He looked back up to Merry.
“I’m just trying to make sense of it,” he said.
Merry leaned down and kissed his cheek.
“That’s one of the things that’s so lovely about you,” she said. “You’re always trying to understand.”
She ruffled the hair on the back of his head with her hand softly, and left him for some knitting she had been working at over a period of time. It was to be a warm, balaclava-type helmet, leaving only his eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered, to wear while hunting. It was being made of dark blue yarn. Not, he thought, as bright as those flashing eyes he’d uncovered just after Paul was born. Not as blue, because nothing could be quite like that in his experience again.
The snow had stopped after several days and it was followed by unusually intense cold. He stayed in the cabin, intending to wait this out, but when it did warm, it warmed in the night along toward morning, and with daybreak, snow was beginning to fall again.
It was not a heavy snowfall, but it lasted. It was the second day after that before he finally went outside to see how things were. The weather was cold, but normal for this time of year, climbing a few degrees above freezing in the daytime and dropping to ten to fifteen degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, at night. However, the snow was not so deep that he would not be able to ride one of the horses through it.
As Merry had mentioned, they were already well stocked with meat, and the freeze hole held the nighttime ground-level temperatures all day long at the bottom of the pit, so that the meat stayed frozen hard.
They did not need a hunting trip, therefore, but there were some small things he thought he might want to bring up from the ranch, and he wanted to have a look at how thickly the snow lay in various parts of the foothills and down on the flat itself, since this would give him an idea of how it would build up and drift down there in future hunting trips.
He saddled Sally accordingly and set out. He intended to take only the revolver and the crossbow, but Merry insisted on his leaving the pistol and crossbow with her and taking the rifle instead. It was possibly more sensible, but he had an uncomfortable feeling at leaving the two of them alone there, with less defensive firepower than he was taking along himself, particularly since he did not intend to hunt.
The sky was almost clear of clouds. It had that high blue look that sky gets in winter, where it seems to go on and on forever upward. In many places the snow was only about four to six inches deep. Only under the cliffs and in blocked corners had drifts piled up. He had to descend from Sally’s saddle and lead her by the bridle in only a few spots.
One of these was the shale slope. Ordinarily he went around this. But it remained the most direct route to the ranch. Now, as usual, it was a slanted white sheet from far below up to the bluff where already a drift had piled high. The mouth of the hole that he had guessed had once been a den was still visible as a blackness about halfway across it, but to his surprise, and with a certain amount of shock, he saw animal footprints leading to it—leading to it only.
He examined the prints. He was even now not an expert in reading prints to know what animal had made them. But these, he could be fairly certain, were bear-paw prints, and they were prints made by the feet of a bear much larger than the one who had attacked him down in the willow bottoms. It could even be that they were the prints of a grizzly.
He shied away from the thought. Blowing and drifting altered prints in snow, but these were fairly fresh and he was almost certain they were bear tracks.
No tracks led out at all. If it was a bear, it had already begun to hibernate. In any case, the damage done by leaving his own and Sally’s trail was already done.
But he had stopped to examine the prints at a point a good twenty feet from the entrance to the cave. He now turned about and led Sally softly back the way they had come, while making a mental note not to venture near this area again until there had been at least one other snowstorm to cover his tracks. There should be no trail then, for whatever was in the hole to follow back to the cave.
By the time he left the shale close to where he had originally stepped onto it, his first fears had subsided to a great extent. If the bear had not come out—he might just as well assume flatly from the start that it was a bear of some sort, grizzly or black, though it was hard to believe a black had left tracks that size—it had to have already started its hibernation. And it was not likely to break that hibernation until spring. Unless something disturbed it, they could forget about it until then.
His first impulse had been to return himself and the rifle directly to the cave so that Merry and Paul would not be at the mercy of the bear, with nothing but the revolver and the crossbow to hold him off—and little good a .38 handgun would do against something like a grizzly. In fact, Jeebee doubted that any weapon they had could do him any real damage, unless a bolt from the crossbow, planted into its lower body area, would eventually bleed it to death. But by that time he could have destroyed not only the cave but both Merry and Paul.
But it was ridiculous to return, he thought, now. He could not stay forted up with them all winter. He would have to leave on hunting trips and various other things. It was not even sensible to go back and sit tight until it snowed again. They might, at this time of year, go as much as a couple of weeks without even a light snowfall.
Accordingly, he continued on his swing down to the ranch, which had been lightly touched by the snow, except for those corners where it had drifted into the exposed parts of the house or outbuildings. He got the small things he had intended to pick up—they consisted of some shingles he had rescued from the ash pile on the floor of the ranch’s former smithy and a bathroom scale that he and Merry had talked about bringing up to the cave several times but somehow had never gotten around to taking.
With the relatively light weight of these, he made a swing out into the open range and found as he had expected that except where the land dipped enough to accumulate drifted snow, the going was not bad at all. With little deep snow, and without a strong wind to herd them in a particular direction, his experience now told him, the wild cattle would be following their normal pattern of roaming freely. He swung back into the foothills at last and returned to the ranch by a route that avoided the shale slope entirely.
