Paul, he thought now; Paul was a name he probably would have picked himself, given time to think about it.
“Turn out the light,” Merry said sleepily, settling down with the baby in her arms and closing her eyes. “Leave the doors open a little, though.”
Jeebee did as she had said and went outside again. If Merry was not concerned about Wolf returning, then it was foolish for him to worry about it.
The evening was warm. He looked around at a meadow in the full stride of a northern summer. The pines stood up, straight and dark-needled around a green meadow in which the two streams ran down the natural slope from their point of divergence. The waters were deep blue under a sky that was darkening steadily, enormously high, with a few large clouds at a distance from each other, high to still be bathed in the light of the sun, and moving steadily together like a fleet of treasury galleons sailing eagerly before a westering wind to the lands of gold and promise.
All about him he could feel the world turning forward through time, out of the darkness that had brought him here toward a brighter future.
The warmth, the soft air, the scent of the summer day now ending, filled him, enlarging him as if he was a balloon. He drew it deep into his lungs, feeling as if he grew with the inhalation. He must tell Merry about this moment, later on when she was rested and there was time. In fact, there would be a great deal for them to tell each other about this tremendous achievement at the height and best of the year. He drew the air deep into his lungs for another enormous breath. He was ready to build the cave behind him into a palace. He was ready to rebuild the world. He felt like a giant.
He let the air out, checking on a sudden thought. One other thing he had not talked about with Merry was his original plan of going on after the baby was born to finish finding his brother’s ranch. That whole part of their future had been pushed into the back of his mind as the birth of the baby came close, and he had almost forgotten it himself.
The truth was, he had never really faced the problems of traveling with the new baby. Now that the child was actually born, he could fully realize what would be involved in that. He, Merry, and infant Paul would necessarily be wandering about the higher plains, possibly to be shot at on sight by local ranchers, and living as people on the move had to do. It was suddenly clear how foolish the idea had been.
There could be no moving from here until next summer, at least, when Paul would be a good deal stronger and bigger, even if still young for travel, even carried in a basket of sorts, hung on back or chest, as the Indians had carried their youngest children. Merry must have simply taken it for granted he would eventually realize this. It must have been so obvious to her that he would eventually see this for himself that she had not bothered to point out the impossibility of it. She was very like her father in that.
Consciously, he had not confronted these facts. Unconsciously, he realized now, with all his plans of building the forge and adding on to the cave, he had come to terms with it long since. Jeebee looked around him again. The evening was glorious. He still felt like a giant. It was ridiculous for him to feel so, he thought suddenly. It had all been Merry’s accomplishment, not his. But that was the way he felt, nonetheless. Also, he abruptly recognized, he was hungry.
He went back in, turned on one of the interior lights that was farthest from the bed, and cut some meat and cheese for himself. He made his bed again on the floor against the door and turned the light out. In no time whatsoever, he, with the other two, was sleeping the sleep of the successful and the just.
CHAPTER 36
With the baby’s birth Jeebee went into a blur of activity. They had been concentrating so hard on the birth that they had almost forgotten the inexorable march of the seasons. Now it was as if young Paul was a calendar clock, who by his growth measured off the days for them and emphasized how much was to be done before the snow flew again.
Jeebee found himself coming to begrudge the necessary day a week he spent down on the flat, hunting meat. He could still generally locate at least one cow or calf within the sweep of a day’s ride under good conditions, but the supply would not last forever, although now there were young calves, which would be growing up and providing a future supply.
Still, though these promised well for the future, there was also the possibility that at any time a neighboring rancher might move in to take over this territory. In which case, without warning, he might someday discover armed men on the flatlands directly below him; and hunting would no longer be the safe thing that he had begun to take for granted it would be.
He started giving at least another half a day now and then to checking the foothill and mountain territory within several hours’ ride of the cave, looking for sign of deer travel or presence. He not only found what seemed to be deer trails, but sighted a number of deer.
Aiding him in this, of course, was the fact that fawns had been born with the spring. While these had already grown considerably, still to a certain extent they restricted the travel of their mothers and of such barren female deer who had stayed pretty much together during the winter past.
He decided that there was a fair amount of meat supply in wild game, which could be harvested if he needed it. He could even start harvesting them now; but there was an excellent reason for his not doing so.
The fact was, he had underestimated the amount of work he had planned to get done after the baby’s birth and before cold weather set in.
If he was going to stay here another year, there were needs he had to start facing now. One of these was ammunition for his guns, particularly if he was not going to reach any place where he could get more powder and possibly more shells.
He knew how to load his own cartridges, simply because Paul had carried the materials in his wagon, and Nick had shown him the technique. Paul had sold the cartridge makings cheaper than the finished cartridges themselves, partly because the materials were easier to transport in bulk.
He had become used to saving most of his brass for reuse, but neither primers nor modern smokeless powder would be easy to find, and they were impossible for him to duplicate.
