Wolf and Iron

by Gordon Rupert Dickson

  He found the lighter pair of pants he normally wore in the warmth of the cave, taking them down from their hook where Merry had hung them, and pulled them on, tucking his shirt in. He had slept in his shirt over her objections, not wanting to give up anything that might help bring warmth back to his body. Dressed, he went over and kissed Merry gratefully, and she kissed him back with particular enthusiasm.

  “Have we time?” he asked. Her glow had invaded him.

  “Yes—no,” said Merry. She pushed him toward his chair at the table. “Sit down. Dinner’s going to be ready in a minute.”

  He sat.

  “Wolf hasn’t been around?”

  “He got back about half an hour ago,” she answered. “I went outside to be with him for a bit and let you sleep. He was walking sore-footed—you know the way he does when he’s covered a lot of distance. He curled up in his corner. I think he’s still there.”

  Jeebee stretched without getting up from his chair, pushing his hands high above his head, which was something he could not do standing upright. The ceiling was still too low. Someday, he told himself, he would fix that.

  Sitting there while she got the meal on, he told her more about the storm than he had done in his brief mumble on getting home. She was sympathetic, but he noticed that the glow about her did not diminish. It puzzled and intrigued him. Aside from the fact that he could feel that it would not be right to ask the reason for it, his own nature was not one that asked personal questions easily. So, as he had waited for her to tell him about what had happened to her father and Nick, he waited now for the explanation of why she glowed.

  She sat down with him at the table. As they ate, the talk switched to things needing to be done in the cave. Their meat supply called for at most only a couple more successful hunting trips, one being to replace the one he had just aborted because of the storm. He began to tell her what he had in mind to add to his supplies for any such trip, from now on. One would be a sort of homemade sleeping bag, rather than the blankets he usually rolled himself in. Two, he should put a series of blocks or handles on the side of the sledge that would allow him to lift it, even if loaded, while he was lying flat on the snow surface beside it.

  Also, he wanted an extra-light emergency pack, in addition to the one he wore always on his back. Another one that would carry only some food and perhaps a few other necessary things. Just such a sudden storm as he had experienced could last up to two days, under the sledge and the snow. He ought to be prepared with adequate means to keep him warm and fed that long.

  His curiosity over this glow of hers went unsatisfied all through dinner and until Merry had cleared the table, scraping what little was left to scrape off their dishes into the coals of the fire and putting the dishes themselves to soak in a warm pot of water.

  Having done this last, she wiped her hands on one of the cloths from the ranch she had chosen and laundered to act as dish towels and turned from the fire to confront him, still in his chair.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.

  Jeebee’s heart skipped a beat. In spite of himself a feeling of alarm kindled inside him. What might be good news from Merry’s viewpoint might well contain the seeds of something that would mean trouble for them both, seeds she might not suspect were there. But he smiled up at her.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I’m pregnant,” Merry almost sang.

  “My God!”

  Jeebee erupted from the chair. The glow had suddenly gone out of Merry. She stared at him grimly.

  “What do you mean, ‘My God!’ she said. “Here I tell you I’m carrying our child, and you say, ‘My God!’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There’s no hospital! No doctors!” Jeebee said almost wildly. “We probably couldn’t even lay our hands on a nurse if we searched for miles around! All you’ll have is me, and I’m not worth a damn when it comes to something like having a baby!”

  The breath went out of Merry in a long relieved sigh.

  “So that’s it,” she said, in a calmer voice. She pushed him backward. “Sit down.”

  Numbly, almost tripped up by the edge of his chair seat behind his knees, and under the impulse of Merry’s not inconsiderable strength, Jeebee sat down abruptly.

  “Now,” said Merry, sitting down in his lap and speaking directly into his face from only about six inches away, “let me tell you a few things. First, I helped at a birthing the first year Dad had the wagon going on its route, five years ago. I was fourteen. Since then I’ve been at dozens. In fact, I deliberately asked about possible births at every place we stopped, asked if I couldn’t be useful so I could learn as much about what had to be done as possible. Lots of times there was at least a neighbor who was due to give birth, and Dad would hold the wagon there until I had a chance to be part of it. What do you think was one of the things on my list of recommendations to people I might have asked to hire me this winter, if I hadn’t found you? I’m the closest thing to a trained midwife that they’d be likely to find. Now, what do you think about that?”

  “But I—” Jeebee began.

  “But you, nothing!” said Merry. “Let me tell you as well that Dad not only waited for me when it was necessary so that I could be at a birthing and help and learn, he also got me three books as soon as he could find them, after that first birth I was at when I was fourteen. He came to me and shoved them into my hands. ‘Learn these,’ he said. ‘I mean, memorize them. You’re going to be in situations where maybe there’ll be no one around to help you. I want you to know what’s in them by heart.’ And I did. I memorized every word in those three books. What’s more, I’m going to teach them to you, starting now. By the time I’m through with you, you’re going to have them memorized, too. Now, what do you think of all that?”

  “Fine,” said Jeebee, “and believe me I’m going to learn every word you know. But it’s still not going to make me into the equivalent of a real doctor, or even a real nurse. What if something goes wrong?”

