Jeebee was in the smithy, engrossed in making some more bolts, in preparation for his first attempt with the crossbow on a hunting trip to the flatlands, when he heard a curious thumping sound from overhead. He listened tensely for a second. It was not coming from directly above him but was being transmitted to him through the earth and the wooden walls he had put around the forge. He dropped his work and ran to and out of the outer door, snatching up the rifle from just inside the door of the inner room.
Outside, the rifle held ready for use, he swung about to look at the bluff above the cave.
There, just above the cave, Merry was digging into the cliff and into the bluff face.
His hands sagged with the rifle as the tension abruptly went out of him.
She was beginning, he saw, the last of his projects for him, the putting in of the skylight to the inner room. The first step in adding the skylight was, of course, to dig an opening into the bluff above the ceiling of the inner room. An opening in which the window of the skylight could be put.
She had put the metal ladder from the ranch up against the front wall of the cave; and climbed up it until she could step out onto the sloping face of the bluff above. There, she was busily at work with a shovel. Jeebee stepped hastily back to avoid being hit by a shovelful of earth and took a calmer look at what he was seeing.
Next to where she was digging on the steep face of the earthen bluff was something that Jeebee squinted at, not understanding what he saw at first glance.
Then he recognized that it was a platform of stakes driven at a slight angle deep into the bluff face. Supported by those stakes and firmly tied to them was the chest pack in which Merry normally carried Paul, outside the cave. It was just possible to catch sight of Paul’s face above his wrappings, and then his arms waved suddenly.
He was dressed inches thick in warm clothing, and seemed to be enjoying the open air, the sunlight, and the vigorous activity of his mother, next to him.
“Merry!” Jeebee shouted to her. “What are you doing that for? That’s my job!”
“When you’re ready to get to work on it, fine,” Merry said a little breathlessly, without stopping her digging. “Meanwhile, I’m making a start. Don’t worry, I won’t dig down into the top of our room.”
“Well, I’ll take over now!” Jeebee shouted.
“When you’re done,” Merry called back. “Until then I’ll keep on working.”
“I’m done now,” Jeebee said, guiltily conscious that he had been lingering over last-minute touches on the crossbow bolts.
Jeebee went up the ladder after her. She continued to work until he was right beside her, but then stopped and passed the shovel over without protest. It was not one of the tools he had gotten around to making at the forge yet. This was a rather rusty one they had been fortunate enough to find in the ruins of the ranch. They also, of course, had the small collapsible entrenching shovel that Jeebee had carried down with him on the horse or sledge when he went hunting over the snow on the flats in wintertime. But this old, full-sized shovel was a great deal more effective up here, moving several times the load of earth that the entrenching tool was capable of lifting.
Jeebee took over and was soon hard at work digging back into the bluff over the ceiling of the inner room. The supports he had put up earlier to hold back the earth above them were probably sufficient so that he would be able to stand and work on the two-by-fours that made the rafters of the ceiling, but just to be on the safe side he added a few extra supports and planks between them.
The result was that the outer room’s ceiling became a solid floor as he gradually cleared dirt out to a height of about five feet at the front of the opening in the bluff, shallowing down until it met the wall in the back of the ceiling.
In this new space he set up new shoring timbers and support for the earth that would be above it.
He was still hard at work, but ready to quit, when Wolf returned with the evening. Seeing him up there inside the hole he had made, Wolf was instantly interested and started to climb the ladder toward him, then changed his mind before his hind legs were off the ground. His partner, Jeebee had found out sometime back, could climb ladders with no trouble or worry at all, but he was not at all happy about climbing down them.
Jeebee shouted the news of Wolf’s arrival to Merry inside, went down the ladder, and after preliminary greetings, the two moved inside the room where Merry and Paul were.
Merry had gradually relaxed her concern over allowing Wolf close to Paul. Far from being a threat to the child, Wolf was very gentle and solicitous toward Paul. He would, in fact, endure more from Paul than he would from Jeebee or Merry. He insisted on sniffing the youngster over thoroughly each time he came in for greetings; and if one of Paul’s waving arms happened to stick a finger into his eye while he was doing this, he merely squeezed the eye half shut and went on about his examination.
Wolf’s fascination with Paul did not seem to fade with familiarity. He was clearly ready to continue being full of wonder about him. From the wolf books, Jeebee had learned that this was typical of wolves, that they were all very interested in the young of their own species and would be both caring toward them and willing to play with them for hours at a time. From Wolf’s point of view, Paul was plainly one more member of the community.
This attitude had been very clear in all of Wolf’s behavior toward Jeebee and Merry, but it evidently had some stretch in it as regards Paul. Not that Wolf was ever close to the baby without Merry and usually Jeebee hovering over the two of them. Wolf’s instinct, for instance, had been to try to pick up Paul in his jaws. But Merry put a stop to that.
Wolf was apparently ready, at least within limits, to adapt to Paul, who was still lying there in his crib, not yet up to crawling, when young wolf pups would already have been tumbling around outside the den in which they were born.
