Wolf and Iron
Gordon Rupert Dickson
The U.S. has been devastated by worldwide financial collapse. Civilization as readers know it has disappeared. Marauding bands are terrorizing the countryside, killing and looting. Jeremy Bellamy Walthers’ goal is to cross 2,000 miles of ravaged countryside to reach the security of his brother’s Montana ranch. En route he befriends a wolf who becomes a partner and companion via verbal and nonverbal communication. The story deals with Jeremy’s interaction with the wolf and the other human survivors of the economic collapse. Dickson has created another superior novel; it’s colorful, well written, and peopled with well-developed, multidimensional characters. The wolf is especially fascinating. YAs who have cut their teeth on such works as George’s Julie of the Wolves (Harper, 1972) or Mowatt’s Never Cry Wolf (Little, 1963) will enjoy this survival story in sci/fi clothing.
Gordon R. Dickson
WOLF AND IRON
This book is dedicated to Harry Frank and Martha Frank, without whom I could never have hoped it to be what it is.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chris Clayton
Juanita Coulson
John Fentriss—Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Harry Frank—University of Michigan-Flint
Michael Longcor
Peter McLeod—University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
John Miesel
Sandra Miesel
Kenneth S. Norris—University of California-Santa Cruz
Anne Passovoy—Chicago, Illinois
Robert D. Passovoy—Chicago, Illinois
Irene Pepperberg—Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Department of Anthropology
Edward O. Price—University of California-Davis
FOREWORD
I can’t remember when I first read something by Gordon Dickson. Every now and then (usually when the basement floods and I have to move my paperbacks to high ground) I thumb through an old issue of Galaxy or Astounding and run across a story that I remember clearly and with fondness and “discover” that Gordon Dickson wrote it. I guess you go from reading a particular author to being a reader of that author when you begin to look for his books and stories. That happened over twenty-five years ago.
But if I can’t say when I began reading Dickson’s work, I certainly know why I have continued to do so. First, he’s a dandy storyteller. Even in the mid-1960’s, the Dark Ages when a lot of first-rate science-fiction writers produced a lot of second-rate imitations of avant-garde “mainstream” literature, you could count on Dickson for good, basic storytelling. Stuff with a beginning, a middle, and an end in plausible settings with characters you’d like to meet.
Secondly, the science in Dickson’s work is often behavioral science rather than physical science. This is not to say that his futuristic novels lack the usual trappings of hyperspace travel, disintegration beams, and the like, but these are mere technological furnishings. He never bothers the reader with tiresome lectures about how they actually work, and I can’t remember a single plot that depended on curious properties of neutron stars or the paradoxes of faster-than-light travel. It’s not that I don’t enjoy these plots. Asimov and Niven do it splendidly, and I enjoy it very much—but I don’t know enough about physical science to appreciate it.
Also, I freely admit to a behavioral scientist’s bias in such matters: I spend less time wondering about how we’re going to get to the stars than I spend wondering about what we’ll do when we get there.
I not only find it congenial that Dickson looks to behavioral science for the “hook” in many of his plots, but also that he does so with scrupulous integrity. He doesn’t take liberties with the meaning of a scientific concept just to exploit its current popular appeal. None but Man, for example, is less a science-fiction novel than it is a parable about the clash of cultures. It illustrates far better than many cultural-anthropology texts the role that culture plays in equipping us with glasses through which we interpret reality, and how difficult it is to realize that others with other values, or glasses, can view the world differently but with perfect validity.
Similarly, the solution to the problem confronting the central character in The Alien Way was ultimately resolved by recognizing that different evolutionary pathways—even if they lead to similar end products—can leave very different instinctual residues. Indeed, Dickson hung the plot on the character’s recollection of work reported by Peter Krott in Natural History magazine on foraging patterns in bears. The research was reported faithfully, the pivotal connection with the plot was plausible, and even the citation was accurate.
Consequently it was with more than my usual sense of anticipation that I settled back to read the title story in the Dickson anthology In Iron Years. The cover illustration showed a man carrying something vaguely similar to the Finnish version of the AK-47 assault rifle and accompanied by a rather medieval, but recognizable representation of a wolf. I had worked with wolves and compared wolf and dog social behavior for several years and looked forward to seeing how Dickson would weave into his plot the complex subtleties I’d found to be so elusive and fascinating. When I finished the story, I was not merely disappointed—I was downright angry. Dickson had given his reader nothing but an overgrown dog wrapped in wolf’s clothing!
Exit the reader; enter the pedagogue. The setting in one of Dickson’s novels had described enough of the local landscape and downtown area for me to surmise that the locale was his own hometown. With nothing more to go on, I called information and, to my surprise, was given a listed telephone number for one Gordon R. Dickson. I called, spoke to one of his assistants, left my name—complete with academic affiliation, which I thought might pique his interest—and to my surprise got a return call in less than an hour.
