Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

The batteries were mostly back on full charge. As a result, he and Merry could work into the evening if they wanted to. After they got the stove set up and cooked their first meal on it, they did just that. There were a number of odds and ends to finish with Merry’s new shelves, and a rearrangement of furniture to be made and distributed around the stove rather than the fireplace. Jeebee promised himself to dig the room bigger during their stormbound days in the winter.

Wolf had had more than a few opportunities to investigate the stove while it was being moved in and set up. He had been wary of it at first, as he was with anything strange. However, by the time Merry and Paul had eaten their first meal to be cooked on it, he had become more or less reconciled to it. Although Jeebee secretly felt that Wolf, like himself, missed the open flames of the fireplace—to lie before and gaze into.

One of the reasons it had taken them so long to put up the stove was the fact that the flue of the original chimney startedrelatively low down, and the flue, the round flexible piping from the stove, had been designed to go out through a wall at about head height.

Jeebee had needed to remove a section of the wall and dig into a point at which he could make a new entrance into the chimney for the piping of the flue. It had also been necessary for him to go on top of the bluff and partially dismantle his weather cover in order to fasten the flue at its top. Moreover, the round metal piping had to be secured to the chimney wall, below, where it entered it.

For this, Jeebee had already forged thin metal strapping, lengths of flat metal that could be bent around the pipe and anchored by spikes driven into the clay between the rocks, and then mortared tightly with fresh clay. Luckily, the metal-clad asbestos collar that had been designed by the stove factory to protect the wood of any wall it went through—as it did in the inner room before reaching and entering the chimney further up—had been among the rest of the dusty parts available. Jeebee could have forged a metal collar, but no insulating material like asbestos was to be found anywhere around the ranch.

As a result, that last night, they ended up working almost until midnight.

Luckily, Paul had finally taken to sleeping straight through the night, now. They both tumbled gratefully into bed and Jeebee fell soundly asleep.

He was wakened, unexpectedly, and sat up in the darkness to switch on one of the headlamps that was within arm’s reach of the bed, its light directed away from their eyes. Merry was also awake and starting to sit up beside him.

“What was that?” Jeebee said to her.

“I don’t know,” Merry answered. They looked at each other. It had been an extended roar, far off, like the sound of a freight train, amplified and compressed. Now everything was utterly silent once more.

“Whatever it was,” said Jeebee, “it was some ways away from here.”

“Yes,” said Merry.

Slowly, they lay back down on the bed again, side by side.

“I’ll take a look around in the morning,” said Jeebee.

“That’s a good idea,” Merry said. “Whatever made that noise, I want to know what it was.”

Jeebee lay for a little while before he could drop off again. Long before he managed it, he could hear Merry, breathing slowly and steadily in her own sleep beside him. He had switched off the headlamp, and they were in utter darkness. Finally, slumber claimed him also.

He woke again—suddenly.

There was early dawn light coming through the skylight above him, and Merry was not beside him. For a second he lay, wondering what had woken him. Then he heard it again, and recognized it as he had, even in the depths of his slumber. It was a frantic almost-scream of horses, neighing in terror from the corral. In the same moment he heard Merry’s voice from beyond the wall that separated him from the front room.

“ Jeebee! ”

The word was no scream. It was a shout. But it carried the same note of alarm that had sounded in the voices of the horses. At the same time, he heard the bark of the .30/06 from beyond the wall at the head of their bed.

His reaction was instinctive and immediate. He grabbed the revolver from the two pegs on the wall behind the bed, as two other pegs above these had held the rifle, now gone.

Holding the handgun, he flung himself out of bed and through the door to the outer room. Merry was firing the rifle through one of the loopholes he had built into the front wall for that purpose. The outer door of the cold room was slightly ajar, showing a slice of gray, beginning daylight through it. He made two racing steps through it, out into the open, and saw, less than fifty meters off, the massive shape of a grizzly, coming toward them fast on all four legs.

“My God!” he said out loud, without thinking. “It’s the horses! It’s come for the horses!”

“Get back in here, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice cried behind him.

But the bear had already seen him, and was now aiming, not in the general direction of the cave and the corral, but directly at him. Jeebee ducked back into the outer room, swinging the outside door half closed, but leaving himself room to fire through it with the revolver. He and Merry fired almost together.

“You were right, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice was tight. “It’s like throwing rocks at him, using this rifle!”

It was true, Jeebee saw through the crack in the door, even as he was aiming with the pistol and firing again. The grizzly was paying no attention to the bullets that must be hitting him. Even if he was missing, Merry would not be. Not at this short range and with a rifle.

“Try to get him in the eye or mouth!” said Jeebee. Where was Wolf? It was dawn, his time to come in. If nothing else, he could harass and distract the grizzly, as he had the black bear down by the willows.

The pistol clicked empty in his hand. He threw it away, snatched up the crossbow, then threw it down again. The single bolt he would have time for might damage the bear enough to kill it, eventually, but it would not slow it down now. A wildness exploded in Jeebee. He snatched up the boar spear from where it leaned against the front wall beside the crossbow and burst out again through the door out into the open.

“Jeebee, come back here!” he heard Merry shouting. But in this moment he knew enough not to listen.

Just then, as if out of the dawn light itself, Wolf did appear. He burst onto the scene from between the trees behind the bear and to Jeebee’s right. It was his usual time, and he came.

The dawn wind was from the cave to the bear. Wolf could well have scented the other creature from several hundred yards behind on his way home—scented it attacking his pack territory—and come instinctively to its defense.

Now he was coming at the bear from behind, not as he had come at the one down in the willow bottoms, but as he had attacked the part-collie at the station, in his fantastic ground-eating leaps of approach.

The grizzly heard him and whirled, standing up on his hind legs, but not before Wolf reached it and made a dart at its hindquarters.

The bear struck at him. Not so much batting, as reaching suddenly with both great paws, as if to catch Wolf between them. But Wolf was already back out of reach, changing his angle of attack, and as Jeebee shouted and the bear looked for a moment at him, darting in on the larger animal once again.

Once more the grizzly grabbed at him, and missed. Still at full extension, it threw one paw outward, catching Wolf with the back of it, high on one shoulder—just barely touched him, it seemed, but Wolf went tumbling down the slope of the meadow toward the nearby stream.

The grizzly, still on its hind legs, turned again toward Jeebee. Merry’s rifle continued to sound, and the bear continued to ignore the bullets that must be striking it. It came toward Jeebee on its hind legs.