and sleeping until just before dawn, he now took to staying up later in the evening with her, talking before the fire. In these talks, finally, little by little, without any coaxing from him but as if the memories were painful, the story of her journey to find him came out.

  It came in bits and pieces. Clearly, she found difficulty in winding herself up to the point of telling it, and she was starting with those things that were easier to tell, first.

  For Jeebee it was a little like reading a book, or watching a movie, which had been chopped into sections, each section being read forward in the ordinary manner, but with the sections not necessarily in order except that they generally revealed themselves in reverse order.

  She had known, she said, in any case roughly, where Jeebee was headed, and thought she knew which way he would go. Although of course she had assumed he would be going directly up into Montana after leaving the wagon. It had not occurred to her that he might backtrack, cross the Powder River Pass, and take a side trip to get the wolf books. As a result, she had gone up the other side of that particular range of mountains and not crossed his trail until she was above Billings.

  She had had an advantage over him. She was more confident about asking her way as she went.

  When she started, the people she stopped with overnight and questioned as to whether they had seen anyone like Jeebee or signs of his trail, or even heard of such a person, were either people who had at one time been customers of Paul’s or who knew of Paul.

  When she got beyond the point where Paul was known, she still continued by a chain method, in which she would ask the last family to welcome her whom she might contact farther north. So, equipped with a name and some information that would help introduce her to someone who did not know her, she had moved on, and on; each time, upon leaving she asked for the name of someone yet further up.

  None of those she asked or visited had seen Jeebee, or knew of him directly. But she did pick up word, late in the trip, of someone glimpsed moving northward with a couple of horses.

  Even this information was told her only from time to time. But since she knew she was headed in the right direction, she continued northward. Her figuring was that since Jeebee would be fighting the clock of the seasons to get to his brother’s ranch in time, he would keep moving in the direction she was taking herself. Her only fear was that he would reach the area of his brother’s ranch, then start to wander around trying to find it, and she might overshoot him at that point. Her hope was that she still could overtake him before he got too far north.

  She was still feeling relatively safe when her chain of references, from household to household, broke.

  She had already decided that if the worse came to the worst, and she had not caught up with Jeebee before winter started, she would try to find some family that would take her in until the spring. One which would be willing to trade food and shelter in exchange for the work she could do for them.

  She knew that she had a good deal to offer in her knowledge of horses, of herbal and general medicines, and a multitude of other things useful to know around a farm or ranch. She knew she could be an asset to any such place and more than earn her keep. The only danger was finding herself stuck with people who would not give her a chance to prove what she was able to do.

  “…and that’s more or less what happened,” she told Jeebee, staring into the flames in the fireplace of the cave. “I finally got sent on by one family—their name was Henderson, they were nice people—but they sent me on with only one name, a name for only one person in a family. He was an old man named Gary Brutelle. I was told he didn’t have any wife or children, but he was supposed to have a couple of younger men, nephews or cousins or something like that, living with him.”

  She had always been wary of stopping with any family or group that had no woman among them. But the Hendersons had assured her that old Gary Brutelle was the nicest of men. In addition, he would be definitely in control of anyone else living under his roof.

  It was the only lead she had. So she went forward, particularly feeling that she must be very close behind Jeebee, since at the Hendersons’ there had been talk of some sign found that somebody with horses had camped in the willow bottoms of a small river nearby. A camp, she was told, of which the sign had been recent.

  So if that was Jeebee, he must be fairly close ahead of her.

  Jeebee was tempted to tell her about the bear, but he did not want to interrupt her, now that she was talking.

  She did not even glance at him, but continued with her eyes on the fire.

  “But when I got to this Brutelle place,” she said, “the old man had died. There were only the two cousins there. They were men in their forties, and they seemed decent enough. I was going to move on anyway, except they seemed very good, and really insisted on my staying overnight.”

  She paused.

  “I shouldn’t have trusted them.”

  Jeebee tensed. This time she did look at him.

  “Oh, they didn’t do anything to me personally.” She looked back at the fire. “But when I got up in the morning and moved out into the kitchen, I found one of them holding a rifle on me. The other took away my revolver. They told me they’d talked it over last night after I’d gone to bed. I was to stay with them—and work for them. They needed a woman around the house. As long as I didn’t give any trouble to them, they wouldn’t give any trouble to me. But I was going to
stay, and that was that.”

  She hesitated.

  “In some ways,” she said, “I don’t think they were really so bad. It was just that they really wanted to keep me, and they knew I’d never stay of my own free will. So they took my guns and my horses—everything I owned—and made sure I wasn’t carrying anything else, even a knife I might use against them. And kept me locked up nights. Daytimes, there was always one of them with me and he had a gun.”

  She stopped, and stayed stopped so long that Jeebee finally prompted her.

  “What happened then?”

  She looked at him.

  “Well,” she said, “I thought it best to seem to go along with them and maybe they’d relax and I’d have a chance to slip away.

  And that’s pretty much what happened after several weeks. But I had to run at night, with nothing more than that packsack on my back, with a couple of blankets and a little bit of food that I stole from their kitchen. I headed north blind. I didn’t even get to keep my binoculars. With those I could have waited my time to come up and watch a ranch house from a distance until I was sure there was a woman there, or else there was some sign that it’d be safe to go up to them. As it happened, I’d only passed a couple of places—and that at night—before this snow caught me. I sneaked into a barn at one of the ranch houses, but left that morning before anybody was up, so I don’t know what they were like. I headed on north, but finally, I knew it was no good. I was out of food and desperate. Even if they made a slave of me, the next place I came to, I had to go in and throw myself on their mercy. If I didn’t find a place, I was going into the hills, the way you have, and see if I couldn’t set snares for rabbits and small animals and find someplace to hole up.” She looked at him.

  “Well, you know the rest,” she said. “It was then you found me.

  “You were really ready to drop,” said Jeebee. “I don’t know how you went that long before turning in somewhere.”

  “I kept hoping to catch up with you,” she said, looking at him. “It’s funny. I didn’t really find you until after I’d finally given up hope I’d find you.”