Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

Merry nodded.

“He gives me something every time I look at him,” Jeebee said slowly. He looked back down at Paul now. “It’s strange… I’m just trying to put things together, trying to figure out how something as large as this could happen to me—you, and then him.”

He looked back up to Merry.

“I’m just trying to make sense of it,” he said.

Merry leaned down and kissed his cheek.

“That’s one of the things that’s so lovely about you,” she said. “You’re always trying to understand.”

She ruffled the hair on the back of his head with her hand softly, and left him for some knitting she had been working at over a period of time. It was to be a warm, balaclava-type helmet, leaving only his eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered, to wear while hunting. It was being made of dark blue yarn. Not, he thought, as bright as those flashing eyes he’d uncovered just after Paul was born. Not as blue, because nothing could be quite like that in his experience again.

The snow had stopped after several days and it was followed by unusually intense cold. He stayed in the cabin, intending to wait this out, but when it did warm, it warmed in the night along toward morning, and with daybreak, snow was beginning to fall again.

It was not a heavy snowfall, but it lasted. It was the second day after that before he finally went outside to see how things were. The weather was cold, but normal for this time of year, climbing a few degrees above freezing in the daytime and dropping to ten to fifteen degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, at night. However, the snow was not so deep that he would not be able to ride one of the horses through it.

As Merry had mentioned, they were already well stocked with meat, and the freeze hole held the nighttime ground-level temperatures all day long at the bottom of the pit, so that the meat stayed frozen hard.

They did not need a hunting trip, therefore, but there were some small things he thought he might want to bring up from the ranch, and he wanted to have a look at how thickly the snow lay in various parts of the foothills and down on the flat itself, since this would give him an idea of how it would build up and drift down there in future hunting trips.

He saddled Sally accordingly and set out. He intended to take only the revolver and the crossbow, but Merry insisted on his leaving the pistol and crossbow with her and taking the rifle instead. It was possibly more sensible, but he had an uncomfortable feeling at leaving the two of them alone there, with less defensive firepower than he was taking along himself, particularly since he did not intend to hunt.

The sky was almost clear of clouds. It had that high blue look that sky gets in winter, where it seems to go on and on forever upward. In many places the snow was only about four to six inches deep. Only under the cliffs and in blocked corners had drifts piled up. He had to descend from Sally’s saddle and lead her by the bridle in only a few spots.

One of these was the shale slope. Ordinarily he went around this. But it remained the most direct route to the ranch. Now, as usual, it was a slanted white sheet from far below up to the bluff where already a drift had piled high. The mouth of the hole that he had guessed had once been a den was still visible as a blackness about halfway across it, but to his surprise, and with a certain amount of shock, he saw animal footprints leading to it—leading to it only.

He examined the prints. He was even now not an expert in reading prints to know what animal had made them. But these, he could be fairly certain, were bear-paw prints, and they were prints made by the feet of a bear much larger than the one who had attacked him down in the willow bottoms. It could even be that they were the prints of a grizzly.

He shied away from the thought. Blowing and drifting altered prints in snow, but these were fairly fresh and he was almost certain they were bear tracks.

No tracks led out at all. If it was a bear, it had already begun to hibernate. In any case, the damage done by leaving his own and Sally’s trail was already done.

But he had stopped to examine the prints at a point a good twenty feet from the entrance to the cave. He now turned about and led Sally softly back the way they had come, while making a mental note not to venture near this area again until there had been at least one other snowstorm to cover his tracks. There should be no trail then, for whatever was in the hole to follow back to the cave.

By the time he left the shale close to where he had originally stepped onto it, his first fears had subsided to a great extent. If the bear had not come out—he might just as well assume flatly from the start that it was a bear of some sort, grizzly or black, though it was hard to believe a black had left tracks that size—it had to have already started its hibernation. And it was not likely to break that hibernation until spring. Unless something disturbed it, they could forget about it until then.

His first impulse had been to return himself and the rifle directly to the cave so that Merry and Paul would not be at the mercy of the bear, with nothing but the revolver and the crossbow to hold him off—and little good a .38 handgun would do against something like a grizzly. In fact, Jeebee doubted that any weapon they had could do him any real damage, unless a bolt from the crossbow, planted into its lower body area, would eventually bleed it to death. But by that time he could have destroyed not only the cave but both Merry and Paul.

But it was ridiculous to return, he thought, now. He could not stay forted up with them all winter. He would have to leave on hunting trips and various other things. It was not even sensible to go back and sit tight until it snowed again. They might, at this time of year, go as much as a couple of weeks without even a light snowfall.

Accordingly, he continued on his swing down to the ranch, which had been lightly touched by the snow, except for those corners where it had drifted into the exposed parts of the house or outbuildings. He got the small things he had intended to pick up—they consisted of some shingles he had rescued from the ash pile on the floor of the ranch’s former smithy and a bathroom scale that he and Merry had talked about bringing up to the cave several times but somehow had never gotten around to taking.

With the relatively light weight of these, he made a swing out into the open range and found as he had expected that except where the land dipped enough to accumulate drifted snow, the going was not bad at all. With little deep snow, and without a strong wind to herd them in a particular direction, his experience now told him, the wild cattle would be following their normal pattern of roaming freely. He swung back into the foothills at last and returned to the ranch by a route that avoided the shale slope entirely.

Back at the cave all was well. Jeebee congratulated himself silently on having the common sense to continue his sweep instead of simply heading back here. He unsaddled Sally, put her in the corral, and returned with the saddle and the things he had gathered from the ranch to the inner room.

“We’ve got a hibernating bear for a neighbor,” he told Merry, once everything was put away.

“Bear?” Merry said, frowning. “Where?”

“More than half a mile from here,” Jeebee answered, “maybe a kilometer, or even a bit more than a kilometer. You know, the hole in the shale slope?”

“That?” said Merry.

“That,” Jeebee answered. “You remember I thought it might’ve been used as a den, before. I saw the tracks going in, just today. There weren’t any coming out. It must be a pretty big bear. It might be a grizzly.”

“Grizzly!” Merry stopped what she was doing. “I don’t like that. A grizzly, this close!”