CHAPTER 38
Back at the cave all was well. Jeebee congratulated himself silently on having the common sense to continue his sweep instead of simply heading back here. He unsaddled Sally, put her in the corral, and returned with the saddle and the things he had gathered from the ranch to the inner room.
“We’ve got a hibernating bear for a neighbor,” he told Merry, once everything was put away.
“Bear?” Merry said, frowning. “Where?”
“More than half a mile from here,” Jeebee answered, “maybe a kilometer, or even a bit more than a kilometer. You know, the hole in the shale slope?”
“That?” said Merry.
“That,” Jeebee answered. “You remember I thought it might’ve been used as a den, before. I saw the tracks going in, just today. There weren’t any coming out. It must be a pretty big bear. It might be a grizzly.”
“Grizzly!” Merry stopped what she was doing. “I don’t like that. A grizzly, this close!”
“You know, the year round,” Jeebee said, “they could come within fifty yards of the cave here and we’d never know it. There can’t be too many grizzlies, and bears move around a lot anyway. They have to find food. Besides, remember I told you that the tracks led into the hole but not out? Whatever it is, if it’s a bear, it’s started hibernating and won’t come out until spring. We’ll just keep it in mind, and I think I’m going to insist on going hunting with just the pistol and the crossbow. You keep the rifle here from now on.”
“There ought to be some way of killing it while it’s still asleep in there,” said Merry, “if it’s a grizzly. I don’t want a grizzly anywhere near Paul.”
“I can’t think of any way,” Jeebee answered, “but if it is
a grizzly, the .30/06 is rather light to kill it with a single shot unless you reach a vital area. And I don’t like the idea of trying to hit a vital area in a pitch-dark hole, particularly if it’s curled up, the way I imagine it would be if it was hibernating.”
“We could take the floodlight with the battery,” Merry said. “I could hold the light on it, while you shot it—as many times as it took.”
“And what if it came out after us in spite of the fact it had been shot several times? I’d have a rifle that was already proving it was too light, and you’d just have a revolver.”
“I could take that crazy spear of yours,” said Merry.
Jeebee snorted.
“If it came to that,” he said, “I’d take the spear and the light. You’d do the shooting. You’re the better shot.” He took a deep breath.
“In any case,” he said, “the very idea of trying to shoot it now is ridiculous. We’d just be borrowing trouble. We’d be giving it a chance to kill us both—and then what would happen to Paul? On the other hand, if we just leave it alone, it’ll sleep till spring. Then when it comes out, it’s likely to go in any direction but here. It wouldn’t have denned up here unless it belongs in this territory. If it does, then it knows that there’s cattle down below, and its first instinct on waking is going to be to head down onto the flat. It’ll know that after a winter there’ll be a number of dead cattle that’re still eatable because they were frozen and covered with snow until spring. A hungry grizzly that’s been hibernating is going to think of that dead meat first, and go for it. There’s every reason he should go straight down there, and no particular reason to come our way.”
Merry plainly was not convinced, but neither did she continue to argue. Jeebee had a sneaking feeling that it was his question about what would happen to Paul if they were both killed that had really changed her mind about going after the bear now.
He felt a little guilty, as if he had unfairly bludgeoned his way to winning the argument. But he consoled himself with the fact that after all, what he said was no more than the truth. A bear that size had to be more than a year old. If it was in this district, it knew about the cattle and had seen more than one spring, with its frozen carcasses gradually being uncovered as the snow melted. It would certainly head for the flatlands when it woke.
So they left the matter there. Jeebee sat back and waited for the next snow. Once his tracks were covered, he could relax. But instead of producing more snow, the weather perversely decided to get warmer.
Not only that, but the warming weather continued into the next day, the next, and the next. This unusual spell was then interrupted by a sudden cold snap lasting overnight, followed the next morning by a heavy, but short-term snow shower, the results of which lay on the ground for perhaps half an hour in the already bare spots exposed to the sun, and then vanished. The days went back to being warm again.
The renewal of the warm spell was an unexpected gift from the weather that gave them time to do the last-minute things that Jeebee’s collapse and the first snowstorm seemed to have lost to them.
In one of the outbuildings of the ranch, there had been the dusty, obviously long-unused potbellied stove from which Jeebee had gotten the flue for his forge. For the sake of young Paul, Merry had wanted to bring this up and vent it out their chimney as a replacement for the fireplace. As she pointed out to Jeebee, it would be much better for cooking, and much more efficient at providing heat to the inside of the cave.
During the warm days of fall, Jeebee had put off bringing it up from day to day, until suddenly he had found himself racing the onset of winter to get the skylight finished in time. By the time he did, it had been no longer possible for the two horses to take the trailer down.
The trailer had been absolutely necessary. The stove was too great a weight for either horse to carry alone. The feet would come off it, and a few other extraneous parts, but the main weight of the cast-iron body was more than even Brute could bring up the slopes. With the trailer, on the other hand, the two horses could transport it handily, provided snow had not made the slopes impassable.
