The frames were necessary because Jeebee had no faith in his ability to either build a door frame or hang the door within one. He had heard once that it was a tricky thing to do. The door had to be hung just right, both vertically and in the frame. In the end he got both of them up to the cave, where he put the first one into the opening he had left for it in the outer wall.
His weather front for the excavated home was now complete. Only the interior remained undone. But he could take his time about the work inside, he told himself.
He celebrated that day by taking down the wire fence. It was only late afternoon, but Wolf had already returned and watched him remove it.
To his surprise—although afterward, thinking about what he knew of wolf behavior, it should not have been—Wolf did not at once enter into the territory that the fence had guarded.
Instead, he began by taking his time about making a leisurely approach to the now rolled-up fencing, lying in the meadow a little way from where it had been set up. Finally, he got close enough to sniff it over completely, both the fencing and the angle-iron posts that had secured it. But then, little by little he came deeper into the earlier-denied space until he reached the wall itself, which he then examined closely, from one end to the other.
The next morning, after Wolf had left, Jeebee began work inside the wall.
His last work outside had been to put a roof over the end of it that was far enough away from the face of the cliff so that the space needed bridging—that space where he hoped to set up his smithy. He had needed to fit the rest of the roof tightly against the face of the bluff, digging into the actual earth, with wood slanting upward into it so that any rain would run off. Later on he would undoubtedly find chinks and openings in the roof and wall, but he could then patch them with clay. When winter came, snow and ice would help by filling any openings and freezing them shut.
He was so concerned with having the structure tight that when he finally went in at last to start work on the inner cave section, he discovered something he had completely forgotten. With the wall up and the roof in position, it was too dark inside to see what he was doing.
He had already established that the solar blanket would charge the car batteries, even if it took some time to do it. But he found that working in constant gloom, he used up the batteries’ charge faster than he could replace it.
He found his solution in connecting the batteries to the ceiling lights of the cars. The idea of using these had occurred to him earlier; but he had forgotten it. Now, it turned out to be ideal. The automobile interior lights gave him more than adequate illumination, and drained a battery only slowly.
But in the end he finally gave up and went back down to take out one of the ranch house’s unbroken windows and bring it back to put it in a space he cut in his front wall.
Accordingly, he lost another day and a half of working time before he was able to resume excavation of the cave’s interior in earnest.
He had made some preliminary sketches of how he might do the timbering. Now he began work by digging back the earth that faced the front wall from a few feet short of the end opposite to the blacksmithing area and over to the point where the bluff itself curved back to make the smithy space.
He had to pause occasionally to let dust clear the air of the cave and settle. This slowed him down still further, but he developed the habit of stepping out and doing some other little chore for a while. Eventually, however, he had created a space about four feet deep with a level floor. It was as far as he could go, simply digging.
He began the putting up of two-by-fours as studs, and building a second, interior wall, topping it off with an inner roof to hold back the sandy soil of the bluff above him. He would timber a bit, dig a little further, then timber again. Eventually, he planked between the studs of his inner wall as far as the curve of the bluff, leaving a space in it three feet in from the outer wall, and leaving a space in both outer and inner walls that would be filled by the two doors he had brought from the ranch house.
Once he had done this, he was ready to dig and timber the inside room of his cave. But his estimate of materials had been woefully short. He was forced into more trips to the ranch for used lumber and nails.
With these up at the meadow, finally, he began to work through the space of the door opening he had left in the inner wall.
He timbered as he went, and gradually excavated a room about eight feet wide and ten feet deep, with an interior ceiling over his head, both to support the earth above and keep it from trickling down upon him.
He had begun the interior room deliberately at a level a good two and a half feet above the level of the front room he had made with his two walls. Now, he was attempting to put to use something he had read about, which evidently worked in the building of igloos and snow caves. An igloo, he had read years ago, had its entrance, and a small interior area, below the level of a higher shelf on which much of the actual living was done. This arrangement caused a cold air barrier to form in the lower area. The heavier cold air below could not rise; so the warmth above was not lost to the icy outside temperatures.
The theory was undoubtedly excellent, but he found that in practice, even with both doors open to the outside, after he had worked a short while, the air began to grow bad. There was no real circulation into the area where he was digging.
He was forced to stop. Clearly he would have to provide some air circulation to the cave.
Happily, he had already made some plans to solve not only the circulation problem but the problem of heating the cave at the same time.
He went up to the top of the bluff, and by measuring, positioned himself over the space he had already cleared in the original hole, below. He began to dig a slanting hole down from there for about twelve feet. At this point he was sure he was well below the ceiling he would be excavating up to for the inner cave.
He went back to digging within the cave and soon, at what would be the left side of the inner room, as seen from the entrance, broke through to the point where the hole had been opened to the top of the bluff. He had brought up a length of chimney pipe from a dusty, long-unused, potbellied heating stove in one of the outbuildings of the ranch. He poked this up through the hole to just above ground level at the bluff’s top and anchored the pipe in place. Then he began building a clay-mortared stone fireplace and chimney up to and around the pipe.