According to wolf rules and patterns they had become a pack. Wolf and Jeebee by themselves had simply been a traveling pair. Fixed in position, territorially, but with the addition of Merry and now Paul, the social climate had changed. Wolf clearly looked on Jeebee as the alpha male, Merry as the alpha female, and himself as the beta male of the pack. Paul, he probably considered a somewhat strange wolf pup—that was, if he had ever had any acquaintance at all with wolf pups himself from the time he had been very young.
If he had been raised almost completely by humans, thought Jeebee, he might even not recognize a real wolf puppy for what it was, at first seeing. Though, once he had gotten over his initial caution toward it as toward all strange things, he would be sure to investigate it and come to accept it quickly enough.
CHAPTER 37
The end of summer, fall, and winter abruptly accelerated, the one into the next just after it. Suddenly there simply was not enough time for everything.
The business of building the partial room above the old ceiling of the inner room and putting a triple window in a new wall across the front of the bluff higher up turned out to be more complicated than Jeebee had thought. One of the problems he ran into was shoring to hold up the ceiling of the skylight room, the floor of which was itself firmly supported by the shoring and the walls of the inner room below. Also, with the best of his intentions, his work caused sand to filter down into the inner room below while he was busy, and Merry had to carry Paul in his chest pack or in his crib, either outside entirely or into the forge area, to get him away from it.
Meanwhile, there was still the hunting to be done. The crossbow turned out to work very well as a cattle killer, but as he had expected, its bolt killed by internal hemorrhage, without the shocking power of the much-faster bullet from a gun. The result was that on several expeditions, Jeebee needed to be thankful for being on horseback and therefore more able to dodge the charge of a wounded cow or steer.
However, Jeebee was learning how to use the weapon accurately from a greater range. As a result, with luck, if he shot the animal from far enough off, it did not connect the arrow hitting it
with the distant sight of him. It also put more space between him and the wounded animal, if it decided to charge. This difference would become critical once he was back to pulling the sledge down over the snow to the flatlands for his hunting, and facing his prey on foot.
In the meantime, back up at the cave, he had to take time out to thoroughly clean the chimney he had built and erect a small but strong-roofed enclosure over the point where it emerged from the ground so there was no danger of it getting blocked by snow or windblown debris. He and Merry were one thing. But he did not want young Paul exposed to a sudden stoppage of the chimney and smoke billowing out into the inner room.
With all this handled, one way or another, Jeebee had still not finished the skylight when the first flakes of snow began to fall. Luckily it was just a snow shower, which lasted for perhaps twenty minutes and then stopped, but it told him his time was limited. He burned his electric lighting recklessly in the upper room and worked into the night. He had chosen his three windows and set them in place. Now he began the finish work around them, and the last sealing of the wall outside, working by artificial light.
He managed to get it done by morning, but he had exhausted all but one of his batteries, and he himself was ready to drop. He slept for about four hours, then went to the final job of mortaring it weather-tight. This meant taking clay, which now could not be left outside for any length of time without freezing, mixing it with water, and carrying it outside a load at a time to seal the edges around the window and the new section of upper wall.
Merry would have helped him, but there was not enough room for both of them to work up there. By late afternoon, snow had started again. He got the work finished, just in time, and nearly fell off the ladder, trying to get down it.
He came back inside and started blindly to go to work at finally opening up the ceiling above their heads. Merry stopped him.
“Have you no sense left at all?” Merry said. “You’re so close to being unconscious, you don’t know whether you’re standing on your head or your feet.”
He turned around to argue with her, and found that the movement made him dizzy. Subsiding, he let her pilot him back to the bed, and lay down on it.
“Just give me an hour,” he said, “then I can finish it.”
“Hour, nothing!” Merry retorted. “You’ve got us sealed in up there now. You’ve got all winter to take down the ceiling of this room. You sleep and just let yourself sleep as much as you can.”
He still felt that he should be arguing with her, but somehow the strength was not in him. He did not remember any more until he woke, finally, to find sunlight in his face.
He came to, startled, opening his eyes and sitting up on the edge of the bed at the same time. Above him the ceiling had been half torn down toward the front of the inner room, and daylight was streaming through and down upon them. There was a fire in the fireplace, Paul was silent in his crib, and Merry was busy sewing something at the table.
“You opened up the ceiling—” Jeebee said stupidly.
Merry bit off a thread.
“And I can do the rest of it without your help,” she said without looking at him. But her tone was soft. “Go back to sleep.”
He tried to stand up, found he was still dizzy, and lay back down on the bed. Sleep came again, at once. However, this time it was not a deep unconsciousness, in which he would even lose track of time. This time he dreamed; and it was the old nightmare that he had carried with him out of Michigan into northern Indiana and westward.
He dreamed again that he was working in the study group, and that the screen in front of him was full of the symbols of his equations. Suddenly a darkness, just a pinpoint of darkness at first, appeared near the middle of the screen to obliterate some of them. But it grew, spreading and wiping out all his work.