Exit the pedagogue; enter the reader. I don’t recall much of our conversation. I only remember how congenial and self-effacing and gracious was the person on the other end of the line. I sent him a few reprints of some of my early wolf-research papers, casually dropped his name for a few days with students and colleagues I knew were science-fiction readers, and promptly filed the conversation away under “interesting people I’ve met.”
A few years later I received another telephone call. Gordon told me that he was expanding In Iron Years into a novel and wondered if I would be willing to read the passages describing wolf behavior and check them over for authenticity. I promptly agreed, and so began my role as Gordon Dickson’s wolf consultant.
I was flattered, and I looked forward to the satisfaction of contributing even in a minor way to a work by a favorite author. Gordon doesn’t know it, but most of my colleagues I told about the project were very dubious. I won’t catalog the list of pitfalls they envisioned for me. I don’t really remember them—I only recall that they were pretty gloomy. But I thought it would be great fun. They were wrong. I was right.
In retrospect, I can see all sorts of problems that might have cropped up and made the project a painful chore. That it turned out to be—as I had blithely expected—great fun was because Gordon is the person he is. I don’t mean this to sound condescending—but he is the sort of student every teacher hopes for. He is interested in everything, immerses himself in technical and theoretical details, asks questions that I have to think about for several days, and comes out of the whole thing with a sure and confident grip on essentials. It is fortunate for his fans that he made fiction his life’s work. But if he had not done so, I feel certain that he would have had an equally illustrious career in any of the sciences.
John Le Carre said that authenticity is less important than plausibility. For Gordon, authenticity is the way to achieve plausibility, and it’s not just a means to an end. It’s a passion. It was n
ot sufficient that he understand enough about certain aspects of wolf behavior to ensure that these were presented faithfully. He had to know everything about wolf behavior. He not only read books and papers I recommended, but questioned me about them to be certain he had understood them properly. And he went way beyond the books I recommended. He went way beyond what I could tell him with any firsthand confidence and sent me scurrying to the telephone to call friends and colleagues who had more experience with wolf behavior in the wild, who knew someone who knew someone who had once reported on wolves interacting with horses, with bears …
On other questions, I sent him to the telephone armed only with the name of someone I knew slightly (or not at all, save by reputation) who could tell him everything he might ever want to know about, say, the dietary habits of grizzly bears in Montana.
And it didn’t stop with reading and with questions. I suggested with some hesitation that Gordon join the Animal Behavior Society and attend the annual meeting, which in 1988 was held at the University of Montana in Missoula. Many of the researchers whose work and thinking I was reporting to him secondhand would be there, and he could talk to them personally. Since he wanted to scout the territory where most of the action in the story would occur, he did.
Nor did it stop with wolves. Gordon takes an intense and detailed interest in everything he writes about. A call from Gordon could lead me into a description of the organizational structure of a university or an overview of current theory in behavioral ecology—or send me scurrying to the pages of The Shooter’s Bible to compare the ballistics of a .308 Winchester with a .30/06 or Blade magazine for a definitive, scholarly article on Bowie knives.
Certainly, what appears in the book represents only the tiniest fraction of what Gordon read, what went into our conversations, exchanges of letters, and—eventually—our appropriately science-fictionesque transmissions from computer to computer. I recall once reviewing several hundred pages of material on one minor issue in a scientific paper I was writing. These hours of work were ultimately represented by only a single sentence in the paper. This is typical in the world of scholarship, but I would imagine it is rare in the world of fiction. Scholars must be productive, but their livelihood is only indirectly tied to the absolute volume they produce, and the positions they advance must be supported by a broad understanding of previous work. This is the nature of the peer-review system. Professional, working writers have neither the mandate nor the luxury of exhaustive research and judicious, deliberative selectivity.
Nevertheless, the passages involving wolf behavior in Wolf and Iron represent the same sort of distillation. The upshot is that Gordon has produced not only a typically fast-paced and interestingly peopled Gordon Dickson futuristic adventure novel, but also a credible and, in my best judgment, wholly scientifically supportable portrait of wolf behavior and wolf-human interactions.
Virtually every one of the scenes in which Wolf is an actor has its precedent in either published research or in unpublished reports by scientific observers.
The explanations presented for Wolf’s behavior are a different matter. Explanations are essentially theoretical in nature, and theories do not exist in the real world. They exist only in the mind of the scientist. Consequently, the actions that Wolf (or any wolf) performs can often be explained in many ways, and the explanations can be quite different from one another. Sometimes this is because the question why can mean different things. In other cases, different explanations are based on different sets of assumptions and are just plain contradictory.
When Gordon asked me to sketch an explanation for one or another of Wolf’s actions, I was guided by two things: First, I generally tried to go with an explanation based on theory that has fairly widespread currency in the scientific community. If this left me choices, I tried to offer the explanation that was most consistent with plot development. To do otherwise would be to have the wolf wagging the tale.
