“This,” she said. “This will give you instructions on how to skin animals, how to tan the hide, and how to use it making clothing and shoes. Study that, too!”
“I will,” he said. The gear that was to go on the back of Sally, the packhorse, was piled on the green plastic groundsheet that could have its edges tied together to protect its contents from rain. He stooped to put what she had just given him into one of the loading bags that had room to take it.
Pushing it into one of the bags, he stopped, staring at what was laid out on the groundsheet before him.
“Now,” said Merry’s voice crisply, “let’s see you load Sally and see if you do it right.”
He straightened up and looked at her.
“I wasn’t supposed to get all this stuff,” he said, waving a hand at the items on the groundsheet. “Paul said—”
“He changed his mind,” Merry said, still crisply. She looked straight at him. He stared back, his mind fumbling for words he wanted to say to her and finding none.
“Paul only promised… ” he began at last, unsurely.
“It’s that gold of yours,” she said, still looking him in the eye as if daring him to argue. “He’d been valuing it at the minimum he could get for it. Instead, he decided to value it for the maximum. There can be a big difference; particularly if he can sell those coins in one of the southern cities that didn’t burn itself to the ground, or have everyone in it shoot each other trying to stay alive after the power, water, and food stopped coming in.”
“He didn’t say anything about changing his mind to me.” Even to Jeebee’s ears, his own words sounded weak and unconvincing. It was hardly Paul’s way to announce his reasons for anything he did, even for a change as enormous as this.
He looked again at what lay on the groundsheet. Besides the flour, ammunition, blankets, clothes, and other things of relatively small value that Paul had promised him, there were both a double-bladed and a single-bladed ax, a small wall-supported tent with a frame of aluminum poles, and a large number of other kinds of gear that were—from the viewpoint of Jeebee’s survival—unexpected luxuries.
He raised his eyes again to Merry.
“You had something to do with this,” he said.
“What makes you think so?”
“I just know you did,” he told her. “Paul wouldn’t do it on his own and Nick couldn’t make Paul change his mind, even if Nick wanted to. It had to be you.”
For the first time, her direct glance yielded a little. There was no real change in her expression, but having said what he had and seeing her standing there, for the moment silent, he was suddenly sure of what he had merely suspected before saying it.
“What did you give—what did you promise to get me all this?” Jeebee demanded. “I’m not going to take—”
“Nothing!” she said, almost violently. “I didn’t give up or promise anything. Dad understands me. I told him you had to have these things if you were going to have any chance of staying alive until we come back next year.”
“And he went along with you—just like that?”
“All right!” she said. “I told him I’d give you my own things if he wouldn’t, and he said in that case he didn’t have a choice, because he’d just have to replace them so I’d still have them. Yes, I know it was a hard thing to do to him. He loves me, Jeebee. All this—”
She waved her hand at the wagon.
“—all this, he did for me. I didn’t give him any choice in this case, no. But I’d do what I did again in a minute. I tell you, I want you to stay alive.”
They stood staring into each other’s eyes for a long, painful minute. Then Jeebee stooped to the pile on the groundsheet and began the process of loading the packhorse. Merry had always taken charge of packing the horses when the two of them had gone after the seed. Even when she had allowed Jeebee to help, it had been strictly under her supervision.
Merry had explained that not only was each horse best off loaded with the optimum amount the animal could carry, some carried their loads best when those loads were arranged in a way that suited the particular horse. Jeebee had followed orders, listened, and to his surprise, ended up knowing more than he had ever suspected there was to know about loading a packhorse.
In this case, he could take it for granted that Merry had not supplied him with too heavy a load for Sally to carry comfortably, and he remembered that Sally had a ticklish spot high on her left side, which was best off without having anything pressing directly on it.
As he worked, he waited to hear Merry correcting him in what he was doing. But she said nothing. When at last he had put everything on the horse’s back, covered the load completely with the groundsheet, and secured it all with rope in a diamond hitch, he heard something that was almost a small sigh behind him.
He turned and stood facing Merry once more.
“It’s all right,” Merry said, after a moment. “You’ll do all right. Just remember, she can carry perhaps another fifty pounds comfortably for a full day, at a walking pace—but no more, for day-in, day-out travel.”
They were once more looking unhappily into each other’s eyes.
“You don’t have to go,” Merry said, finally. The words came almost as if forced from her.
“Yes,” Jeebee said with a tight throat, “you know I do. And there’s no hope at all… ”
His voice ran out.
“I can’t leave Dad,” she said. “You know that. But you’d be as safe with us as with anybody else.”
“It’s not just safety,” he said. “It’s a place where I can work I need.” [*original book says this, page 204]
“What work?”
“Maybe someday figuring out how all this happened to us. How maybe it could be kept from ever happening again.”
She shook her head slowly.
“Why you?” she asked. “And what difference does it make now?”
“It makes a difference because a civilized world’s going to grow back together again,” he said. “You know that. Paul knows it. He even plans on it—for your future. You know that, too. As for why it has to be me who finds it, maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t know of anyone else who’s trying, with what I know.”
