Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

“And he went along with you—just like that?”

“All right!” she said. “I told him I’d give you my own things if he wouldn’t, and he said in that case he didn’t have a choice, because he’d just have to replace them so I’d still have them. Yes, I know it was a hard thing to do to him. He loves me, Jeebee. All this—”

She waved her hand at the wagon.

“—all this, he did for me. I didn’t give him any choice in this case, no. But I’d do what I did again in a minute. I tell you, I want you to stay alive.”

They stood staring into each other’s eyes for a long, painful minute. Then Jeebee stooped to the pile on the groundsheet and began the process of loading the packhorse. Merry had always taken charge of packing the horses when the two of them had gone after the seed. Even when she had allowed Jeebee to help, it had been strictly under her supervision.

Merry had explained that not only was each horse best off loaded with the optimum amount the animal could carry, some carried their loads best when those loads were arranged in a way that suited the particular horse. Jeebee had followed orders, listened, and to his surprise, ended up knowing more than he had ever suspected there was to know about loading a packhorse.

In this case, he could take it for granted that Merry had not supplied him with too heavy a load for Sally to carry comfortably, and he remembered that Sally had a ticklish spot high on her left side, which was best off without having anything pressing directly on it.

As he worked, he waited to hear Merry correcting him in what he was doing. But she said nothing. When at last he had put everything on the horse’s back, covered the load completely with the groundsheet, and secured it all with rope in a diamond hitch, he heard something that was almost a small sigh behind him.

He turned and stood facing Merry once more.

“It’s all right,” Merry said, after a moment. “You’ll do all right. Just remember, she can carry perhaps another fifty pounds comfortably for a full day, at a walking pace—but no more, for day-in, day-out travel.”

They were once more looking unhappily into each other’s eyes.

“You don’t have to go,” Merry said, finally. The words came almost as if forced from her.

“Yes,” Jeebee said with a tight throat, “you know I do. And there’s no hope at all… ”

His voice ran out.

“I can’t leave Dad,” she said. “You know that. But you’d be as safe with us as with anybody else.”

“It’s not just safety,” he said. “It’s a place where I can work I need.” [*original book says this, page 204]

“What work?”

“Maybe someday figuring out how all this happened to us. How maybe it could be kept from ever happening again.”

She shook her head slowly.

“Why you?” she asked. “And what difference does it make now?”

“It makes a difference because a civilized world’s going to grow back together again,” he said. “You know that. Paul knows it. He even plans on it—for your future. You know that, too. As for why it has to be me who finds it, maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t know of anyone else who’s trying, with what I know.”

He had never told her as much of his personal history as he would have liked, and the meanings of it to him—even though they had talked at length on the seed-farm trip. She had not, perhaps, asked the right questions to get him going, and he was not yet beyond the reticence that had simply been his habit for a lifetime. So now, even as the words left him, he felt suddenly sure she would not understand what he was talking about.

Perhaps she did not, but in any case, she seemed to take them at face value.

“We’ll be coming by here again next year at this time, give or take a week or so,” she said.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

They stood for a moment more. Then, since nothing more came to him to say, he turned, put his foot in the stirrup of Brute’s saddle, and himself up onto the back of the riding horse.

He looked down at her from horseback.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll get going.”

He could not bring himself to say good-bye. Apparently, neither could she. But as he lifted the reins and Brute stirred to make his first step, she caught hold of Jeebee’s knee with one hand, stopping the horse.

“I love you!” she said.

He looked down at her, feeling the pressure of her hand on his knee. It was out in the open now. Like a naked, twin-edged sword between them, he remembered, as if it had been only a moment ago, the pressure of her body against his when he had held her for that moment on the seed trip.

He knew now that she had no more defenses left. If he should get back down from the horse now and put his arms around her and hold her and kiss her, she would go with him. Or would he stay? The strength of the emotion between them was almost overwhelming. They could gamble either way—that it would work out if she came with him, that it would work out if he stayed with her.

But this was not a gamblers’ world anymore. The last few months and weeks, especially the weeks before, had taught him that. That in his near starvation, they dared not kiss.

“And God knows—” he said, sitting still in the saddle where he was. The words were pulling from him, after a moment’s struggle to find his voice. “ God knows I love you! ”

He shook up the reins and Brute led off, Sally trailing obediently at the end of the length of rope that attached her to Brute and Jeebee. Wolf, who had been lying all this time, watching them from the step to the back door of the wagon, leaped down and trotted to catch up with him.

Halfway to the trees beyond the cleared side of the road he half turned in the saddle, looking back, and saw her still standing where he had left her, gazing after him. He lifted his left hand from the elbow in a single wave. Her hand went up in answer.

He turned, rode on into the trees, and the wagon behind him, with all about it, was lost to sight.

“Damn!”

“The sound of his own voice, within the silence of the lodgepole pines, startled him. Mountains stood on his left hand, the side of the western horizon. He was riding through the north of Wyoming, toward the Montana border.

He reined in Brute; and the packhorse, Sally, feeling the sudden slackening of the line tying her to Jeebee’s saddle, stopped also—Brute being no respecter of sex or familiarity in the case of any other horse crowding his heels. Like a professional boxer reacting to a thrown punch, his two iron-shod hooves would lash out in automatic reflex.

So they all halted, even Wolf, who at the moment was traveling with them. He looked up at Jeebee.

“What’s wrong with me?” Jeebee said to him. “It’s only the end of June! I’ve got plenty of time to find that customer of Paul’s who kept wolves, and maybe get a look at what books on people like you he might have!”

Wolf merely watched him. The only readable expression on his furry mask of a face was one of mild curiosity. Jeebee had not known whether the other would leave with him or not. True, Wolf had gone with him and Merry on their trip to get the seeds, but Jeebee had become more than half convinced that the golden-eyed individual had come to like Merry better than himself, and would choose instead to stay with the wagon.

There were so many questions in Jeebee’s mind about Wolf and his kind—which brought him back to why he had just sworn at himself and pulled up.

It was less than a day and a half since he had parted from Merry, Paul, and Nick. The wagon had turned off Interstate Highway 90 a safe number of miles before reaching the ruins of Buffalo. From there it had swung downward to meet and head south on U.S. Highway 87, on Paul’s customary path to Texas. From Texas it would turn east and go back along a route through the southern states, during the late-summer and fall months, to Paul’s headquarters somewhere in the Carolinas.