Harry Frank, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair Department of Psychology
The University of Michigan-Flint
CHAPTER 1
A man, failed and unfit, moved west and north. Jeebee had made it safely this far on the electric bike—a variation on the mountain bicycle with an electrically driven motor—moving at night through northern Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. Partway across South Dakota, however, the heavy skies that had been with him since yesterday moved lower; and a late April rain began to come down, cold and bitter on the north wind.
His outer clothing, of a breathable, but waterproof fabric, kept the wet from reaching most of him. But even with the long brim of his baseball cap and riding gloves, the rain laid an icy mask on his face and icy chains around his exposed wrists.
He stopped at the first abandoned building he could find—a recently burned and partly fallen-in farmhouse. There was a way among the charred and fallen timbers, however, into a part of it where he could shelter from the rain.
He moved in, accordingly, after covering the motored mountain bike with a plastic tarpaulin from his backpack. He ate some of the cold canned stew he had found in another ruined habitation only a day or so earlier; then lay for hours, waiting for the rain to end.
Eventually, he slumbered. But his dreams were bad, about the running and hiding in a world bankrupt and collapsed. He woke groggily and shifted; and sleep came again, at once. This time he dreamed the old nightmare that he had carried with him out of Michigan and westward. He dreamed that he was back working in the study group; and that the computer screen in front of him was full of the symbols of his equations.
Suddenly a darkness, just a pinpoint at first, appeared near the middle of the screen to obliterate some of the symbols. The blackness grew, spreading and wiping out all his work. It was, he had long since realized, his awareness of the inevitability of the coming Collapse, even though he juggled symbols to prove that it need not come. Now, the inevitability of it invaded his dreams, in retrospect coming to interrupt and destroy all that he had tried to do—he and the others in the study group at Stoketon, Michigan.
His dream shifted. The darkness came out from his screen and became a black shape that pursued him. He found himself in one situation after another, backed into a corner, with no place to go and the darkness approaching; growing enormously to blot out everything as it came closer and closer, to blot him out also.
He woke, sweating. In the lightlessness of his sleeping place, he felt like a naked animal; like a shelled creature stripped of all its normal protection. After a long time, he fell asleep again. This time he slept steadily, the sleep of exhaustion. He did not wake until early afternoon of the next day.
Outside, he found the day scene hardly brighter than the night had been. The thick cloud cover had broken finally, here and there, to let down occasional beams of sunlight. He was so unreasonably cheered by seeing the sun that, since the surrounding territory seemed to be as clear of people as he had found it to be the last week, he took a chance and moved on for a change in daylight.
Slightly after midafternoon, however, the clouds closed down once more; and the rain began again.
Jeebee pulled the visor of his cap down against the falling moisture. Although this plains country, with its sparse patches of timber and only an occasional devastated farmstead, seemed deserted enough, nothing could be certain. His outer clothing, made for camping, continued to keep him dry underneath. Also, today’s rain was not as cold on his face and hands, so he was not uncomfortable.
But as the afternoon wore on, the darkness of the clouds increased, the temperature dropped and the rain turned to sleet. It whipped against the naked skin of his face as the wind strengthened from the north.
Like an animal, he thought again of shelter and began to cast around for it. So that, when a little later he came to another pile of lumber that had once been a ranch house, before being dynamited or bulldozed into a scrap heap, he gave up travel for the day and began searching for a gap in the rubble.
He fou
nd one at last, a hole that seemed to lead far enough in under the loose material to indicate a fairly waterproof area inside. Laying the bike on its side under an overhang of shattered timbers that would shield it from the rain, he crawled in. He pushed his backpack before him as he went, bracing himself for the possibility of having stumbled on the den of some wild dog—or worse.
But no human or beast appeared to dispute his entrance; and the opening went back farther than he had guessed. He was pleased to hear the patter of the rain only distantly through what was above him, while feeling everything completely dry and dusty around him. He kept on crawling, as far in as he could; until suddenly his right hand, reaching out before him, slid over an edge into emptiness.
He stopped to check, found some space above his head, and risked lighting a stub of candle from the bike pack. Its light shone ahead of him, down into an almost untouched basement garage; with no car in it but walls of cinder blocks and a solid roof of collapsed house overhead.
He memorized this scene below as best he could and put the candle out to save as much of it as possible. He let himself down into the thick, dust-smelling darkness until he felt level floor under his boot soles. Qnce down, he relit the candle for a moment, and looked around.
The place was a treasure trove. Plainly no one had set foot here since the moment in which the house had been destroyed, and nothing had been looted from this part of the building’s original contents.
That night he slept warm and dry with even the luxury of a half-filled kerosene lantern he found there, to light him for a while. The next day he enlarged the entrance, and pulled the bike in out of sight. When he left the place, once more in daylight, two days later, through a separate, carefully tunneled hole much larger than the one by which he had entered, he was rich.
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