Now that he had ventilation in one wall of the cave, he returned to the digging. Air came in through the open doors and was warmed by his body heat and exited up the pipe. When he experimented with the doors closed, still enough air leaked in to keep it fresh while he worked. Whether it would be safe to build a fire in the fireplace was another question.
He was extremely doubtful that his crude heating plant would work at all, or that if it did, it would not also smoke him out or otherwise asphyxiate him. But he built a fire in it with the doors open and there was a moment of extreme jubilation on his part when he found that it drew quite well. Even with both doors closed, it would draw, and the firelight within it illuminated the cave somewhat.
The illumination was not great, but it was enough to let him do without even the interior car lights if he had to.
It was only a stop-gap form of illumination, but would have to do for the moment. It was time for him to go hunting again. He had been doing a minimum amount of gathering meat, grudging the time that it took away from his work. But he was now scraping bottom from his last slaughtering trip to the flatlands, and the last of the meat had not really kept too well. It had not made him sick. But even though the nights were much cooler, outdoors it was still nowhere near refrigerator, let alone freezer temperatures.
Accordingly, that evening, by an outside fire—for Wolf would still not go into the inner room of the cave—he made plans to go down to the flatlands for at least a couple of days. The first he would spend hunting. The next would be at the ranch, gathering up at least several more of the vehicle batteries.
The ai
r was chill in spite of the fire and he thought he felt a hint of snow in the dark night air around him. He changed his mind. He had originally been thinking of riding Brute down and taking Sally along as a packhorse to carry the meat and the batteries—which together would not make too much of a load for her.
Now he decided to take the trailer. He had put off bringing up the skis for it. He should get those and keep them with the trailer; after first finding out how they went on. He would need to have the necessary nuts, bolts, and wrenches—or whatever—with him to put them on in case he was caught unexpectedly by snow.
The next morning was frosty. He harnessed both horses to the trailer and started down. It was now only mid-September. He had thought about the possibility of freakish early snowstorms, but it had really not come home to him until now what a difference it would make for him if one caught him unprepared, with wind and an abrupt, steep drop in temperature.
Even on the drive down to the ranch, the wind picked up and became colder. He was glad, and he was sure the horses were glad as well, to get to the ranch. He tied them in the shelter of one of the partially burned outbuildings, and went himself to look in the outbuildings where he had seen the skis for the two wagons. He had merely looked at the skis the time before, registering the fact they were there. He had not examined them.
Now that he climbed up to the rafters and looked at them closely, he discovered that the skis for the larger wagon were unusable. One had its tip ruined by fire, the other was half burned away. The skis for the small trailer were untouched, but as he looked at them, common sense suddenly shoved his imagination aside.
He could use them on light snow over level ground. But in deep or slippery snow and upslopes, the weight of the trailer alone would be too much for the horses to pull.
He took them down anyway. Tied to one of them, in a large and strong cloth sack that had printing—now unreadable—stamped in black upon its once-white surface, he found all the necessary parts to connect them in place of the wheels.
He took them to the trailer, and put them in it. A few solitary but heavy flakes were drifting on the wind now and one lit on the back of his hand to touch him with a sudden sensation of an icy fingertip.
He looked at it in the moment before it melted from the heat of his body and disappeared. After a moment’s thought, he took the hitch of the unloaded trailer and pulled it himself into the same outbuilding that was sheltering the horses.
If it turned into a real snowfall, they might all have to hole up here at the ranch for a day or so. He still found it hard to imagine a real blowing blizzard this early in the year. But the sky above him seemed to sag low with the weight of the dark clouds that hung overhead from horizon to horizon, and the snowflakes were coming at him more thickly.
He decided to ignore the storm, for the moment at least. He was dressed warmly, and by turning the collar of his jacket up around his neck and ears, he could ignore the cold wind. He had already started to think of what he could do if the trailer proved unusable. Not only the trailer, he reminded himself, but the horses. Deep snow would make it almost impossible for them to get through. Certainly, it would make it impossible for them to drag any amount of weight.
What he would have to do was build a light sledge that he could pull himself. Then he could go on foot down into the lowlands on snowshoes, which were one of the things he had found in the house here. That was handy, though he had researched them before leaving Stoketon. He knew two patterns for building them, including a temporary, emergency kind that could be built by someone who was lost in wilderness in sudden snow.
He didn’t have to try to make them now, and in fact had already removed the snowshoes he had found, along with the skis, to the cave—as well as the heavy snowmobile boots.
He went now to look for lumber that he could peel from the outbuildings of the ranch, lumber that would make it possible for him to build the kind of one-man sledge he had in mind.
