Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

She had had an advantage over him. She was more confident about asking her way as she went.

When she started, the people she stopped with overnight and questioned as to whether they had seen anyone like Jeebee or signs of his trail, or even heard of such a person, were either people who had at one time been customers of Paul’s or who knew of Paul.

When she got beyond the point where Paul was known, she still continued by a chain method, in which she would ask the last family to welcome her whom she might contact farther north. So, equipped with a name and some information that would help introduce her to someone who did not know her, she had moved on, and on; each time, upon leaving she asked for the name of someone yet further up.

None of those she asked or visited had seen Jeebee, or knew of him directly. But she did pick up word, late in the trip, of someone glimpsed moving northward with a couple of horses.

Even this information was told her only from time to time. But since she knew she was headed in the right direction, she continued northward. Her figuring was that since Jeebee would be fighting the clock of the seasons to get to his brother’s ranch in time, he would keep moving in the direction she was taking herself. Her only fear was that he would reach the area of his brother’s ranch, then start to wander around trying to find it, and she might overshoot him at that point. Her hope was that she still could overtake him before he got too far north.

She was still feeling relatively safe when her chain of references, from household to household, broke.

She had already decided that if the worse came to the worst, and she had not caught up with Jeebee before winter started, she would try to find some family that would take her in until the spring. One which would be willing to trade food and shelter in exchange for the work she could do for them.

She knew that she had a good deal to offer in her knowledge of horses, of herbal and general medicines, and a multitude of other things useful to know around a farm or ranch. She knew she could be an asset to any such place and more than earn her keep. The only danger was finding herself stuck with people who would not give her a chance to prove what she was able to do.

“…and that’s more or less what happened,” she told Jeebee, staring into the flames in the fireplace of the cave. “I finally got sent on by one family—their name was Henderson, they were nice people—but they sent me on with only one name, a name for only one person in a family. He was an old man named Gary Brutelle. I was told he didn’t have any wife or children, but he was supposed to have a couple of younger men, nephews or cousins or something like that, living with him.”

She had always been wary of stopping with any family or group that had no woman among them. But the Hendersons had assured her that old Gary Brutelle was the nicest of men. In addition, he would be definitely in control of anyone else living under his roof.

It was the only lead she had. So she went forward, particularly feeling that she must be very close behind Jeebee, since at the Hendersons’ there had been talk of some sign found that somebody with horses had camped in the willow bottoms of a small river nearby. A camp, she was told, of which the sign had been recent.

So if that was Jeebee, he must be fairly close ahead of her.

Jeebee was tempted to tell her about the bear, but he did not want to interrupt her, now that she was talking.

She did not even glance at him, but continued with her eyes on the fire.

“But when I got to this Brutelle place,” she said, “the old man had died. There were only the two cousins there. They were men in their forties, and they seemed decent enough. I was going to move on anyway, except they seemed very good, and really insisted on my staying overnight.”

She paused.

“I shouldn’t have trusted them.”

Jeebee tensed. This time she did look at him.

“Oh, they didn’t do anything to me personally.” She looked back at the fire. “But when I got up in the morning and moved out into the kitchen, I found one of them holding a rifle on me. The other took away my revolver. They told me they’d talked it over last night after I’d gone to bed. I was to stay with them—and work for them. They needed a woman around the house. As long as I didn’t give any trouble to them, they wouldn’t give any trouble to me. But I was going to stay, and that was that.”

She hesitated.

“In some ways,” she said, “I don’t think they were really so bad. It was just that they really wanted to keep me, and they knew I’d never stay of my own free will. So they took my guns and my horses—everything I owned—and made sure I wasn’t carrying anything else, even a knife I might use against them. And kept me locked up nights. Daytimes, there was always one of them with me and he had a gun.”

She stopped, and stayed stopped so long that Jeebee finally prompted her.

“What happened then?”

She looked at him.

“Well,” she said, “I thought it best to seem to go along with them and maybe they’d relax and I’d have a chance to slip away.

And that’s pretty much what happened after several weeks. But I had to run at night, with nothing more than that packsack on my back, with a couple of blankets and a little bit of food that I stole from their kitchen. I headed north blind. I didn’t even get to keep my binoculars. With those I could have waited my time to come up and watch a ranch house from a distance until I was sure there was a woman there, or else there was some sign that it’d be safe to go up to them. As it happened, I’d only passed a couple of places—and that at night—before this snow caught me. I sneaked into a barn at one of the ranch houses, but left that morning before anybody was up, so I don’t know what they were like. I headed on north, but finally, I knew it was no good. I was out of food and desperate. Even if they made a slave of me, the next place I came to, I had to go in and throw myself on their mercy. If I didn’t find a place, I was going into the hills, the way you have, and see if I couldn’t set snares for rabbits and small animals and find someplace to hole up.” She looked at him.

“Well, you know the rest,” she said. “It was then you found me.

“You were really ready to drop,” said Jeebee. “I don’t know how you went that long before turning in somewhere.”

“I kept hoping to catch up with you,” she said, looking at him. “It’s funny. I didn’t really find you until after I’d finally given up hope I’d find you.”

“You were out on your feet,” Jeebee said gruffly. “You’d have died that night if I hadn’t found you.”

“Maybe,” she said, looking back at the fire. “Maybe… but maybe not. I had a lot of reason to want to live.”

She sat without saying anything more for some seconds. Jeebee waited her out, listening to the crackle and snap of the burning wood in the fireplace. Finally she shook her head, as if she was putting the whole memory she had talked about out of her mind. She looked over at him and smiled.

“Have you looked for an outdoor thermometer down at that ranch?” she said. “That’s not the sort of thing people raiding a ranch like that would particularly think of taking. They must have had a thermometer to see what the outside temperature was like. Did you see one?”

“No,” Jeebee said slowly. The fact of the matter was it had never crossed his mind to look, either. Or if he had seen one, he had paid no attention to it. He was long past the point where he thought of the weather in degrees. It was cold, it was hot, it was bearable, it was unbearable. These were the things he concerned himself with, as exclusively as Wolf might.