Possibly he could make black powder, if he had to. But to the best of his present knowledge, he would have to be willing to make a long and probably perilous trip through strange territory, south, to get sulfur. The silver nitrate for the primers was there to be extracted from bird droppings. But gathering the droppings would require more time than he had to spare.
A much better alternative would be to have something else to kill cattle and large game with—something for which he could make the missiles himself. Something that would have the additional value of being silent so that he would not attract attention by the carrying sound of firing a firearm if someone was down, out of sight on the flatlands but still within hearing.
The ideal answer to all this would be, he thought, a crossbow. He had once handled and even shot a handmade crossbow, its bow part made of a steel leaf from an automobile spring. Its short, heavy bolt—or arrow—with its metal broad-head arrow point, had gone completely through a target of three-eighths-inch plywood. With the forge now operating, he could build himself such a weapon and missiles. By using the crossbow for hunting whenever possible, he could considerably stretch his remaining ammunition supplies.
In addition to this, he had planned, ever since it was clear they must stay, to make an addition above their present cave. He planned to use window frames and glass scavenged from the ranch, which like most isolated dwelling places, had its own supply of extra glazing materials.
So he could even put glass in one or several of those window frames that had had their glass knocked out by the raiders or destroyed by the fire. It would only require that the frame itself be solid. What he intended was to build a sort of skylight window in an upward-extended section of the wall of the cold room, which would let outside sunlight over a floor, sealing it off from the cold room, below, directly into the inner room.
The window he had in mind would ac
tually be three of the ranch’s windows fastened, one on top of the other, so that essentially he would have triple glazing to keep the cold out and still let the daylight come through.
But both the crossbow and the skylight would be time-consuming jobs, and with the hunting and other necessary duties, it was hard to believe he would get them done as fast as he would have liked. The sooner he got the crossbow working, the sooner he could start saving on his firearm ammunition. On the other hand, the window would have to be finished before winter.
The work did not seem like much compared to what the two of them had accomplished the past months, Jeebee thought, but now Merry would have her hands full most of the time taking care of Paul.
It was only gradually, in the weeks and months that followed, that he learned differently.
Out of his almost nonexistent knowledge of women who had just had children, Jeebee had rather fuzzily assumed that Merry would be, except for feeding young Paul, something of a near invalid for a month or more after the birth. Able perhaps to get around in the cave and just outside it and do minor things there. But not up to any kind of ordinary work that might require heavy exertion from her.
To his surprise, by a week and a half after the birth, she had not only rigged a carrying chest pack for Paul, but was doing a number of light jobs. They had reached the point where some of the seeds that she had saved from the ranch’s garden and replanted in its rich topsoil (possibly trucked in for the purpose) had begun producing food ready for harvesting.
As a result, even now, in midsummer, they had a quantity of homegrown foodstuffs to bring back to the cave from below, and to cook and store. Apparently the people of the ranch house had regularly put up much of their garden produce in glass sealer jars, in the fall. Merry also knew how to do this. While Jeebee hunted and did other necessary things, she was busy cooking and sealing a great deal of what could be preserved this way.
Where there was more of certain vegetables than they had jars for, and some that could not be stored well in sealer jars, these Merry cooked. Some of these were cooked into forms more fit for such storage. From ripe tomatoes she made tomato sauce, and even a variation of catsup. Carrots, rutabagas and such other root vegetables would keep well with their stems cut off and buried in open boxes of dry sand.
These boxes, like the sealer jars, they stored in a cool area. Jeebee had opened up the inner room’s back wall and dug the equivalent of the ranch house’s fruit cellar in the soil behind it, to house them.
Meanwhile Jeebee was busily at work at the crossbow. Happily, on the occasion in which he had seen the crossbow demonstrated and had a chance to shoot it himself, he had also been shown the plans from which the crossbow had been made, and his memory was good in that respect. He redrew them on some of the paper he had gotten from the ranch, just to make it all clear in his own mind before he began work.
The wooden stock required something stronger than pine, in his estimation, and the ordinary two-by-four would not be wide enough at the butt end for him. Happily, over the fireplace that had been at the ranch was a mantelpiece of varnished wood, which Jeebee identified as oak. It was a foot wide and some eight feet long and about two inches thick.
With a little labor he removed it from its position and brought it back up to the cave. There he sweated to saw off a length of thirty inches, which he then roughed out into the wooden part of the crossbow with an ax.
When he was finished, he had a wooden stock about six inches wide at the butt and curving up underneath to its narrowest point. The material for the bowstring he had already obtained, the brake cable from one of the cars, the loop of it at each end of the bow—a leaf from one of the automobile springs—held by the small set screws that already existed with the brake cable to hold it taut and in place in its original duty on the car.
Next he drilled upward through the stock at its narrowest point, making a place to set the trigger. That trigger would release a nut—he would have to make it—which would hold the bowstring in place when cocked. From the notch that held the nut, forward to the front end of the stock, he cut a groove in which the bolt would lie when the crossbow was strung and ready to fire.