He had never told her as much of his personal history as he would have liked, and the meanings of it to him—even though they had talked at length on the seed-farm trip. She had not, perhaps, asked the right questions to get him going, and he was not yet beyond the reticence that had simply been his habit for a lifetime. So now, even as the words left him, he felt suddenly sure she would not understand what he was talking about.
Perhaps she did not, but in any case, she seemed to take them at face value.
“We’ll be coming by here again next year at this time, give or take a week or so,” she said.
“I’ll be here,” he said.
They stood for a moment more. Then, since nothing more came to him to say, he turned, put his foot in the stirrup of Brute’s saddle, and himself up onto the back of the riding horse.
He looked down at her from horseback.
“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll get going.”
He could not bring himself to say good-bye. Apparently, neither could she. But as he lifted the reins and Brute stirred to make his first step, she caught hold of Jeebee’s knee with one hand, stopping the horse.
“I love you!” she said.
He looked down at her, feeling the pressure of her hand on his knee. It was out in the open now. Like a naked, twin-edged sword between them, he remembered, as if it had been only a moment ago, the pressure of her body against his when he had held her for that moment on the seed trip.
He knew now that she had no more defenses left. If he should get back down from the horse now and put his arms around her and hold her and kiss her, she would go with him. Or would he stay? The strength of the emotion between them was almost overwhelming. They could gamble either way—that it would work out if she came with him, that it would work out
if he stayed with her.
But this was not a gamblers’ world anymore. The last few months and weeks, especially the weeks before, had taught him that. That in his near starvation, they dared not kiss.
“And God knows—” he said, sitting still in the saddle where he was. The words were pulling from him, after a moment’s struggle to find his voice. “God knows I love you!”
He shook up the reins and Brute led off, Sally trailing obediently at the end of the length of rope that attached her to Brute and Jeebee. Wolf, who had been lying all this time, watching them from the step to the back door of the wagon, leaped down and trotted to catch up with him.
Halfway to the trees beyond the cleared side of the road he half turned in the saddle, looking back, and saw her still standing where he had left her, gazing after him. He lifted his left hand from the elbow in a single wave. Her hand went up in answer.
He turned, rode on into the trees, and the wagon behind him, with all about it, was lost to sight.
CHAPTER 18
“Damn!”
“The sound of his own voice, within the silence of the lodgepole pines, startled him. Mountains stood on his left hand, the side of the western horizon. He was riding through the north of Wyoming, toward the Montana border.
He reined in Brute; and the packhorse, Sally, feeling the sudden slackening of the line tying her to Jeebee’s saddle, stopped also—Brute being no respecter of sex or familiarity in the case of any other horse crowding his heels. Like a professional boxer reacting to a thrown punch, his two iron-shod hooves would lash out in automatic reflex.
So they all halted, even Wolf, who at the moment was traveling with them. He looked up at Jeebee.
“What’s wrong with me?” Jeebee said to him. “It’s only the end of June! I’ve got plenty of time to find that customer of Paul’s who kept wolves, and maybe get a look at what books on people like you he might have!”
Wolf merely watched him. The only readable expression on his furry mask of a face was one of mild curiosity. Jeebee had not known whether the other would leave with him or not. True, Wolf had gone with him and Merry on their trip to get the seeds, but Jeebee had become more than half convinced that the golden-eyed individual had come to like Merry better than himself, and would choose instead to stay with the wagon.
There were so many questions in Jeebee’s mind about Wolf and his kind—which brought him back to why he had just sworn at himself and pulled up.
It was less than a day and a half since he had parted from Merry, Paul, and Nick. The wagon had turned off Interstate Highway 90 a safe number of miles before reaching the ruins of Buffalo. From there it had swung downward to meet and head south on U.S. Highway 87, on Paul’s customary path to Texas. From Texas it would turn east and go back along a route through the southern states, during the late-summer and fall months, to Paul’s headquarters somewhere in the Carolinas.
Jeebee had headed north since leaving the wagon, planning to follow the route of U.S. Interstate 90 north and west across the Montana border toward Billings. His plan had been to circle Buffalo to the east and follow up on the eastern side of 90.
He was still short of Buffalo and east of highway 87. Both horses were behaving well and his way seemed clear. Except that, suddenly, just now the thought of a change of route had come to him. He reached into his backpack, fastened just behind his saddle.
By feel his fingers identified the case holding his own marked and ruled maps. He found the brown plastic map case, took it out, and located the map he needed.
Instead of heading straight north and crossing I-90 to be on its eastern side as it headed north, it would be very simple for him to turn west, cross 87, and swing northwest until he hit U.S. 16, the road leading out of Buffalo and through the Bighorn Mountains by way of the Powder River Pass and Ten Sleep Canyon.
On the other side of the mountains was Worland, from which a day’s travel northward would bring him to Glamorgan, the small town near which Walter Neiskamp, the man who raised wolves, had his place. Paul had located the position of Neiskamp’s house with a small neat cross in red ink.
