Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

That gave him no more than two months in which to find his brother’s ranch, and he had estimated it could be anywhere within over a thousand square miles of territory. Those thousand-plus square miles would be down in the flatlands. He would be moving across the property of other people who did not know him, and who might not even know, let alone like, his brother.

If he still had not found the ranch by the time the first heavy snowstorm, or series of snowstorms, caught him, he would not last long down below. Even if he was able to make it from where the snow caught him, up into nearby foothills, he would still face having to find or make some kind of winter-long shelter under the beginning of that season’s conditions—an almost impossible task.

But—if he stayed where he was right now and started preparing a winter shelter, he would have those two months in which to work on it.

The odds were overwhelming against going on.

Actually, his only reason for doing so was that all his plans had been based upon reaching his brother’s place before such weather set in.

Now that reason, set against the strong chance of disaster if he went on now, gave him no real choice.

He would stay here and make the best use of his time to build a place in which he could winter. Anything else would be not only foolish but dangerous.

He was surprised to find that finally making this decision seemed to lift an emotional burden from him. All the tension that had come from fretting about getting into physical shape to travel again was suddenly gone. It was only, slowly, that another, if more healthy, tension replaced it. When he began to think of the things he wanted to do, here in the meadow, the two short months he had just gained suddenly seemed to grow shorter.

On more than one occasion while he was lying around waiting for his ankle to mend, he had played with the thought of enlarging something like the hole in the sandy bluff at the end of the meadow. His mind had even ranged into the idea of making a sort of livable cave, with a wooden front on it. With a door in the wooden front, and perhaps even windows.

Now that he had faced his decision, he realized that it must have been a foregone conclusion in the back of his mind for some time. Thinking about what would need to be done, he began to see how much would be involved in building what his imagination had dreamed up so easily and cheerfully.

To begin with, the soil revealed by the hole was very sandy and crumbly. If he merely dug deeply into it, there was a real danger of the sandy roof and sides falling in on him. He knew how miners dealt with such things. They supported the roof and walled the sides with timbers to hold back the weight of the surrounding soil. There was timber, and even planks, available for him down at the ruined ranch. But to put these all together, he would need nails, and that would mean that he would either have to find some supply of unused nails down at the ranch—which he well might, since that was not the sort of thing the raiders would be interested in picking up—or pull nails from the outbuildings and the house itself.

He could do this, of course, while he was stripping the planks he needed to build his cave front. But it all meant a number of trips down to the ranch, a great deal of hauling material back up—it would be easier to drag it, come to think of it, than to carry it on the backs of the horses. Particularly the longer pieces of wood would not carry well on the back of a horse, but extend behind and drag on the ground, in any case.

Meanwhile, as he was doing all this, he would have to keep hunting at regular intervals, to shoot cattle for food.

Things would get easier as far as hunting went once the weather got colder. As soon as the nighttime temperature began to drop below freezing, a deep hole in the ground could act as a refrigerator, or even, later on, as a deep freeze.

Of course, until the ground froze solid, anything he buried, Wolf could dig up. Jeebee had read that wolves in one zoo had become so adept at burrowing under their fence that the zoo had spent thousands of dollars to pour a concrete apron around the inside perimeter of the enclosure. Facilities with tighter budgets—including, he had read with amusement, one connected with the University of Michigan—discovered that a three- or four-foot apron of wire fencing material was almost as effective. If it was securely anchored to the ground, wolves couldn’t get an effective purchase on it with their jaws, and digging at it was evidently uncomfortable to their footpads or toenails.

At the ranch Jeebee had noted some wire fencing with a two-by-four-inch mesh, of the kind ordinarily used in rural areas. It had been put up around a rectangle of darker earth that had evidently been the family’s personal vegetable patch. A section of that wire would do very well to cover a hole for meat storage in cold weather. Though he should probably find some way of either weighing, or staking, it down so that it could not be taken off of the hole by anyone but himself. Meanwhile, according to the books, wolves did not like to try to scramble over a thin barrier, even no higher than four feet.

While cold weather had some advantages for him, it would also make it increasingly hard to work outside. Cold rain could be expected, turning into sleet followed by snow. Work would not only be difficult, but more dangerous to his health—he couldn’t afford to get sick, out here by himself.

Thinking of the weather reminded him that he would have to find some way of heating the cave’s interior. Body heat would help to a certain extent, in such an enclosed, insulated space, but he would need more than that.

One of the first things to do would be to rig some kind of temporary cover for the cave entrance, to keep out rain and snow while he was working inside. The cover should be something heavier than the plastic sheets he had, which were called tarps but actually were not. Maybe some actual waterproof canvas could be found down at the ranch. Probably even a sheet of something that could be weighted along the bottom edge or otherwise secured to resist wind.

His mind ran on, thinking of a number of things. He was letting it freewheel at the moment without yet making it consider the practical problems involved in doing these things. But then, he reminded himself, it was always better to do the large thinking first and get down to the details afterward. One of the things that had come immediately to mind the minute he had thought of staying was that now perhaps he could set up his backwoods forge.

He envisioned the cave—deepened, ceilinged, walled, and floored inside. It would have the wooden front—there was no reason why he could not extend that front off to one side to enclose a blacksmithy.

The nearly vertical face of the bluff itself curved backward slightly as it went away the stream. So that if he extended the front, he would build out straight in front of that curve. The further part of that front would then have a space behind it, widening out like a slice of pie; he could dig further in to widen it, if necessary, and could further enclose it with a short end wall at right angles to the front section, to tie it back to the bluff face, and add a bit of roof.

He might wall it off from the interior, heated area of the cave, since it would be strongly warmed by his forge, once he had it going. The important thing would be to keep out the rain and snow.

Building the forge, as well as the area for it, and the part of the cave he would live in, was going to keep him very busy in whatever time he had before the ground froze. All at once, he found himself desperately eager to get at it immediately. It was frustrating not to be able to ride Brute right now and use Sally as a packhorse.

Then it struck him that there were things he could do while he waited a few more days for the ankle to strengthen. One was to ride down to the ranch and spend some time examining it for things there he could use. Now that his decision was set, it was time for plans to be made, and careful planning was a part of his nature.