  “Sweetheart,” said Merry, “nothing is going to go wrong. I’m young, I’m strong, my hips are wide. What with the cheese, the beans, and the rest of the food we’ve been able to put together, and the vitamin tablets, I’m going to have proper nutrition during the months I’m carrying the baby. Nothing is going to go wrong. Just remember that women were having babies, sometimes all by themselves out in the middle of nowhere or in some cave, thousands of years before there were doctors or nurses or midwives. Besides, it’s not something you can change your mind about now. The baby’s on the way and I’m going to have it. Also, it’s going to be the best, prettiest, strongest baby that ever was. So you might as well just get used to the fact.”

  “I will,” Jeebee said somewhat feebly, “just give me a little time, will you? I hadn’t thought about anything like this at all.”

  Merry kissed him and got up off his lap.

  “No, I don’t suppose you have,” she said. “Well, you can sleep on it tonight. But I’m going to start teaching you the first few paragraphs of the first book tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine,” said Jeebee. But his voice still sounded a little weak in his own ears.

  She grinned at him, her fists on her hips.

  “You’re scared,” she said.

  “Damn right,” Jeebee answered.

  CHAPTER 33

  He remained scared. Meanwhile, the winter wore on, the temperature lowered, and the snow grew deeper, until at last the curve of icy temperatures turned upward, the snow cover gradually began to decrease again, and they moved at last into spring. Throughout all this time, there were no lack of problems and emergencies that for the moment had been able to shove Merry’s condition out of the immediate center of his mind.

  But the moment any of these were past, it returned to center stage in his thoughts, as the Powder River Pass had both filled him with foreboding but drawn him toward it.

  As soon as he was free to think of something other than immediate necessit
ies, the fact of the approaching birth would come back to him, inescapable, ominous, beckoning.

  Face it any way he might, it remained a certainty that he alone was the only person Merry would have to turn to for help when the hour came. He was far from confident about how much help he would be then, in that time in which the life of not only the child growing within her, but her own, would be at balance.

  It was something he had never imagined having to face. He, Jeebee, with a critical responsibility for the safe birth of a child and its mother. Nor did it help that the child would be his own, and the mother of that child the one person he loved most on earth.

  There was no way he could alter or control what would happen. He knew that; but knowing this did not change his feelings. He took his fears out in a savage attack on what would be needed when the time came. Even the temporary relief this work gave him had to come in the intervals between his normal duties of keeping them fed, housed, and protected.

  Survival required that he keep up his hunts down on the flatlands. Half a dozen more times before spring came, he was caught by storms while he was down there. On five of these occasions he managed without trouble. He waited them out, warm enough—if not exactly comfortable—in his homemade sleeping bag, under the shelter of the sledge and the snow that quickly drifted over him.

  But the sixth time, the storm lasted sixteen hours, and after the first ten switched direction a quarter of the way around the compass. So that from this new angle the wind blew clear the drift that had accumulated over him and the sledge.

  He had to wrestle the sledge into a new position, with the numbingly cold wind and snow pushing against him as if the sledge were a wooden sail, fighting him every inch of the way.

  He had been exhausted when he finally established his new position and the snow began to build about them again. He did not think he could have worked another fifteen minutes before reaching the limits of his strength. But as it was, he saved not only himself, but the load of frozen meat he already had on the sledge. A load, unfortunately, which had made the sledge that much more difficult to shift.

  On one other trip he had missed his shot at a range bull, which had been the only animal he could find. He had wounded it, but not enough to even slow it down. It had charged him. Only the fact that he had dodged behind the sledge and the bull had tripped over a snow-covered corner of it, trying to get to him, had given him time to pump another shot in just behind its shoulder and bring it down. At that, it was still not dead. He had to fire another shot into it before it finally lay still.

  In the same icy months of January through early March, up at the cave, Merry had experienced her own near escape. Investigating a slight noise in the outer room one afternoon, she had all but stepped out on top of a cougar, who had come in through the swinging wolf door that Jeebee had built for Wolf, into one wall of the smithy.

  The cougar had been attracted by the smell of the stored meat. Frustrated, like Wolf, by the wire netting over the storage pit, it was hooking its claws into the mesh and trying to pull it up, and this had made the sound Merry had heard.

  Merry reacted without thinking. She had been drying the last of the morning dishes when the noise caught her attention, and still held the dish towel. She ran at the bewildered cat, flailing at it with the towel and waving her arms wildly.

  “Get away from our food!” she screamed.

  The mountain lion bounded back past her, back along the cold room and through the wolf door into the smithy, and vanished from there into the brush. It left behind a few hairs on the wooden framing.

  The look on its white-haired face had been one of sheer terror, in the face of the flapping dishcloth, and Merry found herself leaning against the frame of the inner door, laughing hysterically at the poor creature’s obvious stark fear and comical retreat.

  The image of the predator fleeing from a furious, dish-towel-waving woman sent her into another bout of nearly uncontrollable laughter when she later told Jeebee the story.