Once Jeebee had found Glamorgan, he hoped to be able to talk the man into either selling him some of his wolf books or letting him read them. After that, he would head north into Montana, roughly following U.S. 310, which crossed the border just above Frannie and below Warren, and from there on continue up and around Billings.
Above the Billings area, he could follow the general routes of either State Highway 3 or U.S. 87 up toward the Musselshell River and highway 12, which led eastward toward the town of Musselshell. It was all ranch country there, east of the Little Snowy Mountains, with the Big Snowy Mountains behind them.
It was still early in the day. Only ten miles or less separated him from a point beyond which highway 16, which went through the Powder River Pass, split off from 1-90. He could make highway 16 by noon.
He sat in his saddle, torn two ways, while Brute stirred restlessly beneath him.
The strong desire to reach Neiskamp’s, and at least get a look at the wolf books, was almost like a compulsion on him. Balancing it was what could only be described as a fear of making the crossing of the pass.
It was unlikely that the pickings, which travelers such as he and his two loaded horses could offer, would be worth anyone’s lying in wait along the pass in country like this. But on the other hand, he would undoubtedly be reaching points where the only available path for him would be the road itself, as long as he had the horses.
The cool finger of fear touched him once again, inside. Once committed to the pass, he would be a sitting duck for anyone lying in wait with a rifle along the way. There was nothing to be done about that. But in any case, he would be safer traveling at night, as he had in his early period before he had gotten into South Dakota and met the wagon.
It was remarkable, but for the first time in his life, he was experiencing two interlocked sensations, neither of which he would have believed was possible to him. The fear—it was almost a superstitious fear—of crossing the pass, was there. Irrationally, something inside him seemed to say that if he tried to cross the pass, he would never make it through alive, and as a result, he would never see Merry again. It was the latter possibility, not the former, that now left him hollow inside.
It was a real, if reasonless, apprehension. But strangely, woven with it at the same time—and remarkable after all these months that had taught him the value of taking no chances, of playing safe, of always taking the most protected route—he felt an almost fierce desire to tempt the very fear itself. He had never felt anything like that desire in his life before. It was as if to cross through the pass was something he had to do, a test he must pass for his own sake.
He had always wondered how people could want to dare ridiculous dangers. This danger was not necessarily ridiculous, but he found a grim desire in him to dare it anyway. It was as if the crossing of the pass was an enemy he was required to seek out and cross swords with, when all his life he had avoided crossing swords with anyone.
After a long moment of sitting undecided where he was, it was that last, unreasonable need that won out.
“Well, Wolf, it looks like we turn west,” he said—and suddenly realized that Wolf had already disappeared into the little patch of trees surrounding them.
He turned the horses. The possibility of death lying in wait for him in the pass went before him still, like a wraith in his path. But his desire to go brushed that wraith aside. Something new was stirring in him. A fatalism, an almost physical desire to gamble. The challenge was attractive in a way he had never felt before. He wished that Wolf was with him. It was as if Wolf would be a catalyst of some sort to test his decision. Still riding, he howled.
Brute and Sally, used now to his making such noises, stolidly ignored him and continued walking.
He howled twice, but there was no answer. It was unlikely that Wolf had gotten too far away to hear him in the short time they had been parted, altho
ugh sounds sometimes played tricks, particularly with mountains nearby. But then there was no guarantee that Wolf would answer a howl, in any case. Jeebee shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it. It would be up to Wolf, just as he had thought earlier, to find them and go along, if he wanted to.
The decision was then to be Jeebee’s, alone, unhelped. The fatalism held him. He lifted his reins again, rode across the road, and turned north.
He and the horses reached the woods just above a patch of highway 16 near noon. He stopped well out of sight of the road and unloaded both saddle and pack from the two horses, then tethered the horses about ten feet apart.
For himself he laid out the groundsheet covering the gear and unrolled the foam mattress on top of it. Wolf was used to the packload, he hoped, and had lost interest in it. But even if his destructive urges were triggered while Jeebee slept, any tugging on the groundsheet by Wolf trying to get at the gear below him would wake Jeebee instantly. The arrangement did not make the most comfortable of beds, however.
But it would do for a nap. He lay down on it, accordingly, deliberately leaving himself uncovered so that the coolness of the afternoon shadows would wake him. The last few months had developed an internal clock in him that could be preset for the time he wanted to awake. Lying on the packload, he closed his eyes, turned on his side, and almost instantly dropped into slumber.
He woke feeling stiff and chilly. But the feeling did not bother him. Like an animal, he knew that getting up and moving about would warm him quickly.
He had chosen a spot not far from a small stream, and he took the horses there to water before splitting Sally’s load between her and Brute. They would both be packhorses on the slopes ahead, and he would cross the pass on foot, himself.
Above, the sky was still bright with late afternoon. The chill that had woken Jeebee had come from the treed slope behind him, falling into shadow from the rise of the mountain behind it. Even when he had finished watering and loading the horses, sections of the road opening eastward below him were still in sunlight.
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