Similarly Jeebee watched and studied Merry for the small things she might be doing that could pass unnoticed but that might be important in the business of handling the spare horses. But it was difficult to learn much from her, except when she deliberately set out to teach him something. Paul was much more open about explaining things than she was. Jeebee came to the conclusion, finally, that a lot of what she knew she had picked up unconsciously, by observation or by doing, so that she hardly realized she knew it herself.
The first hurdle had been his learning to ride. He finally faced the fact that he would never be able to sit easily in the saddle the way she did, moving with the horse as if the two had been welded together. Nonetheless, he did learn how to saddle a horse, to mount it, how to stay on it, and how to make it go where he wanted it to go. He also learned how to put on and take off saddle and bridle.
What had come more slowly were the tricks of rounding up the loose horses that followed the wagon. With Merry riding herd on them, they seemed to follow automatically and just as automatically stay bunched together. If the wagon stopped, they stopped; and they were apparently content just to crop the grass where they stood without straying too far. The dogs, Jeebee found, were quick to try to turn back any of them that made a serious attempt to stray.
But even with the help of the dogs, he himself had no real control over the loose horses. The minute he took his eyes off one, it seemed to drift away from the rest. Merry, on the other hand, appeared able to anticipate when a horse was going to try to move off on its own and to be in front of it when it did, blocking the way with her own riding animal.
“So. Did you get a look at that wolf of yours tonight?”
The words woke Jeebee suddenly out of his thoughts. He was once more back at the fire with his dinner tray on his knees and it was Paul speaking to him. He felt abruptly and reasonlessly guilty, as if he had been a student in a class who had not been paying attention and had been suddenly called upon by the instructor.
“Yes,” said Jeebee.
“I thought that’s what you’d been doing all these evenings,” Paul went on, “but around here we don’t ask. Have you been seeing him every night?”
“No,” said Jeebee. “Tonight he came for the first time.”
There was a moment of silence during which the fire crackled.
“I tried to get him to follow me down here. I wanted to bring him to the wagon and see if he’ll travel with us at least a little bit of the time,” said Jeebee. He was abruptly surprised at himself at speaking out so much to these people who were still in many ways holding themselves back from him. “He’d be gone most of the time anyway. But I’d like him to come up close. Have you got anything against that?”
He was speaking directly to Paul Sanderson. Paul frowned.
“Hmm,” he said.
He scratched with his left forefinger at the angle of his jaw close to his neck. The rasping of the fingernail on his beard was loud in the silence. Jeebee waited, listening for an answer, but his eyes were on Merry. However, Merry did not speak up.
“Most people got the wrong idea about wolves,” Nick said, unexpectedly. “They think they’re vicious because they kill game and livestock. It’s not so. Truth is, they’re shy. Gun-shy, trap-shy, people-shy. Good hunters, but shy. That wolf won’t bother anything down here if he comes in.”
Jeebee did not think it prudent to mention how thoroughly destructive Wolf’s innocent but determined curiosity could be.
“Just as long as he doesn’t get in the way of the team,” Paul said thoughtfully, almost to himself.
“He’ll stay well out of the way of that team, particularly when it’s moving,” said Nick. “Would you get in the way of a team that size coming right at you?”
“The other dogs will gang up on him if he comes,” said Merry, unexpectedly. “Greta might help the wolf, if she likes him well enough.”
Paul, unexpectedly, gave a little nod of his head.
“All right,” he said, “if you can get him to come down to us—it’s all right with me. He and the dogs will have to work things out amongst themselves. All right then, with all of us? Merry? Nick?”
“No reason why not if it doesn’t make trouble,” said Merry.
“I just told you how I felt,” said Nick.
Jeebee felt a sudden increase of warmth in all their attitudes toward him. As with Paul, when he unexpectedly invited Jeebee to join them, Jeebee could not figure out what he might have done or said just now to change their feelings toward him for the better.
The others continued to give him no clue. A little after that, the campfire part of the evening broke up. As Jeebee had come to find was usual practice, Nick lingered a little around the fire after Merry and her father had gone into the wagon.
Jeebee cleaned up his plate and was about to gather up the others and take them to wash when Nick stood up suddenly.
“Let’s take a little walk,” he said abruptly.
Wondering, Jeebee joined him as the older and smaller man led the way out of the circle of firelight into the surrounding darkness. As usual, once they got away from the lighted area and their eyes adjusted, it was not too hard to see. The moon had come up since Jeebee had come back to the wagon and it was a three-quarters moon that shed a fair amount of light.
Nick stopped about thirty paces away from the wagon and spoke in a low, but conversational tone. “Look,” he said, “maybe you’ve reached the point where you ought to begin to know some things.”
He paused.
“I’m ready to learn whatever there is to be learned,” Jeebee said, to start him up again.
“This is not exactly learning.” Nick paused again. “There’s something you ought to understand about Paul and Merry. Now, they don’t look it, but this wagon and everything about it, the route and everything, is something Paul did only for Merry.”
“I don’t think I follow you,” Jeebee said after a moment.
Nick sighed. It was almost a sigh of exasperation.
