Wolf and Iron

by Gordon Rupert Dickson

  He woke again—suddenly.

  There was early dawn light coming through the skylight above him, and Merry was not beside him. For a second he lay, wondering what had woken him. Then he heard it again, and recognized it as he had, even in the depths of his slumber. It was a frantic almost-scream of horses, neighing in terror from the corral. In the same moment he heard Merry’s voice from beyond the wall that separated him from the front room.

  “Jeebee!”

  The word was no scream. It was a shout. But it carried the same note of alarm that had sounded in the voices of the horses. At the same time, he heard the bark of the .30/06 from beyond the wall at the head of their bed.

  His reaction was instinctive and immediate. He grabbed the revolver from the two pegs on the wall behind the bed, as two other pegs above these had held the rifle, now gone.

  Holding the handgun, he flung himself out of bed and through the door to the outer room. Merry was firing the rifle through one of the loopholes he had built into the front wall for that purpose. The outer door of the cold room was slightly ajar, showing a slice of gray, beginning daylight through it. He made two racing steps through it, out into the open, and saw, less than fifty meters off, the massive shape of a grizzly, coming toward them fast on all four legs.

  “My God!” he said out loud, without thinking. “It’s the horses! It’s come for the horses!”

  “Get back in here, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice cried behind him.

  But the bear had already seen him, and was now aiming, not in the general direction of the cave and the corral, but directly at him. Jeebee ducked back into the outer room, swinging the outside door half closed, but leaving himself room to fire through it with the revolver. He and Merry fired almost together.

  “You were right, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice was tight. “It’s like throwing rocks at him, using this rifle!”

  It was true, Jeebee saw through the crack in the door, even as he was aiming with the pistol and firing again. The grizzly was paying no attention to the bullets that must be hitting him. Even if he was missing, Merry would not be. Not at this short range and with a rifle.

  “Try to get him in the eye or mouth!” said Jeebee. Where was Wolf? It was dawn, his time to come in. If nothing else, he could harass and distract the grizzly, as he had the black bear down by the willows.

  The pistol clicked empty in his hand. He threw it away, snatched up the crossbow, then threw it down again. The single bolt he would have time for might damage the bear enough to kill it, eventually, but it would not slow it down now. A wildness exploded in Jeebee. He snatched up the boar spear from where it leaned against the front wall beside the crossbow and burst out again through the door out into the open.

  “Jeebee, come back here!” he heard Merry shouting. But in this moment he knew enough not to listen.

  Just then, as if out of the dawn light itself, Wolf did appear. He burst onto the scene from between the trees behind the bear and to Jeebee’s right. It was his usual time, and he came.

  The dawn wind was from the cave to the bear. Wolf could well have scented the other creature from several hundred yards behind on his way home—scented it attacking his pack territory—and come instinctively to its defense.

  Now he was coming at the bear from behind, not as he had come at the one down in the willow bottoms, but as he had attacked the part-collie at the station, in his fantastic ground-eating leaps of approach.

  The grizzly heard him and whirled, standing up on his hind legs, but not before Wolf reached it and made a dart at its hindquarters.

  The bear struck at him. Not so much batting, as reaching suddenly with both great paws, as if to catch Wolf between them. But Wolf was already back out of reach, changing his angle of attack, and as Jeebee shouted and the bear looked for a moment at him, darting in on the larger animal once again.

  Once more the grizzly grabbed at him, and missed. Still at full extension, it threw one paw outward, catching Wolf with the back of it, high on one shoulder—just barely touched him, it seemed, but Wolf went tumbling down the slope of the meadow toward the nearby stream.

  The grizzly, still on its hind legs, turned again toward Jeebee. Merry’s rifle continued to sound, and the bear continued to ignore the bullets that must be striking it. It came toward Jeebee on its hind legs.

  Jeebee saw it coming, appearing to grow enormously as it got closer. Head and shoulders towering over him, it seemed to swell to mountainous proportions, blotting out the earth and sky, black and invulnerable.

