Also, Jeebee was aware of a subtle change in Wolf’s behavior toward him. Some sort of watershed had been passed with the moment of Wolf’s peculiar and abjectly solicitous behavior that night—the urgent, but hesitant approach, for the first time rolling over on his back and exposing his belly to be scratched.
Jeebee had pondered this without being able to define the full significance of it. He could only feel that their relationship had changed. They were now closer and their respective positions were more sharply defined.
They had become partners in a more important sense, rather than just traveling companions, and Wolf had apparently accepted a junior role in that partnership. He still went about his own business during the day. But he had not, since that night, left before Jeebee awoke, and not until Jeebee had shown an agreement with his leaving—almost a “permission” to leave, with at least a few reassuring words and a perfunctory scratch behind Wolf’s muttonchops.
In spite of recognizing this change, Jeebee put aside any temptation to take for granted whatever new authority the other might have acknowledged in him.
He was no more ready than before to try to take food away from Wolf or to impose his will upon him in other ways. Indeed, he felt instinctively that this might now be even riskier than before, when Wolf’s most likely response was, simply, to leave.
At a deeper level, he felt that any such behavior on his part would be a betrayal of trust. But his life since Stoketon had taught him much about the economics of trust. Whatever the nature of Wolf’s allegiance to him, anything that could be eaten, pilfered, broken, or ripped would be something Jeebee would keep, as before, securely stowed out of the other’s reach. For the moment, Jeebee’s “trust” extended only so far as the luxury of no longer worrying that Wolf might leave one morning for no apparent reason, and never return. But the fact that he was able to have even that much faith, he realized, in itself was a major milestone.
In other areas, however, he began to be concerned, particularly as he went into the second week at his observation point. He still had an ample food supply. But the traffic on the road had varied widely in character, day after day, and as yet he had seen no one he trusted to approach.
He still held to his original belief that someone approachable would eventually turn up. But increasingly he felt time’s clock ticking away the minutes and days while he waited. Time was on its march. His brother’s ranch in Montana was in higher country and would be under snow as early as October. He had only the summer and early fall in which to travel, and a good ways to go yet.
Then one day as he was lying, watching the road just before noon, he got a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. It was not on the road but in the patch of woods around him, to his left and about twenty yards off among the trees.
He looked, and saw Wolf. His partner seemed to be dodging about in play behavior with some four-legged companion, but Jeebee could not make out at first who or what the companion was.
But as the romping brought the two of them closer to him, he saw that the other animal was not a wolf. It was a short-haired, yellow dog, as large and almost as lean as Wolf.
Jeebee sat up to watch. The two came quite close, and eventually Wolf, in his bouncing around, ended up facing Jeebee. Apparently reminded by this of his new obligation to his senior partner, he stopped playing to trot over and greet Jeebee.
The dog followed after a moment, slowly and warily. Coming to about a dozen feet from him, it stopped, and stood, now clearly visible.
Jeebee concentrated on scratching Wolf’s neck. The dog hesitated a moment more where it stood; then slowly it moved forward again to come level with Wolf’s hindquarters. Here it hesitated once more, looking at Jeebee. Jeebee was careful not to look directly back at it. He saw, however, that it was a female. After another moment, she apparently made up her mind to trust him. Decisively, she pushed forward and nosed Jeebee’s arm.
“Well, hello there,” said Jeebee, looking at her now.
She wagged her tail and pushed herself past Wolf to sniff at Jeebee’s jacket. He ventured to stop scratching Wolf and turned to stroke her head. She pulled back out of reach for a second, then pushed forward again and wagged her tail again, more confidently.
Jeebee spoke to her soothingly again and reached out a hand to stroke the top of her head. Wolf crowded his body between them and wedged his head under Jeebee’s hand. Jeebee found himself beset by an unaccountably frantic bout of face licking, but there was an odd undercurrent of tension in Wolf’s behavior. His tail wagged uncertainly, and his eyes flickered back and forth between Jeebee and the yellow dog. Despite the clearly audible whimpers, Jeebee could feel Wolf’s rib cage vibrating with suppressed growls. He couldn’t tell if they were intended for himself or for Wolf’s new friend.
Jealousy, thought Jeebee? He chided himself for the suggestion—arrant anthropomorphism. But, he thought then, it was as convenient a tag label as any. Something about the situation was disturbing Wolf. Still, jealousy did not fit his character as Jeebee had seen it displayed up until now. On the other hand, his relationship with Wolf had changed, in ways he did not fully understand. Jeebee’s new role might well mean new barriers as well as new liberties. Jeebee devoted his hands and attention to Wolf.
“So you brought a girlfriend home for dinner, did you, boy? Too bad I’ve nothing on the stove to offer the two of you.”
