“You were out on your feet,” Jeebee said gruffly. “You’d have died that night if I hadn’t found you.”
“Maybe,” she said, looking back at the fire. “Maybe… but maybe not. I had a lot of reason to want to live.”
She sat without saying anything more for some seconds. Jeebee waited her out, listening to the crackle and snap of the burning wood in the fireplace. Finally she shook her head, as if she was putting the whole memory she had talked about out of her mind. She looked over at him and smiled.
“Have you looked for an outdoor thermometer down at that ranch?” she said. “That’s not the sort of thing people raiding a ranch like that would particularly think of taking. They must have had a thermometer to see what the outside temperature was like. Did you see one?”
“No,” Jeebee said slowly. The fact of the matter was it had never crossed his mind to look, either. Or if he had seen one, he had paid no attention to it. He was long past the point where he thought of the weather in degrees. It was cold, it was hot, it was bearable, it was unbearable. These were the things he concerned himself with, as exclusively as Wolf might.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “There’s got to be one. I can look for it. But what do we need a thermometer for, particularly?”
“You shouldn’t have to ask me that,” said Merry. “You know I’ve been digging that pit in the cold room up front for the meat storage. We’re almost to the point where it’s going to be cold enough to keep meat frozen down there. But we want to be sure. If you can get a thermometer from the ranch, we can check the temperature at the bottom and know.”
Jeebee felt stupid.
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll swing by there tomorrow, long enough to see if I can find one without a lot of searching. I’d still like to get more in before the weather breaks.”
“I’d like to get down there, too,” said Merry. “Why don’t you let me go down with you, and leave me at the ranch while you go out hunting, then come back and pick me up along with whatever I’ve found to take back.”
Jeebee was tempted to point out that taking her there and then going back to pick her up would limit the amount of ground he could cover out on the open range looking for cattle. While he hesitated, she spoke again.
“As you say, this good weather isn’t going to last, perhaps not more than another day or so—if that. In fact, it could snow tonight and we’d be into winter,” she said. “I want to get down and comb through that place before everything gets covered.”
“All right,” said Jeebee.
But, almost miraculously, the weather continued to hold. Not only was it warmer than it had been—and warmer than it should be for this time of year—but the sky remained clear of clouds and they had relatively long hours of daylight in which to get things done.
Jeebee was making progress in using the solar-cell blanket to charge all the batteries. Evidently the converter that was built into the blanket would work for car batteries, although it was, as he had expected, no better than a trickle charger. It was very slow to get a battery up to working level.
Nonetheless, he kept the blanket spread out where the sun could reach it all day long, and continuously connected to a battery, so that one of them was being charged all the daylight hours. Eventually they had four fully charged batteries in reserve, which could be turned on for extra or emergency lighting during the night or early morning, if the fire was out or for other reason they needed extra illumination. Using the cars’ interior lights had allowed the batteries to charge faster than Jeebee depleted them by use. Also, the light from the fireplace had helped.
Accordingly, both Merry and Jeebee went with the horses and the trailer down to the ranch the next morning. Merry finally let herself be persuaded to ride in the trailer, though this was anything but a comfortable way to travel.
The springs on the trailer were very stiff, designed for heavy loads, like machinery or equipment that needed to be hauled about the ranch. So they were very little use in cushioning the bumps and jolts along the way. Also the trailer was continually tilted either upslope or downslope or sometimes toward one side or another. The result was that Merry had to ride holding on to the top pipe of the fencing that enclosed the body of the trailer, to keep from being thrown off her feet.
In fact, part of the way down there, she got so thoroughly sick of the jolting that she insisted on stopping, getting out, and walking. However, she recognized shortly that she was still not up to an extended tramp of any kind on foot. They compromised by stopping for short rests and Jeebee promised that he would build a sort of padded chair-harness that could be put in the trailer for anyone who wanted to ride in it. It had not occurred to him before, but either one of them could be hurt away from the cave, and need to be transported back to it in the trailer. He began to think about some way of anchoring down and cushioning a bed that could be fastened to the floor of the trailer as well as the harness.
He dropped Merry off at the ranch. He had taken the place so much for granted, he was a little startled to see Merry reacting to it as if it was some sort of potential Christmas tree full of presents. He left her there, worrying a little that she would be disappointed with what a small amount of things there were to find, and went about his hunting.
It turned out to be one of his unsuccessful days. Most of the time he could find cattle fairly easily. But occasionally, from some instinct of self-preservation, they either all seemed to have gone into hiding, or else he was somehow perversely threading a path through all the places where they weren’t.
He had given up and headed back toward the ranch when he found himself startling jackrabbits with the horses and the trailer as he advanced. Apparently, as inexplicably as there were no cattle, there was this area that was suddenly full of the large rodents. The .30/06 was really too heavy a weapon to use on such small animals. A direct hit on the body of one of them simply blew the animal apart. But there were enough of them so that he could try for head shots; and he did end up killing three this way, gutting and cleaning the carcasses and bringing them tied to the railing of the trailer, back to the ranch.
