Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

“Well, I’ll take over now!” Jeebee shouted.

“When you’re done,” Merry called back. “Until then I’ll keep on working.”

“I’m done now,” Jeebee said, guiltily conscious that he had been lingering over last-minute touches on the crossbow bolts.

Jeebee went up the ladder after her. She continued to work until he was right beside her, but then stopped and passed the shovel over without protest. It was not one of the tools he had gotten around to making at the forge yet. This was a rather rusty one they had been fortunate enough to find in the ruins of the ranch. They also, of course, had the small collapsible entrenching shovel that Jeebee had carried down with him on the horse or sledge when he went hunting over the snow on the flats in wintertime. But this old, full-sized shovel was a great deal more effective up here, moving several times the load of earth that the entrenching tool was capable of lifting.

Jeebee took over and was soon hard at work digging back into the bluff over the ceiling of the inner room. The supports he had put up earlier to hold back the earth above them were probably sufficient so that he would be able to stand and work on the two-by-fours that made the rafters of the ceiling, but just to be on the safe side he added a few extra supports and planks between them.

The result was that the outer room’s ceiling became a solid floor as he gradually cleared dirt out to a height of about five feet at the front of the opening in the bluff, shallowing down until it met the wall in the back of the ceiling.

In this new space he set up new shoring timbers and support for the earth that would be above it.

He was still hard at work, but ready to quit, when Wolf returned with the evening. Seeing him up there inside the hole he had made, Wolf was instantly interested and started to climb the ladder toward him, then changed his mind before his hind legs were off the ground. His partner, Jeebee had found out sometime back, could climb ladders with no trouble or worry at all, but he was not at all happy about climbing down them.

Jeebee shouted the news of Wolf’s arrival to Merry inside, went down the ladder, and after preliminary greetings, the two moved inside the room where Merry and Paul were.

Merry had gradually relaxed her concern over allowing Wolf close to Paul. Far from being a threat to the child, Wolf was very gentle and solicitous toward Paul. He would, in fact, endure more from Paul than he would from Jeebee or Merry. He insisted on sniffing the youngster over thoroughly each time he came in for greetings; and if one of Paul’s waving arms happened to stick a finger into his eye while he was doing this, he merely squeezed the eye half shut and went on about his examination.

Wolf’s fascination with Paul did not seem to fade with familiarity. He was clearly ready to continue being full of wonder about him. From the wolf books, Jeebee had learned that this was typical of wolves, that they were all very interested in the young of their own species and would be both caring toward them and willing to play with them for hours at a time. From Wolf’s point of view, Paul was plainly one more member of the community.

This attitude had been very clear in all of Wolf’s behavior toward Jeebee and Merry, but it evidently had some stretch in it as regards Paul. Not that Wolf was ever close to the baby without Merry and usually Jeebee hovering over the two of them. Wolf’s instinct, for instance, had been to try to pick up Paul in his jaws. But Merry put a stop to that.

Wolf was apparently ready, at least within limits, to adapt to Paul, who was still lying there in his crib, not yet up to crawling, when young wolf pups would already have been tumbling around outside the den in which they were born.

According to wolf rules and patterns they had become a pack. Wolf and Jeebee by themselves had simply been a traveling pair. Fixed in position, territorially, but with the addition of Merry and now Paul, the social climate had changed. Wolf clearly looked on Jeebee as the alpha male, Merry as the alpha female, and himself as the beta male of the pack. Paul, he probably considered a somewhat strange wolf pup—that was, if he had ever had any acquaintance at all with wolf pups himself from the time he had been very young.

If he had been raised almost completely by humans, thought Jeebee, he might even not recognize a real wolf puppy for what it was, at first seeing. Though, once he had gotten over his initial caution toward it as toward all strange things, he would be sure to investigate it and come to accept it quickly enough.

The end of summer, fall, and winter abruptly accelerated, the one into the next just after it. Suddenly there simply was not enough time for everything.

The business of building the partial room above the old ceiling of the inner room and putting a triple window in a new wall across the front of the bluff higher up turned out to be more complicated than Jeebee had thought. One of the problems he ran into was shoring to hold up the ceiling of the skylight room, the floor of which was itself firmly supported by the shoring and the walls of the inner room below. Also, with the best of his intentions, his work caused sand to filter down into the inner room below while he was busy, and Merry had to carry Paul in his chest pack or in his crib, either outside entirely or into the forge area, to get him away from it.

Meanwhile, there was still the hunting to be done. The crossbow turned out to work very well as a cattle killer, but as he had expected, its bolt killed by internal hemorrhage, without the shocking power of the much-faster bullet from a gun. The result was that on several expeditions, Jeebee needed to be thankful for being on horseback and therefore more able to dodge the charge of a wounded cow or steer.

However, Jeebee was learning how to use the weapon accurately from a greater range. As a result, with luck, if he shot the animal from far enough off, it did not connect the arrow hitting it with the distant sight of him. It also put more space between him and the wounded animal, if it decided to charge. This difference would become critical once he was back to pulling the sledge down over the snow to the flatlands for his hunting, and facing his prey on foot.

In the meantime, back up at the cave, he had to take time out to thoroughly clean the chimney he had built and erect a small but strong-roofed enclosure over the point where it emerged from the ground so there was no danger of it getting blocked by snow or windblown debris. He and Merry were one thing. But he did not want young Paul exposed to a sudden stoppage of the chimney and smoke billowing out into the inner room.

With all this handled, one way or another, Jeebee had still not finished the skylight when the first flakes of snow began to fall. Luckily it was just a snow shower, which lasted for perhaps twenty minutes and then stopped, but it told him his time was limited. He burned his electric lighting recklessly in the upper room and worked into the night. He had chosen his three windows and set them in place. Now he began the finish work around them, and the last sealing of the wall outside, working by artificial light.

He managed to get it done by morning, but he had exhausted all but one of his batteries, and he himself was ready to drop. He slept for about four hours, then went to the final job of mortaring it weather-tight. This meant taking clay, which now could not be left outside for any length of time without freezing, mixing it with water, and carrying it outside a load at a time to seal the edges around the window and the new section of upper wall.

Merry would have helped him, but there was not enough room for both of them to work up there. By late afternoon, snow had started again. He got the work finished, just in time, and nearly fell off the ladder, trying to get down it.