The female wagged her tail vigorously at the sound of his voice. Watching her now, out of the corner of his eye, Jeebee decided that her fur was really not yellow but of such a light brown that the sunlight seemed to give her an overall yellowish cast. She tried to worm her way past Wolf, but he deftly twisted his body and blocked her with his hip. She gave up and trotted off into the wood. Wolf immediately detached himself from Jeebee and ran after her. Jeebee waited a few minutes, but they did not return, and he went back to his watching of the highway.
No one had shown up so far this day and it was past mid-afternoon. His eyes were getting tired of squinting through the lenses of the opera glasses. He scanned as far as he could see with his small binoculars toward both the east and west ends of the highway, where they disappeared against the line of the horizon. At the eastern end, to his left, he thought after a bit that he made out something. He could not be sure, even with the binoculars. It was merely a dot, as far off as anything on the roadway could be seen clearly—if indeed it was there at all.
He continued to study it; and the more he did so, the more sure he became that there actually was something there. If so, it should not be more than half an hour away from him. But if it was, it would have to be moving toward him at the slowest walking pace he could imagine anyone traveling.
He set himself to wait. But the hours passed and nothing changed. Yet, when he examined that end of the road, he was still sure he saw something there.
In the end, and since it had been a day of no travelers anyway, he decided to take the unusual step of moving toward that end of the highway, in hopes he could get a better view of whatever was there, if indeed it was not all in his imagination.
He began by going back away from the highway. Even to satisfy his curiosity, he was not going to take any chances. The route he followed went from the back of his observation point, on a long slant under a fold of land to where he was once more under the cover of a good-sized patch of trees set in an old watercourse, to the east of his starting point, and up toward the roadway again.
He repeated a number of these traverses between areas of good cover, until he had moved perhaps as much as half a mile eastward from his regular position. The clump of brush he was now in overlooked the highway. He moved to its outer edge, lay down, and tried his opera glasses once again on the vanishing point of the freeway.
Now he saw that he had not been imagining anything. It was definitely a vehicle of some sort—apparently quite a large vehicle, but with no horses attached to it. This was all wrong. Motorized transport of any kind had never before appeared on the road
below him; nor had he expected it. Publicly available supplies of gasoline for motors had effectively dried up a little more than a year before, nearly eight months before he had left Stoketon.
The drying up of all supplies of fuel for motorized vehicles, he remembered, had been the signal for most of the last members left of the study group to try to get out. It had also marked the beginnings of Jeebee’s efforts to accumulate necessary items for his own escape. Prescription drugs for his emergency medical pack, the electric bike, and the solar-cell blanket, which recharged the bike battery, were all things he had acquired at this time. The bike itself had been an experimental vehicle that he had located, left or forgotten in a commercial research-and-develop-ment center.
Only a heavy transport truck or possibly a mobile home, he thought, could be the size of what he now saw. But the thought of either was ridiculous. Such a vehicle would be an obvious target for any human predators along the way, and totally incapable of escaping off the road. It would, in short, be nothing more than a traveling death trap for its owners.
Now he was intrigued. Moreover, he was extremely puzzled by the fact that whatever it was, it did not seem to have moved since he had first spotted it. The only possible explanation was that it was in fact a motored truck that had somehow gotten hold of enough fuel to drive this far, but had finally run dry at the spot where he saw it.
That explanation involved so many coincidences that he found it hard to accept. Finally, he decided to get even closer so that he could make sure of what he thought he was seeing.
But it would be too risky to try that in daylight. He was all right in the brush; but moving from patch to patch of it while the sun was up would leave him too exposed and vulnerable as he got closer to the vehicle.
He had picked up some of Wolf’s almost excessive caution where the unknown was concerned. It was now getting on to late afternoon. He could go back to his camp and eat something, then come back and work down the highway at night to get a look at the object. He was tempted to just stay where he was until dark and then reconnoiter, but common sense disagreed.
It would be safer to approach anything he wanted to look at closely after sunset in any case. But not at first dark. With the first approach of night they would instinctively become more aware and cautious. He had time, and a full belly was always a wise precaution against the unexpected.
So he went back to the camp, ate, put three extra cans of food in his backpack, and refilled his water flask. He hid the .22 safely out of reach in the branches of a tree at some distance from his camp, taking only the loaded .30/06, with extra cartridges. As soon as the sun set he started out on his nighttime trip of exploration.
Under these conditions, he went more openly and easily than he would have in full light. Twilight, even nighttime, had become for him a much more secure time for travel than day. At night he could go directly to his goal, down the strip of highway, staying in one of the shallow drainage ditches along either side of both concrete strips so as not to be outlined against the stars.
He would come toward them from a direction which any people there would probably not be watching. It would be most natural for them to expect any attack to be from the dark, open country on either side of them, out of which enemies could approach under the cover of trees and deeper folds of landscape.
Accordingly, he worked down the road until he had covered what he estimated to be at least a couple of miles. To his surprise, whoever was with the vehicle had lit a fire in the open beside it, which could only mean either that they felt unusually secure or that they were unusually foolish.