  Its blackness was the blackness of his dreams, but now, here in daylight and reality. As a formless void in his dreams, that blackness had destroyed all his work. It had ridden his sleeping hours and pursued him out of Michigan and westward across the devastated land. It had never left him permanently, and now it had taken living shape. Merry and Paul were behind him, and he was the only thing that stood between them and it. A wildness inside him picked him up and drove him. He lifted the boar spear and ran toward the grizzly.

  In that second there was no fear or fury in him, nothing but purpose. What was, was before him; and their coming together was inevitable. He ran full at the bear with his spear in one hand.

  In the moment before they reached each other he jerked the spear up into both hands, hurled himself forward—“Aim for the balls,” Nick had said. He remembered the black bear in the willows. As they came together at their combined speeds, he shoved down the butt of the spear to brace it against ground.

  It was like hurling his body against a wall of rock; and then the spear, its point now buried deep in the soft lower body of the grizzly, kicked in his grasp so strongly that it threw him away, tumbling as Wolf had tumbled.

  He scrambled back to his feet and saw the grizzly, all its attention now removed from any human target and focused only on the visible shaft of the spear that stuck out from its body. Wolf was dodging in, out, closing his jaws on the thick legs from behind; but the bear ignored him, also.

  All its attention was on the visible part of the spear. The shaggy black head and open jaws were lowered to bite at it, but the jaws could barely reach down that far, and its teeth scraped ineffectively upon iron. The bear battered and pulled at the shaft with his paws, roaring each time he struck it, and the point tore and cut inside him. The wooden part of the shaft snapped and splintered, but the backward-pointing tines of the spearhead kept it from being pulled free.

  It fought the embedded spear like an enemy, the only enemy there was. Wolf continued harrying from behind, and from the loophole Merry was still pumping rifle shots into the great body. Jeebee stood, empty-handed, less than four paces off, staring, hypnotized by the massive, wounded creature.

  The bear began to stagger, still struggling to rid itself of the spear with teeth and claws. It stumbled drunkenly for several steps as if fighting to keep its balance. Then it lifted its head, opened its mouth, and gave utterance to a strangely humanlike, moaning roar of agony and frustration.

  One of its legs buckled. It fell to the ground on its side, with one spasmodic jerk moving its hind legs up toward its belly like a man with a cramp. It lay still.

  Merry’s rifle stopped firing. Wolf darted in, snapped at the throat of the fallen animal and leaped away before it was possible to know if his jaws had actually touched it. He made another snarling, half dart forward, then checked, still some feet away, tensely staring, bright-eyed, at the still beast.

  For a long moment he stood there, jaws open and panting, gazing at the bear with a sort of alert disappointment. As if he waited for the dead animal to get up and threaten them again.

  The grizzly did not move. Wolf stepped closer and sniffed at it, waited, sniffed again. Suddenly he darted his nose under one heavy forelimb, lifted it slightly and dodged back—all in one quick movement. He waited. The foreleg lay where it had dropped.

  His tail and ears rose. His head lifted. The tension began to leak from him.

  But Jeebee was already heading away, back into t
he cold room. He was just in time to catch Merry as she turned toward him. She dropped the rifle and her knees sagged. He caught her and held her tight against him. Her arms wrapped around him and clutched him, with the grip of someone finding refuge, at last.

  CHAPTER 39

  As he turned toward the door to the inner room of the cave, however, she stiffenedsuddenly.

  “You don’t have to carry me!” she said. “I can walk!”

  Jeebee grunted a negative, pushed through the door with his shoulder, and laid her down on the bed. At his refusal to let go of her, she had relaxed against him again, with a little sigh; but the minute she touched the bed she bounced up off of it onto her feet as if it had been a bed of live coals.

  “Paul!” she said.