It was, as he had long since figured out, his consciousness of the Collapse, in retrospect coming to interrupt and destroy all that he had tried to do—he and the others. Again he dreamed of the black shape that pursued him, cornered him, over and over, looming closer and closer, to blot out everything as it came close to blot him out also.
He woke, sweating.
Merry was seated on the bed beside him, her hands on his shoulders. She had been the one who had seized him, not the darkness.
“You had a nightmare,” she said, relaxing her grip and letting him sag back against the pillow. “You were shouting—something about iron.”
“The iron years,” he said dully.
“The iron years?” She looked at him narrowly.
“It was just my name for this time we’re in, that’s followed the Collapse,” Jeebee said. “That’s all. I thought—I told myself we’d gone back to the time of iron. You understand?”
Merry nodded her head.
“I think so,” she said. “You mean we’ve moved into a time when things are hard, when everything is hard, like iron?”
“That’s it,” Jeebee said, remembering even as he spoke to her. “Maybe a little more than that. I meant—you know, there was a time once when iron ruled the world. Men with iron weapons, in iron armor, ruled everything. And in some ways we’ve gone back to it now, and it will last at least for decades, maybe for a couple of hundred years—”
He broke off, looking up at her concerned face.
“Oh, we’ll go back to civilization, back to technology,” he said. “It’s inevitable. It won’t be exactly the same, but the knowledge’ll all be built up again. It’s always been that way.”
“Always?” said Merry. “This never happened before—the Collapse with everything falling apart, the whole world going bankrupt, transportation and communication and everything failing, all at once.”
“No,” Jeebee answered, “but that’s just the shape it’s taken in our time. Before that there was pestilence, or barbarians who took everything, including life, from all but a few lucky ones, and each time the race built back to get pretty much on the track it’d been on from the start. We’ll do it again. But it’s going to be a hard time, in between. That’s what I was thinking of when I started calling them ‘iron years.’”
She took a corner of the top sheet and wiped his damp face, gently.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“Your fault?” Jeebee stared at her.
“Oh, I don’t mean the iron years. I mean, you overworked. You drove yourself to the dropping point. And that was my fault because I started you out by shoving you in that direction. I was so full of thinking what we needed for Paul through this winter. I should have known you don’t need prodding, that you’d go to your absolute limits anyway, without anyone shoving you from behind.”
“Well, then.” Jeebee reached up and pulled her down to him so that he could kiss her. “I would have done the same thing anyway then, wouldn’t I?”
“Maybe,” Merry said, laying her cheek alongside his, “but if you do, from now on, you’ll only have yourself to blame.”
Jeebee looked around him. There was a strange quality to the light coming down on them from the skylight. It could not be just that they were later in the afternoon; the angle of the light had not changed that much. He could have only been asleep another hour or so at the most.
“I’ve got to get up,” he said.
Merry’s hands pressed his shoulders softly back toward the bed.
“It’s snowing. Snowing heavily,” she said. “We’re locked in for a while. Besides, it’s time for you to do nothing for a few days and mend. Give yourself time.”
“Still, I—”
“No still,” Merry interrupted. “It’ll be hard to stop the wheels spinning at first, but you’ll just have to wait until they do. Now lie back, take it easy, do nothing; at least till the storm stops and probably for the next few days. We’re in no hurry, now. We’re sealed in, nice and tight and warm, the three of us. We’ve got plenty of meat and vegetables stored. There’s all the time in the world for us, now.”
She was right, of course. It took Jee
bee a little time to admit it to himself, but the way he had collapsed physically before his first long sleep was something with which he could not argue.
He worked at resting. For the first two days, it was indeed work. He had to fight to keep from getting up and doing things; and in the end, about the third or fourth day, he did let himself finish opening up the whole ceiling of the inner room to the skylight. He also let himself do small things like bringing in wood to keep the fireplace fire going, and making sure the solar blanket was not covered by snow, but hung up against the front wall of the cave, where it could get the full benefit of the sun to recharge the batteries he had depleted during his last orgy of work.
Little by little, he relaxed. It did not come easily, but gradually the urge crying out inside of him to be busy, always busy, muted and fell silent. He reread his wolf books, he watched Merry, he thought, and above all he studied young Paul, sitting in a chair by the cradle and watching the baby, both asleep and awake, for long periods.
There was a healing element in this period. He could feel it, but the machinery of it did not come out into the open of his conscious mind until he felt Merry’s arm around his shoulder one day as he was sitting watching Paul and saw her gazing down at him.
He looked up at her.
“You know,” he said, “I told you about that moment I had with him during the birth, when his eyes opened? That moment of bonding?”
Merry nodded.
“He gives me something every time I look at him,” Jeebee said slowly. He looked back down at Paul now. “It’s strange… I’m just trying to put things together, trying to figure out how something as large as this could happen to me—you, and then him.”
Wolf and Iron Page 48