Just on the chance that they were unusually secure, he abandoned his roadside approach for a small woods that was fairly close to them, less than a hundred yards away. He was upwind, so no animals that might be with them should be able to catch his scent on the relatively light night breeze.
Under cover of the trees, he took out the binoculars again and tried to find out what he could with their help. They were not night glasses; and with the restriction looking through them placed on his field of vision, he had some trouble locating the spot of light that was the blazing fire. But eventually he zeroed in on it. By its illumination he was finally able to make out the shapes of at least two people. One was a good-sized adult, and the other was either a small adult, or perhaps a teenage youngster, wearing a red shirt.
There were also what looked like dogs. At his best count, there were at least five of them. This probably meant that there were more, for he had lost sight of some that moved out of the circle of firelight as he counted, and possibly missed others that had come in without him spotting their entrance. Borne on that same light, night breeze, he faintly heard the distant whicker of horses.
So, they had horses along with them, too. He had been right to be cautious. He could not hope to escape on foot in country like this from a mounted pursuer who could see him.
With the idea of dogs and horses as cotravelers with the two human shapes he had seen, he began to reassess what he could see of the vehicle. This was not easy because the firelight lit only one side of it, and the rest of it was in darkness. But gradually, studying it, he came to the conclusion that it was some kind of large covered wagon, with a boxlike body having high sides and a curving roof. It apparently ran on large wheels with truck tires on them.
It was too large to be drawn by just a couple of horses, but a team of perhaps four or six should be able to move it handily. If those wheels rolled as easily as they looked to, four horses should pull it easily on level, well-paved roads.
The more he examined the situation, the more he became convinced of two things. One, that it was indeed a horse-drawn wagon modeled on the old prairie, or “Conestoga,” type that had been common in the wagon trains of the nineteenth century, during the migration of settlers westward. The rounded, canvas-style top and the rectangular body made something like that almost certain. The second was that he must have a still closer look at it, in daylight.
He decided he would stay where he was until almost dawn. If the wind did not change so as to carry the message of his presence to the noses of those dogs, he should be fairly secure here. With the moon down, in the darkness just before the sun rose, he could get closer, look it over in the predawn light, and be safely gone before full light.
He dozed, accordingly, through the night; lying where he was, waking occasionally to drink from his water flask or empty his bladder. He woke before first light, and realizing from the utter darkness about him that the dawn was close, he began to decide how he would make his approach.
The difficulty was that he was not closely acquainted with the area where he was lying, although he had passed by it in his searches for abandoned farms that might have buildings that would yield things he could use. In the darkness, the wind was still in his favor, and he thought he remembered from his earlier trips up and down along the highway that there was another small stand of trees closer to where the wagon was now. If he could reach those further woods in good time, he could look the outfit over in the first predawn illumination and still be able to get clear away before sunrise.
Accordingly, he began to move. It was almost a matter of feeling his way. But his night running on the first weeks out of Michigan had taught him how to do just that over unfamiliar territory. Necessarily he went slowly, but also directly, down alongside the highway and only about twenty yards off it. Eventually, he reached what he thought was the patch of trees he remembered. He worked slowly through these until he was at their edge, where the open ground to the highway began. He lay down to wait.
His waiting was no more than a matter of minutes. The extreme darkness of predawn had begun to lighten as he entered this final patch of woods, and very shortly along the eastern edge of the sky a paling began, which trumpeted the eventual sunrise.
He looked down in the direction of the freeway at the point where he believed he should see the wagon emerge from the darkness. The fire had died out completely, so there was n
o help there. He lay utterly still, and—blessedly—the wind stayed in his favor.
Slowly around him the predawn brightened. Slowly the shape of the wagon emerged out of the darkness like a sketch in black and white. It was a little farther down the freeway than he had expected it to be when he finally saw it.
He waited. The light got stronger and soon he could use the opera glasses. The vehicle was as he had thought; an oversized wagon, of the Conestoga type, rolling on eight pairs of large, rubber-tired wheels.
Behind it, enclosed in a sort of stake-and-rope corral, was a herd of perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty horses. Both of the riding and pulling variety. Three other horses were unaccountably together close to the back of the wagon. There was something strange about the shape of those three horses. But the light was not yet strong enough for Jeebee to tell what.
The dogs were sleeping shapes on the ground around the wagon and the ashes of the fire. The wagon, he thought, studying it with the glasses, was really oversized. The top of its roof could be no less than twelve feet above the road surface. Also, its front behind the wagon seat was not open, but closed by a wooden wall. Forward of this, a tongue projected only far enough for a first pair of horses. But Jeebee was confirmed in his guess that it would take at least four to pull it handily.
No people were in evidence this early. They must all be in the wagon; and again he thought that they must be very secure, or else they would have had someone posted on guard. He had been wrong about the number of dogs. He counted eight—no, nine—shapes sleeping around where the fire had been.
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