  She darted past Jeebee across the room, switching on the small lamp over Paul’s cradle. But it was not really necessary. Jeebee blessed the skylight. The daylight coming through it now was bright enough to see the interior of the room clearly.

  In that second, Merry reached the crib where Paul lay, checked herself with her hands on the side of it, and gave a long, slow sigh of relief.

  “He’s still sleeping,” she said fondly. “He slept through it all.”

  Jeebee sat down on the edge of the bed. A weakness had suddenly taken him. He was lost in the moment in which he and the grizzly had come together, and he stayed lost in it. He was only dimly aware that Merry had come back and climbed past him onto the inner side of the bed again.

  “Well?” she said warmly, after a long moment. “Are you just going to sit there?”

  The imprisoning shell that was his memory of the moment that held him, broke. He felt a sudden deep hunger for her flooding all through him. At the same time the weakness he felt was still there. Numbly he became aware that the stockings in which he slept for warmth were soaked through from the snow. He was still in the underwear he had been sleeping in and in which he had fought the grizzly. His feet felt cold—they had not felt cold until now. It was almost like being two people at once. Numbly he bent to strip them off and lay back on the bed, rolling over on his right side to face Merry. He put his arms around her, abruptly with the same kind of urgency and need with which she had held him, when he caught her turning from the loophole. She put her arms around him now again, and the palm of one hand up against his face.

  “You’re like ice,” she said.

  It was true. He felt chilled all the way through now, but he had not noticed it until she had mentioned it just now. He held her warmer, living body close to him.

  “It must be the reaction,” he said dully. Something wet, rough, and almost hot stropped the back of his neck and he almost leaped from the bed at its touch, spinning around to receive Wolf’s tongue, this time right across his face.

  Jeebee spluttered and sat up, holding him off even while falling into the familiar pattern of stroking and scratching his back and behind his ears that was part of the regular dawn and twilight greeting ceremonies between themselves and this four-legged partner.

  “Can’t you put him out?” Merry said, behind Jeebee, and Wolf switched his attention to her, attempting to climb over Jeebee and upon the bed to get to her.

  “Not now,” said Jeebee, holding him off. “Not after what he’s been through right along with the rest of us. He’d never forgive us.”

  He was himself again. The weakness was gone. Merry lifted herself up and moved around to sit beside him on the bed, and Wolf crowded against her, making greeting noises and licking at her hands and face. She, too, responded as Jeebee had, and the normal routine of the greeting ceremony—that was now also a general congratulation ceremony—continued, with Wolf ending by rolling over on his back and exposing his belly to be scratched.

  “The bear caught him on his left shoulder,” Jeebee said. “Feel it down there. It’s a considerable bruise. At that, he was lucky he got hit with the back of the paw instead of the front, otherwise those claws would have ripped him up.”

  Merry scratched along Wolf’s side and, under the guise of grooming motions, explored the stricken area.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s a bigger swelling than I can cover with my hand. And he isn’t even limping!”

  “He’s probably just ignoring it, the way he’s feeling right now,” said Jeebee. “He’d react fast enough if we made a fuss over it.”

  “You’re right,” Merry said, taking her hand away from the injured area. She glanced at her fingers. “And no blood. That’s just fine.”

  Jeebee nodded. He knew what she was referring to. He had not only found it in the wolf books he had rescued, but he had had some experience with it in the case of some minor cuts and illness in Wolf’s case. The only way to get a pill into Wolf was to hide it in a piece of meat that he would swallow whole. Also, even if he would have stood still to have a wound cleansed and bandaged, the bandage would come off more quickly than it went on, the minute he was able to get his teeth on it. Happily, there was no worry about that just now, as Merry had said.

  At their feet, now, Wolf decided he had had his fill of belly scratching, scrambled to his feet, gave Merry’s closest hand a perfunctory farewell lick, and trotted, grinning, over to the crib to thoroughly sniff over the sleeping Paul.