This groove notch and the passage for the trigger needed only another slot across the stock near the front of it into which he could mount the lower edge of the steel leaf spring, once it was ready to act as a bow; plus a couple of slots lower on the stock near its front, to which he would be fixing a forged steel stirrup.
This would be needed so that he could put his toe in it to hold the weapon down while he pulled its string back into cocked position on the nut. There would be two more holes needed through which leather thongs could go, to lash the bow stave firmly in place once it was in its slot. On second thought, he decided to use animal sinew, put on wet and allowed to dry-shrink to the point where it was as tight as necessary.
The rest of the work was all at the forge. He had to do some forge work on the steel spring to put it into a slightly recurved bow shape. He also had to make the steel stirrup and the rivet that would hold it. Then, there was the trigger, which was a length of metal bent twice, once semiparallel below the stock to be pushed up against the stock to trigger the nut above in the opposite direction, pivoting over a pin halfway up the slot and pressed against a notch in the bottom of the nut, where it was held in place against the tension of the bowstring, once it was strung. To fire the bolt, he could then just pull up on the trigger, depressing the sear at the trigger’s far end and releasing the nut, which would then rotate and let the bowstring fly forward.
The last part of the mechanism he worked on at the forge was the nut itself. This was essentially a thick circle of metal, as wide as the stock, and with a pie-shaped cut taken out of it where the bowstring would loop over it, and a slot through it so that the bow could notch to the string, ready for firing.
He also added the useful, though not completely necessary item of another spring-steel finger bolt, secured on the bottom of the stock, to provide cocking tension to the exposed part of the trigger to fire the bow.
There was only a little extra forge work required once the bow itself had been made and assembled. This consisted of forging broadhead points for the hardwood shafts—made from leftover parts of the mantel—together with a forge-rolled section behind it that could be glued to the front of the shaft. The shaft also had fins, where a plain bolt would have had feathers, and these he made of wood and also glued on. The glue was something that Merry knew how to make out of cattle hooves.
The glue gave off an almost unbearable smell in the making—which fascinated Wolf—but when done worked very well for Jeebee’s purposes, not only in making the crossbow but in other instances where glue was useful.
All in all, the making of the crossbow was a fairly straightforward procedure. But it ended up taking Jeebee a number of weeks, counting the time involved in obtaining the necessary parts from the car and the ranch house and doing the work of assembly. One of his last jobs was stringing the bow before it was attached to the stock.
Since the bow had, he estimated, between eighty and a hundred and ten pounds of pull, he would barely be able to cock it with his foot in the stirrup and lifting up on it. Stringing the bow in the first place was therefore a problem. It was solved by putting the forged bow stave across a couple of logs and placing on top of it a long lever of a narrow log, with a rock holding down the short end of the lever that was heavier than the bow pole’s weight.
With this done, Jeebee was able to push down on the long end of the lever and weight it with another rock. This bent the steel bow stave to the point where he could loop the ready-made brake-cable bowstring over its tip, onto the leather cushioning that he had wrapped around the bow ends where the loops of the string would rest.
Finally assembled, and with about a half-dozen bolts made, with the broadhead points, the wooden vanes glued in, and butt caps made of cartridge casing, he tried it out.
He had brought a piece of three-eighths
-inch plywood up from the ranch that compared, according to his memory, with the one that had been used as a target when he had first seen and fired a crossbow. He cut it in half, putting one piece loosely behind the other, since he did not want to lose the bolt if it indeed went all the way through, as he had lost the first bolt of the crossbow he had been allowed to fire several years back. Now, he cocked the device, put the bolt in the slot, and aimed at the plywood from an easy fifteen yards of distance.
The crossbow exceeded expectations. It went clear through the outer piece of plywood and its point penetrated at least a third and possibly half of the way through the second piece, so that he had to cut the wood around it before he could wriggle it out.
In the immediate days following, he practiced with his crossbow whenever he had spare time; and at last became reasonably accurate with it.
He was very pleased with this addition to their armory. He had wished for another rifle that Merry could keep with her while he was gone. While making the crossbow, he had thought that perhaps he could leave the crossbow or the rifle with her. Accordingly he let her try her marksmanship with the crossbow. But it soon became obvious that if he left either weapon with her, it would have to be the rifle.
It was strange. Merry, who was literally a superb shot with both rifle and pistol, was much more erratic and inaccurate with a crossbow than Jeebee himself. Jeebee puzzled over this. But the only answer he could come up with was that, since he had envisioned the crossbow and wanted one since he was a child, he might have approached the use of the weapon with more enthusiasm than she did. Either that, or else she was trying to use it the way she used a firearm, which fitted the shoulder differently, as well as having a definite kick and a different flight pattern to its missile.
In the end he was glad she was better off with the rifle. The bolt of the crossbow was a penetrating missile, rather than a smashing missile. For that very reason, it was slower to kill. It achieved its end by internal bleeding of its target, unless whoever fired it was lucky enough to hit dead on a vulnerable spot like the heart or an eye socket. That meant it produced a wounded animal, which could be more of a threat before it finally died.
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