Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

Jeebee thought he had not a great deal to fear from them. They clearly were not sending out scouts to protect their flanks, apparently depending simply on their numbers for protection. There must have been between forty and fifty of them, equally divided between men and women. The latter were hardly distinguishable from the men, wearing roughly the same assortments of clothing—pants, shirts, jackets, and hats—and in most cases had their hair cut short. In addition, the layers of clothes nearly everybody wore nowadays, including Jeebee himself, disguised bodily differences.

There was something famished looking about the whole group. Jeebee felt a touch of coldness at the thought of being discovered and captured by them; but if in any strange case they did pay attention to his hillside, he could simply head back off the crest and into the folds of the land. He was pretty sure that he could outrun them. At least he could keep away from them for long enough so that it would not be worth their while to keep chasing him. Otherwise, if he could string them out in chase until there were only two or three of them dangerously near, then firing from the ground with a steady rest for the rifle, the .30/06, he should be able to take care of them.

Accordingly, he watched them pass with some tenseness, but no extreme alarm. They moved on westward, to his right, until they began to dwindle in the distance, and he slipped back into his thoughts.

Now that they had gone by he was pleased that he had been as little frightened by them as he had. He had indeed changed.

It was hard to say how much, but it was not a small change. He was as ready to bolt now as he had been on leaving Stoketon, but there was the difference that now there might be situations in which instead of running, he might turn and become an aggressor. Hard to believe. At odds with everything his whole life had taught him up to the moment when he had first begun this run for safety to Martin’s ranch.

That had been the Jeebee that was. But now—he took a hand momentarily from the binoculars to touch the thick curly black beard on his chin. Perhaps growing the beard had something to do with it? No. He took his hand away. That was ridiculous.

What was actually making him different was the mere fact that he had survived this long. The process of continuing to live had taught him daily lessons that made his chances of living better. The old Jeebee, running from Stoketon, packing much more in survival gear than he owned in the world now, had given himself almost no chance at all to last in this new world. Now he was beginning not only to think he might make it safely to Martin’s ranch, but to take it for granted he would, and concern himself only with the problems along the way.

Greatest of these had been his sudden discovery of the necessary savagery in himself under the patina of twenty-five years of civilization—

Hold it. Some movement in the eyepieces of his lenses had brought him abruptly back to the present.

He squinted hard to make out what it was. Something else was coming into view at the eastern end of his view of the highway. Damn these little opera glasses! All he could make out was movement; and since it had not been visible a moment before, he assumed it was movement toward him. He would have to wait for it to reveal itself in finer detail.

Slowly, while he watched with a tension that in the end had his eyes beginning to blur with protective tears, it resolved itself into not one, but a group of figures on horseback. They were still too far away to count, but it seemed as if there must be four of them at least, if not more.

There were more. Slowly, it became clear in his binoculars that there were six of them, all but one of them men and all of them riding at a trot with the unconscious ease of people long used to horseback. Behind them trailed a number of packhorses, each with its load. More important, from his point of view, as they came more clearly into focus, he could see that each rider had a rifle scabbard fixed to his saddle, and the butt of a weapon protruded from each one.

These were exactly the sort of travelers he had been fearing, though in a smaller group.

There was a chance, of course, that they were a perfectly harmless group simply traveling the old right-of-way because its shoulders and median made for more open, smoother going than an off-road route.

But anybody who would bet on that would be willing to believe that a grizzly would enjoy having his ears pulled.

Jeebee was up, squatting on his toes, ready swiftly to rise and retreat. But he found curiosity holding him in his place. The group was still a distance from him.

He decided to stay where he was for the moment.

The riders came on. As they got closer to the woods, one of them suddenly separated from the others to ride off to Jeebee’s left, to investigate something. The rider disappeared in some trees farther down the road which hid the area back from the highway.

Jeebee began to become uneasy. He was aware that the rider could be circling to investigate his patch of woods from behind. If so, he had perhaps made a mistake in letting himself get too interested in these riders. He might no longer have time to escape back across the open patch between these woods and those where he had camped.

He got to his feet quickly and went deeper into the clump he was in, looking for an appropriate tree to climb. It had to be one with limbs low enough for him to get started up on, and yet big enough so that he could get high enough that the leafy branches below would hide him from anyone passing beneath.

After a few minutes he found one, a cottonwood. The lower limbs were ideal in that they were within reach of him if he jumped up and caught hold of one, but not so close to the ground that they would suggest the tree was easily climbable. He pulled himself up—suddenly grateful for the extra arm muscle that the past few months had built into him.

He commenced his climb. Cottonwoods were usually easy to climb and this was no exception. He made it high into the tree, into the crotch of a limb where it joined the trunk. He was a good twenty-five to thirty feet off the ground, and while he could look down through the leaves and see the immediate ground area, he doubted that anyone looking up would easily make out the shape of his body through the intervening greenery.

He sat, and time went by slowly. But the past three months had conditioned him to patience. He had carried the .22, moving it ahead of him to keep laying it between the next two limbs above him as he climbed. Now, seated near the tree top and hidden, he traded it for the .30/06 slung on his back, put the .22 in the sling, and held the .30/06 loaded, across his knees.

If the single rider did have suspicions about the tree, he wanted to be able to take whoever it was out with a single shot. He was still far from being as good with a rifle as he would have liked, with shells as hard to come by as they were. But he was fairly confident of his ability to fire a killing shot from this short a distance, at a slowly moving target.

When the rider finally came, he heard hoofbeats in the distance, from deeper in the woods behind him. For a moment he thought horse and stranger would pass beyond the area of ground he could see through the leaves below him. But in the end they both came almost directly below him. The rider was a woman.

Though he would not have been sure of this if she had not glanced up—at the sky, as it happened, rather than into the tops of the trees around her. She was lean as a man, and dressed pretty much as a man from the jeans and heavy checkered shirt and the wide-brimmed hat, which may have had long hair tucked up under it, or may have had hair cut short. A very serviceable rifle rode in the saddle holster by her right knee.