Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

Arrived there, he licked at her face. She tried to dodge the tongue and reached out to scratch in the winter-thick fur under his neck. Wolf slipped quickly into the enthusiasm of his normal greeting, and the more Merry tried to restrain him, the more insistently he pressed his attentions.

“That’s enough,” Merry said finally.

Jeebee stepped forward and scooped Wolf up, one arm under his belly and the other between his forelegs. Wolf’s chest was cradled in the crook of his arm, and his neck was jammed against Jeebee’s shoulder, so Wolf could not turn and snap at his face in protest. Carrying the other so, Jeebee pushed his way through first the inner door, then the outer one. Outside, he kicked the outer door closed hard enough so it latched behind them. Then he set Wolf down.

Wolf tried to get back in through the front door, but Jeebee stood where he was.

“It’s no use,” Jeebee told him. “She’s got to rest. Later on you can see as much of her as you want to. How about that?”

As usual, neither the words nor the tone of Jeebee’s voice made any visible impression on Wolf, where they might have soothed the ruffled feelings of a dog. But, also as usual, Jeebee felt better voicing his thoughts aloud. After a few seconds, Wolf gave up trying to open the latched door, gave Jeebee a petulant stare, and stalked off. As suddenly as ever, he pulled his vanishing act, and the meadow was empty.

Jeebee waited a moment more to make sure he was gone, then let himself back in through the outside door, latching it behind him again and returning to Merry.

“I guess I’m weaker than I thought,” Merry said as he came in.

“You’ve got plenty of reason to be,” Jeebee said. His voice sounded gruff in his own ears. “Sleep, now. Or would you like something more to eat first?”

“No more food,” said Merry. “You’ve filled me up to where I could go five days without eating.”

“You’d probably gone five days without when I met you,” said Jeebee.

“Not quite,” said Merry. But her eyelids fluttered as she said it. A second later she was asleep again.

On the morning of the fourth day, her need for sleep and her general exhaustion seemed mostly to have left her. She woke when Jeebee roused himself. They could not see out the window he had put in the front wall with both doors closed, but Jeebee knew from habit that it was barely dawn. This morning saw Merry bright-eyed and looking almost as he had last remembered her at the wagon.

She insisted on rising, and frying some of the bacon herself, then making what she christened as their “deprived” form of pancakes, with the melted bacon fat, flour, and water.

Jeebee ate, feeling extraordinarily domesticated, and went out to harness the horses to the trailer. It was a bright morning. Cool now, but it would warm with the day. When everything was ready, he left the revolver with her. “I’ll hunt in close to the foothills,” he said. “I ought to be back by midafternoon.”

“I wish I could go with you,” she answered.

“In a day or so, when you’re stronger,” he said.

They clung together tightly for a moment.

It was with an effort on both their parts that they let go of each other. Jeebee picked up the reins of the two animals shortly in front of their mouths, wrapped the excess around his arm, and led them away across the meadow and down toward the flatlands.

When he got back, in midafternoon as he had promised, he found the cave and its contents straightened up and as cleared of loose sand as possible. He delivered his raw meat, which she started cooking, and they went through the ending routine of the day, including Wolf’s twilight return and greetings and finishing up the cooking of all the meat he had brought back.

Jeebee had been sleeping rolled up on the earth floor of the cave so as not to disturb her during the first few nights. This night, she made room for him in the bed. For a moment they lay looking into each other’s eyes in the firelight, then came together as naturally as shadows from the sun outside a room approach each other and merge at the end of a day.

It took her a full week to recover to anything like normal activity. They had no way of weighing her until she could get down to the ranch, or Jeebee could bring back up the bathroom scales that he knew to be down there, ignored by its attackers when the ranch had been looted. It was obvious that she had lost more than a little weight. Her clothes hung loosely on her, and she looked even more lost in some of Jeebee’s clothes she borrowed to wear while she washed her own.

She urged Jeebee to return to his normal routine, whatever that was.

“I’m just fine by myself,” she said. “I can make a fire if I want. I can cook anything I want to eat. I’m completely taken care of here. You can keep leaving your revolver with me, if you’re worried about my being safe. But the snow will be five feet deep before you turn around. I want to get down to that ranch with you, too, as soon as we can. I’ll bet I can find a lot of things you didn’t think to bring up here.”

“You might,” said Jeebee.

He thought he heard a note in her voice that was somehow wrong, and could be connected to whatever had happened to Paul, Nick, and the wagon—and to her as a result. It was as if she was trying hard to act as if there was nothing unsaid between them—a sort of unnatural brittleness. But he said nothing. He took the rifle, the horses and trailer—for the snow was now almost gone and the good weather held—and went back to his hunting. Now that she was here to do the cooking for him, he could simply drop off a load of raw meat at the cave and return to the flatlands without waiting. With the two of them and winter coming on, there was a more urgent need for stockpiling meat than ever.

The days were still sunny, but it was getting colder. It was now frosty in the mornings, and the cooked meat could be hung in places where it was in the shade all day. So it could be kept at close to ordinary refrigerator temperature.

So Jeebee spent the next few days hunting. Up at the cave, Merry gradually recovered her strength, although the strange brittleness of character stayed with her. She was almost overbusy, cleaning and recleaning the inner room, cooking the meat he brought in, and—although he did not know about this until she was halfway into it—she began enlarging the hole in the cold front room, at the opposite end of that long, narrow passageway from the blacksmithy, and had it half-dug before he found out.

Still, she seemed finally to have become fully rested. So that, while Jeebee by himself had been in the habit of going to sleep shortly after sundown and sleeping until just before dawn, he now took to staying up later in the evening with her, talking before the fire. In these talks, finally, little by little, without any coaxing from him but as if the memories were painful, the story of her journey to find him came out.

It came in bits and pieces. Clearly, she found difficulty in winding herself up to the point of telling it, and she was starting with those things that were easier to tell, first.

For Jeebee it was a little like reading a book, or watching a movie, which had been chopped into sections, each section being read forward in the ordinary manner, but with the sections not necessarily in order except that they generally revealed themselves in reverse order.

She had known, she said, in any case roughly, where Jeebee was headed, and thought she knew which way he would go. Although of course she had assumed he would be going directly up into Montana after leaving the wagon. It had not occurred to her that he might backtrack, cross the Powder River Pass, and take a side trip to get the wolf books. As a result, she had gone up the other side of that particular range of mountains and not crossed his trail until she was above Billings.