He had hoped that Merry had found a satisfying number of some small things, like the thermometer, so that she would not be disappointed with her visit to the ranch, but he had completely underestimated her.
She apparently caught sight of him while he was still a distance away and came out in the open to wave at him to attract his attention. He waved back and continued on in. She met him happily.
“Bring the trailer around and we’ll load up,” she said.
Jeebee followed her around to the back of the ranch house and found a pile of filled plastic sacks. The sacks he already knew about. There was a stack of them in one of the outbuildings, and no one among the looters had apparently been interested in them. But she now had six of them stuffed full of various things, the actual identity of which he could not see through the milky semi-transparency of the plastic.
CHAPTER 31
“What’s all this?” he said, for there were six of them, the equivalent of large leaf bags, filled full and fastened with wire ties. “I don’t have anything in the trailer. We can carry them all right. But where will we put them when we get back up there?”
“You’ll see,” said Merry. There was very nearly a gleeful look on her face. “Most of it’s light, anyway, and some of the other stuff won’t have to go into the cave at all.”
“What is it?” Jeebee asked.
“Odds and ends—useful things, though,” said Merry, “and a lot of root vegetables from the garden. Some we’ll eat, but a lot we’ll keep as seed to start next spring.”
Jeebee opened his mouth to tell her they would be moving on as soon as the weather was good enough to travel in the spring. But he was stilled by the thought that after what she had been through, it would be wrong to rob her of this moment of pleasure. There would be plenty of time for her to find out that wherever they would be, it would not be around here, when a
ny vegetables they had planted in the spring were ready for harvest.
He had been surprised by the amount of things she had gathered. But he was more surprised—and impressed—when they got back to the cave and she showed him exactly what she had found. The variety was large, from the outdoor thermometer she had talked about earlier, to a number of small cans of various spices, including supplies of salt, sugar, baking powder and baking soda, sacks of dried beans, peas, and other dried vegetables that Jeebee had not even thought to look for.
In addition to these were a number of other small but useful items, including hooks that could be screwed into their plank walls so they could hang up things, and old throw rugs full of holes or half worn away, which had been ignored by the looters—but which Merry now pointed out would be useful not to only make the floor of their cave’s inner room warmer but possibly the walls as well.
She had also brought back a great deal of yarn of various colors.
“Have you done any knitting?” she asked Jeebee.
Jeebee guiltily remembered her pushing knitting needles and yarn on him when he was ready to leave the wagon and emphasizing that he knit things like gloves and caps for his own use.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t had time.”
“Well, you’ll have time this winter,” she told him.
Merry was right about what she had said about the things she had gathered not taking up as much room in the inner part of the cave as Jeebee had expected, once they were stored in an orderly fashion. This was mostly around the walls, except for those things that would be of direct use in the cooking, and these she put next to the fireplace, saying that she would build shelves within reach of the fire to put them.
“In fact,” she said, “we could use a lot of shelving in here. That’s something else I can do while you’re busy with other things.”
Jeebee had to agree with her. Shelves were an obvious thing. He had even thought of them, but not as anything he would get to in the near future. Other things—even the forge for the smithy he needed to build—ranked before such things. But now, of course, the situation was changed.
Jeebee skinned the rabbits—it was a small pat to his ego that he was more experienced at this than Merry. She freely admitted this, saying that she was quite at home with cleaning and preparing domestic animals for cooking, but had little experience with wild game simply because at the wagon they had not eaten much of it.
They put the rabbits on to boil, and Merry cleaned and cut some of the vegetables into the pot with them. Jeebee had taken some from the garden himself, but only from time to time, figuring that it did not have enough vegetables in it so that he could eat them regularly without exhausting the supply.
The vegetables, with the rabbit, therefore, were a treat. The long-term problem of balancing their diet had also been met by Merry in an unexpected way. It had never occurred to Jeebee to look for vitamin pills down at the ranch.
Merry had gone looking and found nearly a year’s supply. She had also come upon a greater find. Jeebee had stared earlier when she pulled a number of bags of dried beans and dried peas from one sack. He had stared harder when, after that, she pulled a good six-inch-wide two-inch-thick wheel of paraffin-covered cheese out of one of the other bags.
“Where did that come from?” Jeebee said. “I could swear I went through that house a dozen times looking for some food that had been missed by the people who robbed it; and they’d taken everything that was ready to eat. I did find some flour, and things like that. But I even looked for a root cellar all around the place and couldn’t find one.”
“Did you think of looking under the kitchen floor?” said Merry.
“Under the kitchen floor?”
“Of course,” Merry said. “Where else would you put foods that you might want to get at in a hurry, but wanted to keep out of the way in the kitchen? Someplace cool but dry, and sure not to freeze?”
“The kitchen… ” said Jeebee thoughtfully. “I didn’t notice anything in the kitchen that looked like it was a trapdoor to a place below it.”