As he had begun to cannibalize the ranch house to provide materials for his cave, he had discovered that there might be benefits in leaving the undamaged parts of the house and its outbuildings as intact as possible, for purposes of further shelter or use. Accordingly, he examined first the outbuildings that had been most damaged by the fire.
The worst off of these was a building that had originally, evidently, been little more than a roof and a couple of walls. It had been either the blacksmithy for the ranch or the building in which a portable forge had been set up to do blacksmithing. He had already discovered an anvil there, which he meant to bring back to the cave for his own use once he got down the list of other priorities to it. Right now, the need for it was far enough in the future not to concern him.
There was almost nothing left of this building. Certainly there had been nothing about it of the kind of material of which he was most in need.
What he had hoped for was to find a couple of six-to-eight-foot planks, both at least an inch in thickness. If he found them he could saw their ends on the diagonal, or if he could discover a saw around the place that would let him saw in a curve, he could put a continuous upward curve to the bottom edge at the end of each plank. The two planks could then form the runners of his sledge. After that it would merely be a matter of bracing between them with a few two-by-fours and putting light planks across the two top edges to make a bed. The whole thing need only be heavy enough to carry about a hundred pounds of beef, or an equal load.
But there was nothing left in the smithy outbuilding. He went on next to the most ruined shed, which had evidently been a storeplace for odds and ends of small equipment and tools in need of mending, or merely those that were potentially too useful to throw away.
This building had been only about half destroyed by the fire. Jeebee looked it over, but saw nothing of the thickness he wanted. He was just about to leave when he realized that what he was looking for was under his feet.
The floorboards of the shed, in fact the floorboards of all the sheds, were of thicker planks than those used in the sides of the buildings or the ranch house.
He had already taken a number of hand tools up to the cave. But lately he had seen the wisdom of keeping at least one of each of the more common tools down at the ranch, for work there as well. Accordingly, he went to his store of these things and found a claw hammer and a crowbar.
With these he pried up a couple of the floorboards. He found that there was a bonus attached, once he had. For not only were the planks as thick as he wanted, but they had been put down with nails larger than any of those he had so far salvaged from their original places in the house and other buildings.
He went to work with a saw that decidedly was not made to cut curves. Not only was it a straight-cut saw—unthinkingly, earlier, he had taken the best saw with him—but it was rusty and dull. But as it got close to noon, he finally got the sawing done and began to join the two planks with the heavy nails driven through their sides and into the ends of a couple of braces made of two-by-fours.
Planking over the top of the sledge with the lightest boards he could find took less than another hour. He attached a towing rope to the front ends of the runner planks. The end product was good. But he began to be a little worried as he looked at it and realized how much dead weight he would be pulling, even without any load on it. Heading into a blizzard with this dragging behind him, fully loaded, might be more than he could manage. He needed to save weight some way, but certainly he could not save it either on the runners or on the bracing boards.
He went looking for something else to cover the body of the sledge. He found it in a piece of half-inch plywood that had been used in a building that had evidently done double duty as a temporary barn for about three horses or three head of cattle. The plywood had been used to form partitions between the stalls.
Swearing under his breath at his waste of time, he removed the boards and replaced them with the plywood.
When he was done, the sledge was still not what might be called “light.
” But it was the best he could do. Wrapped up in his work, he had almost forgotten the weather. But now he stepped outside the building in which he had been working and saw that the day had grown very dark. The snow was no longer a scatter of soft flakes, but hard, almost invisible pellets of ice. There would be no trying to get back up to the campsite and the cave today.
When the morning dawned, there were a good four inches of grainy snow on the ground. But the wind had ceased, and although the temperature was low, the absence of movement in the cold air made it bearable. It was even more bearable as the last of the clouds disappeared, and the sun came out.
The snow was not so deep and the temperature was not so low that what had fallen might not quickly turn into slush or ice, which could be slippery underneath the hooves of the horses. Still… he made a quick decision to load the sledge on the trailer and head back to the camp.
Once there, he could find shelter for the horses in the corral he had built abutting the small, right-angled wall of his smithy-to-be. The trailer would be safe at the campsite, and he would also have the sledge on hand. So that if the weather continued to be bad and more snow fell, he could head down into the flatlands with it alone.
On foot. As he had early imagined himself doing.
CHAPTER 29
It was a long, hard struggle back to the cave. In spite of the fact that the air temperature stayed low, the horses found most of the going slippery, and the trailer was evidently a problem to pull, particularly when they ran into smaller drifts.
Jeebee went ahead of them to break trail and to make sure that the horses did not wander into a drift too deep to pull the trailer through. Its only load was the sledge, but under these conditions that was enough.
They reached the meadow in late afternoon. The bright, cloudless sky overhead, and the fact that the surrounding trees blocked out much of what little wind stirred, gave the meadow an appearance of being warmer than it actually was. Jeebee unhitched the trailer without bothering to take the sledge out, unharnessed the horses, and put them in the corral.
Wolf and Iron Page 37