“I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “Now, Merry’s mother died about five years ago. Paul had been a salesman, but liked running a fix-it shop better than being a real-estate salesman—and he was a damn good real-estate salesman. He made a lot of money with it. But he liked fixing things, so he started the shop so that he and Merry could be together as much as possible. The shop was connected to their house, and he was home all the time.”
“My mother died when I was sixteen,” Jeebee said suddenly. He not only surprised himself by saying it; he realized he hadn’t even thought of the fact for years.
“All right,” said Nick, almost as if he hadn’t spoken, “Paul did well with the fix-it shop, too—nowhere near as much money as he could have made selling real estate, but he’d made a lot of money at that already, that he still had. So they were well off enough. But he saw this coming, everything going bust the way it has. And he worried about keeping Merry safe through what he saw was coming. So he started this route five years ago. They spend their winters in the east and south. I won’t tell you where. You don’t need to know that, anyway. But they spend their winters, as I say, east and south; and with the first sign of spring down there, they start moving north and west. They follow this route Paul made with this wagon, he built for himself and had built for him. He began the route even back when cars were whizzing along these freeways, only then the wagon traveled on back roads, off to one side.”
Nick paused again. This time Jeebee just waited.
“Paul’s a good peddler. Bound to be, being the salesman he is. People like him, when he sets out to be liked,” Nick said, “and gradually he’s built up a bunch of regular customers. There’s always danger, of course, but here with the wagon we’re safer than most. People have got to know Paul and he follows the same route, so the locals aren’t liable to be shooting at him. Otherwise—well, you’ve seen what we call the Quiet Room. We’re armed well enough to stand off a pretty good-sized bunch. But that isn’t what I
wanted to talk to you about. What I wanted to tell you is, don’t be taken in by the way they talk to each other. This wagon, this route, everything about this is something Paul built for Merry. He lives for Merry. And Merry, she wouldn’t leave her father for anything, because she knows that there’d be nothing for him if she went.” Nick paused again.
“So, you should know that,” he went on after a bit. “You’re a young fellow, and Merry’s young, too. But don’t start getting any ideas, unless you want to stay with the wagon and her and her father for the rest of your life.”
“I haven’t—” Jeebee was beginning when Nick cut him short.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Nick said. “I just thought I’d tell you, that’s all, so you’d understand.”
He stopped talking. Jeebee stood, at a loss as to what to say. “Well, I’m going to bed,” said Nick.
He went off toward the fire. After a moment Jeebee followed him but Nick had already gone into the wagon by the time Jeebee reached the fire. Somberly, Jeebee washed the food trays, put out the fire with the wash water, and carried the trays into the wagon with him to put them in their usual place up in the storeroom, next to where he now knew the beef was kept in its locker. He went into the Quiet Room and saw Nick already in his hammock, turned with his face toward the side of the wagon and only his back showing. The lantern was already turned down, but not completely off. Jeebee slung his own hammock, put the blanket handy in it, got in, then reached up and turned down the little lever that extinguished the lamp completely.
He lay staring at the darkness overhead. He had not really thought much about Merry, he told himself defensively. Nick’s warning was almost an insult. At the same time, he found that he could not really take offense at it. The truth of the matter was, Merry was a woman. She was young, and he could not help but respond to her, even if that response was annoyance at the way she treated him.
Still thinking about her, he fell asleep. Sometime in the night he dreamed of Wolf coming unexpectedly into the wagon to look for him.
The next day, rather unexpectedly, Nick began initiating Jeebee into the craft of blacksmithing. Jeebee found it fascinating, in spite of the almost intolerable temperatures of the tiny metal-walled room, after the forge was going. He listened eagerly as Nick described how a blacksmithing outfit could be set up anywhere, given a few starting tools. Necessary were an anvil, a pair of tongs, and what Nick called a hardy. This was something that looked like a small but stout chisel, made all of metal with a short end that fitted into a hole at one end of the anvil so that the hardy was fixed in place and faced upward with its cutting edge. That was, Nick explained, exactly what the hardy was to be used for. Its use was to cut the hot metal, once it had been heated to the proper malleability. The heated iron or steel was held in the tongs, laid against the up-facing edge of the hardy, and the strip hammered until the hardy cut through it.
The rest of the necessary things used in blacksmithing, Nick explained, could either be found easily lying about, or made, once the smithy was in operation. A forge with a firepit could be built out of any noncombustible materials. Rocks, mortared together with anything that would serve the purpose and was non-combustible. An air intake would have to be built into it and a bellows constructed to pump air up that intake. Also charcoal would have to be made, by burning hardwood in the absence of oxygen. The old-fashioned way of doing this was simply to set the wood afire and cover it with earth so that it burned slowly.
Besides the anvil, hardy, and tongs, a hammer would be necessary. But Nick said that this could probably be found in any abandoned farmstead—ideally it would be a short-handled six-pound hammer of the kind known as a maul.