  Merry, long satisfied now that Wolf had accepted Paul as one of the family, made no move to stop him. A few weeks earlier she would have worried about Wolf licking the baby’s face and waking him. But Paul had recently graduated to the clutching stage, and he found Wolf’s muzzle irresistible. His small fist had learned to fasten on the hair there with surprising strength, and consequently, Wolf now only made a few small sounds to encourage the pup from a safe distance, then headed for the door.

  “Will you look,” Merry murmured, “at who killed the bear all by himself.”

  And, indeed, Wolf was visibly strutting as he left.

  Jeebee got to his feet, and hastily, by the gentle illumination of the morning light, stripped off his clothes. As he turned back to the bed, he saw Merry had already gotten rid of hers. She lay under the bottom blanket of the number they used to cover themselves at night in colder weather, the edge pulled up to her chin and her eyes bright in her face above that edge.

  Jeebee slipped in under the blanket himself and reached for her, feeling her turn toward him as he did so. There was a deeper longing in him now than he had ever felt before, and a pleasure greater than any he had ever experienced as his upper arm closed about her body and back. In fact everything was the same, but at the same time everything was different.

  There was a preciousness to her, now that they were both alive and the bear which might have destroyed them both was dead. They were alive because of each other, and it was as if they had gained each other fresh for the first time, with the gaining bringing them both something of far greater value.

  He had known that he had loved her since long before, back during the days at the wagon, but never had he loved her as much as in this moment, just after a time in which he might have lost her forever. Her skin was like silk under his hand and her breasts fitted the curve of his fingers, their nipples waking desire even, it seemed, in his fingers. When, after they had held each other, and touched each other for some time, he entered her, there came for him a new sense of blending together—a climax, a unification between them that seemed to make them for the first time actually one living being bound and made into a single person.

  Their time together was timeless. But when they released each other at last, and lay, side by side, still holding each other, weary and happy, that singleness still held them in one indivisible unit. And together, like one person, they slid imperceptibly into sleep.

  When Jeebee woke again, the day was far advanced, but still the whole room was illuminated. For the cave faced westward, and now the light of late afternoon was striking at a long angle through the skylight he had built above them.

  Merry was up and dressed, stirring something in a pot on the stove, her hand moving almost autom
atically while she crooned softly and tunefully to Paul hidden within the high sides of the crib beside her. A Paul who was evidently awake, for he giggled and made small noises back from time to time—obviously wanting to sing, himself, as his mother was doing.

  Jeebee lay there, still feeling the wonder that had been the feeling of oneness, which still enclosed him and Merry—and also Paul, now that he was awake and contributing to it. It was, Jeebee realized suddenly, the beginning of a new appreciation of being alive. They all became closer now, and would continue to be so from now on, than they had ever been before; because they had defended all that was valuable to them, and won in that defense.

  Just about then Jeebee may have made some small noise himself in his throat, because Merry looked over toward the bed and saw him lying there with his eyes open.

  “No hurry about getting up,” Merry said softly. “We’ll have something to eat in a little while, but not just yet.”

  Her face held the same softness that had been in the note of her crooning to Paul, and in the gentleness of her touch—the sometimes fierce gentleness of her touch—when they had been in the bed. Jeebee, who had, indeed, been planning automatically on getting up and dressing, suddenly realized that there was indeed no hurry. She was right. From the angle and color of the light, it was still some little time until twilight. Wolf would not be back for a while, scratching and whining at the door for his regular day-end greetings, if indeed he came at all. It was true there was work to be done. There was always work to be done. But there was nothing immediate calling him right now, and even the bear carcass could wait to be taken care of.

  All the pressure he had felt the last few long months of breakneck struggle to get the cave ready for winter was gone from him.

  He luxuriated in this sudden rare and wonderful idleness, lying in the bed, feeling his wife and child close to him, enjoying the light and the moment. And there grew within him a kernel of discovery that expanded abruptly all through him, to burst out and encompass the cave, his life, and all their lives, together.