“The trap door was in that little pantry area with all the shelves around it,” Merry said. “The people that went through it simply grabbed what they wanted off the shelves and never looked down. You did the same thing, didn’t you? You looked into the pantry, saw practically nothing there but these spice cans, and gave up. Right?” Jeebee nodded slowly.
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t check the floor there. What made you do it?”
“I was just pretty sure that there had to be something like that. I’ve seen a lot of entries like that in the kitchens of houses off by themselves. It’s a natural thing to have. By the way, there’s a lot more still down there that we’d better pick up and take away before the really cold weather comes. Things that wouldn’t have frozen, ordinarily, because the house above them would be heated. But now it’s just a ruin, stuff will freeze as hard there as they will in our meat pit in the cold room, out front. There’re more cheeses for one thing. Oh yes, and more of this.”
It was then she had held up a large bottle full of long, dark tablets.
“Vitamins,” she said, “the one-a-day kind. We’re both going to take them from now on, as long as we have to live on so much meat. And the cheese’ll help. Good source of vitamins C and D.”
While the food cooked, Jeebee stepped into the outer room to see how far Merry had gotten with the freeze pit she had been digging in the floor of the cold room. It had occurred to him that he might use his time right now to finish it. But he saw that she had done remarkably well with the time she had. She was either stronger in some ways than he had thought, already, or else she had a particular pride in being able to do this bit of excavation. In either case, perhaps it would be best not to seem to step in and finish it for her.
Since he was outside and had the time, he went along the length of the cold room, past the corner where Wolf was now in the habit of curling up, and stepped into the area that would be the smithy.
There was nothing here yet but some stones he had already gathered, and a large pile of clay. He had found a clay deposit after searching down the bed of the larger stream for some distance and brought what was there back, load by load, in a couple of the buckets from the ranch.
The two full buckets each time had been a good load to carry that distance, but it was invaluable. The stone, mortared by clay, would make an excellent firepit. But it struck him now that he had better get the clay to the inner room before it froze where it sat. Or else he would never be able to break it into chunks to warm up, soften, and mix with added water for use as mortar.
The two buckets were still here. He got a shovel from the inner cave, where he kept the tools so that Wolf would not chew their handles to bits, and went out to load buckets and start bringing the clay inside.
“What’s that?” Merry demanded when he brought in the first two buckets.
He told her briefly.
“And you were worried about me filling up the space in here!” she said.
That was all she said, however. He managed to transfer the clay before the food was ready. He made a rough pyramid of it against their innermost wall of sand, the one wall of the cave that he would be excavating further once he was confined to the cave by weather and could only work inside.
The rabbits were tender and tasty.
“A change for the better, from beef all the time,” Merry said as they were eating, “don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” Jeebee answered.
The truth was, however, the change did not make a great deal of difference to him. Sometime since he had left Stoketon, appetite had become unimportant to him. Hunger was important, and food was good when he ate it. But he did not miss any particular taste, or regret things that he used to be able to eat that were no longer available.
The fact of the matter was that the feeling he looked for was that of a full stomach rather than the satisfaction of a particular taste.
But Mer
ry had gone to some trouble with the rabbits, including using some of the spices she had brought back up. Jeebee did not want to hurt her feelings. But privately, he would have been as happy with anything else that was meat, along with the vegetables.
That evening, as they sat before the fire, she began for the first time to tell him about some parts of the last few days of her search for him.
Most of the people she had stopped with had been very helpful. Some had been indifferent. Some had been hospitable only out of a sense of obligation, or a consideration of the future contact they might want to have with Paul and the wagon.
Nearly all of them had thought Merry was foolish to go looking for someone who had probably vanished. Somebody, who under the new conditions of the present time, was not likely to be found. But until she passed out of the area in which she, Paul, and the wagon were known, the visiting had been pleasant.
What struck Jeebee as she talked was a sense of wonder. Not just a wonder that she should venture on such a search for him, but that she should stick so single-mindedly to the goal of finding him. There was a driving force in her he had never really appreciated.
“You know,” she told him as they finally banked the fire and started to bed, “we ought to change places for a few days. Let me take over the hunting. You work up here, or down at the ranch, whichever you want. Which do you want, by the way?”
“There’s things I ought to get started on here, like building the forge,” he said, because that was at the top of his thoughts, “before it gets too cold out there. The clay’ll freeze on me, if I wait too long.”
“It’s strange you didn’t find some kind of forge down there in that outbuilding you said must have been a blacksmithing place for the ranch,” said Merry. “A forge wouldn’t burn.”
“They may have used a portable forge, and the looters took it with them,” said Jeebee. “Nick told me about the portable forges. Sears, or Montgomery Ward’s, used to sell them, once upon a time. Maybe they still do—I mean, did right up until the Collapse. It was a sort of three-legged metal bowl that you could pick up and carry, and build a coal fire in. It wouldn’t be hard to carry that off.”
Wolf and Iron Page 40