He let Jeebee try his hand at doing some simple black-smithing tasks with the equipment in the small room, and Jeebee promised himself that somewhere along the line, he would have a smithy of his own. It was, he thought, in addition to everything else, something that would make him more useful to his brother’s ranch—if he knew something about blacksmithing; and of course, the more he knew the better.
That evening, when Jeebee went looking in a nearby patch of woods, Wolf was waiting for him again. From then on they met almost steadily at twilight after the wagon had stopped for the day. But nothing Jeebee could do would persuade the other to follow him when he turned and went back down to the wagon.
The dogs around the wagon had not given tongue on any of Wolf’s appearances. It was not until the third night that Jeebee realized that he had instinctively headed downwind to find his patch of trees. And it had been downwind that Wolf had been waiting for him. So much, already, of elementary woodcraft had rubbed off on Jeebee.
Jeebee wondered if perhaps it was the presence of the dogs that was keeping Wolf away from the wagon. He got to the point of actually considering that perhaps Wolf might feel safer if he put him on a leash and tried to bring him down to the wagon that way. Maybe being on a leash would give Wolf a feeling of security, as well as also keeping the other dogs away? Even as he thought this, he knew it was ridiculous. Neither the dogs nor Wolf were likely to cooperate under such conditions.
There was only, like a small nagging pain, the worry in Jeebee of how Merry really felt about Wolf showing up. The dogs and Wolf, as Paul had said, would have to sort things out with each other. Merry had agreed to Wolf’s joining them—if he would—but, it seemed to Jeebee, with no great enthusiasm.
Merry was the one the dogs obviously liked best, and obeyed best, of all the humans around the wagon; though by now they had all gone so far as to approach Jeebee and make more or less polite friends with him. Only in the case of Greta, the yellow female, was this anything close to a warm friendship. When Greta was not on guard duty, she always sought out Merry first, unless Merry was on horseback. But if that was the case, and Jeebee was both outside the wagon and afoot, she would sometimes come to Jeebee, wagging her tail, sniffing him, and licking at his hands or face.
Greta also very clearly was dominant over all the other dogs as well as being larger than the rest of them. It was only later that something Nick had said one day made Jeebee realize that the other dogs were the results of litters she had had from contact with other, unknown dogs, at some of the places they had stopped.
Certainly the rest obeyed her, although usually not without protest if they were involved with something they wanted to keep or do. Watching the attitude of the other dogs to her, a wild thought came to Jeebee, a few days later. Perhaps he could take Greta with him on one of his twilight trips to the woods, and when the two of them came back, maybe Wolf would be reassured enough to follow them.
He actually tried this the next night, picking a moment when neither Nick, Merry, nor Paul was close or was within hearing.
“Come on, girl,” he said to the yellow dog, “come on with me. We’ll go for a walk.”
The female came to him and went with him for a little distance. But at about fifty feet from the wagon, she stopped and would not go any farther. When he called her softly, she wagged her tail, flattened her ears and whimpered a little, but stayed put. Jeebee guessed that perhaps she had been trained not to go beyond a certain distance from the wagon, ordinarily. Certainly none of the other dogs usually did.
He turned and left her, continuing on into the trees and finding Wolf.
This time, including Wolf’s usual greeting, the other, after sniffing around Jeebee’s pant legs suddenly neck-rolled against one of them. Jeebee recognized suddenly that it was the same leg that Greta had pressed against when he had talked to her, just a few minutes earlier. It puzzled him, however, that Wolf would be interested in the scent of Greta now, since the female was no longer in heat.
He tucked the question away into the back of his mind and did not think anymore about it consciously until nearly evening, when Greta came up to him and sniffed with unusual interest at the pant leg against which Wolf had neck-rolled. A little later, when he started to leave the wagon, she trotted along with him almost as if she was now
determined to go along with him.
But, again, she went only a little farther than she had before. At that point she hesitated, wagged her tail, put her ears back and whined loudly, but ceased to follow. Jeebee called her, but she would not come. He left her finally and went on, thinking that perhaps he might eventually be able to coax her all the way up, after all. The thought cheered him.
When he reached the woods, Wolf was waiting. He did not neck-roll as he had the day before, but subjected Jeebee to a very prolonged nose search. The demeaning thought struck Jeebee that he seemed to be a sort of human messenger service between the dog and the wolf. Possibly carrying love letters?
The thought made him chuckle, a sound Wolf ignored with complete indifference as he sniffed. The examination over—or the message received—Wolf reverted to his general greeting behavior, which ended up with his rolling over on his back and inviting a belly scratch.
That evening, as darkness settled around them and it came time for Jeebee to head back down to the wagon, he had a secret but strong hope that perhaps this time Wolf would follow him beyond the edge of the woods.
But once more it did not happen. Wolf came as far as he had come before, to the point where he could see into the open area, but that was all. Greta could be seen sitting, touched by the firelight and looking out. Jeebee left him behind and went back down to the wagon.
The next day just before noon, in clear daylight as Jeebee was both helping and learning how to herd the stock from Merry, a howl sounded from some nearby wood.
Jeebee’s answering howl from the wagon was loud in the following stillness, and Merry whirled her horse about to confront Jeebee.
Wolf and Iron Page 14