  Jeebee was not amused. Any wild animal, particularly one hungry enough to enter a place that must smell so thoroughly of humans and Wolf, was unpredictable. Any wild animal was dangerous if cornered, and Merry had very nearly cornered the cougar in the end of the cold room. Moreover, if it was as panic-stricken as Merry had said, it could have injured her just in its efforts to escape. The next day he tripled the two-by-fours reinforcing the vertical sides of the doorframe. Then anchored deeply in them two U-shaped iron hooks, which would hold a bar of axle iron to lock the door.

  From then on, Merry kept the door barred, opening it only to Jeebee’s voice, or the whining and scratching of Wolf. Even then, before unbarring the door, she belted the revolver around her waist.

  But in spite of the episode of the cougar, the glow that Jeebee had noticed in her on the evening he had learned he was to be a father, remained and deepened. Jeebee found it hard to describe, to himself or her.

  “It’s a sort of happiness-of-satisfaction look,” he told Merry once.

  “No,” she had answered, patting the beginning bulge of her belly complacently, “it’s just the mother-feeling.

  “Isn’t that right, baby?” she said to the child inside her.

  But then she looked up into Jeebee’s face.

  “You know,” she said, “you look different, too.”

  “I do?” Jeebee asked, astonished.

  One of the things Merry had brought up from the ranch was the only mirror that had escaped being smashed by the raiders, the cover of the medicine chest in the ranch-house bathroom. Later on, when he was able to do so without Merry catching him at it, Jeebee looked at his bearded features in the glass. He tried very hard to see the difference Merry had mentioned. But as far as he could tell, it was the same old face.

  Merry happened to come back to the inside room just as he turned from the mirror.

  “Finally decided to shave it off?” she asked.

  Merry had never liked Jeebee’s beard, but they had come to a compromise. He could wear it through the cold winter months. He had found it an actual asset in warmth for his face, particularly down in the open winds of the flatlands. But with the melting of the winter’s snow, his beard would also disappear.

  “In the spring, as I promised you,” he said now.

  He went out to check on his current charcoal-making fire. During his time back up at the cave, his days were filled with things like making more charcoal for his forge. This, and an ever-increasing list of other matters, always needed to be attended to. The consumption of charcoal had gone up because of the many things needing to be made of metal, particularly with the improvements they were both now adding to the interior room.

  By the end of March, he had finished excavating back another five feet and walling in the final side of the room. Another week and the ceiling was completed. He and Merry had discussed a number of ways of sealing the walls, floor, and ceiling so that they would be able to keep the area clean. Jeebee had laid down a plank floor. Now even this should be sealed in some fashion that would keep the dirt from working up through the cracks between the planks.

  Merry’s original use of old blankets and the like for throw rugs, while successful in creating warmth underfoot, particularly when feet were without boots or socks, was not a practical way to ensure cleanliness. This was because, in their limited space, it was impossible to do the constant, large amounts of washing and rewashing needed to keep the floor coverings fresh and safe.

  It was finally decided they would put down a second floor on top of what was already there, with a sheet of plastic as a sealing layer between it and the underfloor. To do this they would have to wait until spring had advanced far enough to make the outbuildings at the ranch clear of drifted snow.

  The sealing layer, Jeebee thought, could be made by joining the large plastic bags, each bag measuring three feet five inches by two feet ten inches, of which there was a tall stack, laid flat, in one of the outbuildings. He had come up with the idea of melti
ng the edges of some of these bags together into one large sheet, using an iron rod, heated at the forge. The tricky part would be to get the rod at the right temperature and hold it there.

  A sandwich of layers like that might keep dirt from working up into their rooms from underneath; both at the time of the birth and after the baby had come.

  Finally, they were at the end of April, and the snow was rapidly disappearing. It seemed to evaporate almost as much as it seemed to melt. In fact, thought Jeebee, considering their altitude, a good deal of straight evaporation might indeed be removing it. Regretfully, he shaved his beard, and decided it was time to have a look at the ranch.

  He chose to ride Sally, as the steadier of the two horses—particularly after a winter in which they had had no work at all, being neither ridden nor fitted with a packload—down to see how the buildings had weathered the winter.

  It was necessary for him to pick his way with Sally. There were still spots where he had to get off and lead her, through drifts that still lay fairly deep in places where two slopes came together, but they made it down successfully. Out of curiosity he passed the shale slope and saw, surprisingly, that it was entirely clear of snow in certain places. The hole to the den, or whatever it might be high up on it, was now completely exposed.

  That should have prepared him for what he would find at the ranch. But in spite of his realization of the dryness of the air, compared to what he had been used to in Michigan, and the effect of the recently sunny and warm days, he was surprised when he got there.

  The ranch was already mostly clear of snow. It lingered only in shady places or where drifts had piled high. He was able to get into the outbuilding with the plastic bags and check the stack of them. Laid empty, and then piled, one on top of the other, he estimated the stack must contain at least a couple of hundred bags. He thought fleetingly that if the sealing of the floor worked, he might also eventually seal the ceiling, then after that, possibly the inside walls.