Now, thanks to this freak warm spell, there was enough bare ground all the way down to the ranch so that Jeebee could try to take the trailer for it. So he did. Meanwhile, up at the cave, Merry was busy taking down some shelves and putting up new ones, to fit the cooking process more conveniently around a stove rather than a fireplace.
There were a few slippery spots and patches of ground that had been iced by the freeze, then lightly covered with the new snow, that Jeebee had to get the horses and trailer over on the way down to the ranch. Otherwise he had no trouble and found nothing that would keep them from pulling the stove back up.
On the way down, at a point at which he could do so, Jeebee used his binoculars to check on the shale slope from a distance. To his relief, there were large bare patches on it, too, and with the powerful binoculars he was able to focus in closely on the mouth of the hole. All sign of his being near it had already gone.
He noticed for the first time that on top of the bluff that crowned the slope, there was still the unusual, tremendous accumulation of snow. More than he would have thought would have come from the snowfall alone. Perhaps there had been a snow-slide from the slopes higher up, which were more steep, and it had found a natural barrier to pile up against in the upturned lip of the bluff.
He continued to the ranch. It was even more clear of snow than he had expected. He loaded the stove with its flue, and everything else that belonged to it, on the trailer, and lashed the pieces tightly into place. Luckily, all its necessary parts were there, including lids for the two cooking surfaces in the top of the stove, through which fuel could be added, as well as through the door in front.
The horses made relatively easy work of getting back up to the cave. Jeebee, with Merry’s help, spent the rest of that day and the next two, setting the stove up and getting it working.
Jeebee found he regretted losing the open fire of the fireplace. On the other hand, there was no doubt that the stove was more efficient, more practical, and a great deal safer to use. He was pleased that he did not have to rob his smithy of flue sections to get enough to vent the stove up the chimney, and more than pleased to be able to get rid of the smoke up the flue of the fireplace rather than up the nakedly clay-mortared stone walls of his homemade chimney.
He set up the flue within the chimney, pushing it up until it poked into the little weather top he had built aboveground on the top of the bluff for it. The flue would be easier to take apart, section by section, when spring came. It would need to be cleaned then of tars and possible flammable soots. Just as the interior of the chimney had been, though he had done his best to scrub the latter as clean as possible.
The batteries were mostly back on full charge. As a result, he and Merry could work into the evening if they wanted to. After they got the stove set up and cooked their first meal on it, they did just that. There were a number of odds and ends to finish with Merry’s new shelves, and a rearrangement of furniture to be made and distributed around the stove rather than the fireplace. Jeebee promised himself to dig the room bigger during their stormbound days in the winter.
Wolf had had more than a few opportunities to investigate the stove while it was being moved in and set up. He had been wary of it at first, as he was with anything strange. However, by the time Merry and Paul had eaten their first meal to be cooked on it, he had become more or less reconciled to it. Although Jeebee secretly felt that Wolf, like himself, missed the open flames of the fireplace—to lie before and gaze into.
One of the reasons it had taken them so long to put up the stove was the fact that the flue of the original chimney startedrelatively low down, and the flue, the round flexible piping from the stove, had been designed to go out through a wall at about head height.
Jeebee had needed to remove a section of the wall and dig into a point at which he could make a new entrance into the chimney for the piping of the flue. It
had also been necessary for him to go on top of the bluff and partially dismantle his weather cover in order to fasten the flue at its top. Moreover, the round metal piping had to be secured to the chimney wall, below, where it entered it.
For this, Jeebee had already forged thin metal strapping, lengths of flat metal that could be bent around the pipe and anchored by spikes driven into the clay between the rocks, and then mortared tightly with fresh clay. Luckily, the metal-clad asbestos collar that had been designed by the stove factory to protect the wood of any wall it went through—as it did in the inner room before reaching and entering the chimney further up—had been among the rest of the dusty parts available. Jeebee could have forged a metal collar, but no insulating material like asbestos was to be found anywhere around the ranch.
As a result, that last night, they ended up working almost until midnight.
Luckily, Paul had finally taken to sleeping straight through the night, now. They both tumbled gratefully into bed and Jeebee fell soundly asleep.
He was wakened, unexpectedly, and sat up in the darkness to switch on one of the headlamps that was within arm’s reach of the bed, its light directed away from their eyes. Merry was also awake and starting to sit up beside him.
“What was that?” Jeebee said to her.
“I don’t know,” Merry answered. They looked at each other. It had been an extended roar, far off, like the sound of a freight train, amplified and compressed. Now everything was utterly silent once more.
“Whatever it was,” said Jeebee, “it was some ways away from here.”
“Yes,” said Merry.
Slowly, they lay back down on the bed again, side by side.
“I’ll take a look around in the morning,” said Jeebee.
“That’s a good idea,” Merry said. “Whatever made that noise, I want to know what it was.”
Jeebee lay for a little while before he could drop off again. Long before he managed it, he could hear Merry, breathing slowly and steadily in her own sleep beside him. He had switched off the headlamp, and they were in utter darkness. Finally, slumber claimed him also.
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