Nightwalker 4

by Frank Roderus

  He stifled a whimper of pain and lay quiet, the dog still at his side.

  “If you want to go find something to eat it would be all right,” he said. Not that the dog would understand, but he felt better for saying it.

  “As for me, I just want to rest here a while before we do anything else. Is that all right with you, dog?”

  Wolfe put his head down on his folded arms and tried to sleep. He was not looking forward to what he had to do next.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Wolfe wriggled deeper into the aspen grove until he found a pair of young trees growing side by side, their roots close together and the trunks almost forming a V-shape where they came out of the ground. That was not what he wanted but it was certainly what he needed.

  Wolfe steeled himself and picked up his left leg, shoving forward and then pressing down until his hiking boot was lodged firmly between the trees.

  He found a scrap of dead wood on the ground at his side and clamped that between his teeth lest he bite down so hard as to break a tooth.

  Then came the hard part. Wolfe closed his eyes, planted his right foot against the trees.

  And pushed.

  A lightning bolt of agony unlike anything he had ever known drove through him.

  He pushed as hard as he could manage despite the pain. Kept pushing until he felt the bone ends pull and shift and come together.

  Only when he had accomplished that did James Wolfe allow himself the relief of unconsciousness.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Wolfe waited until the pain in his leg had diminished to mere throbbing with the flow of blood pumping through his arteries, then took his backpack off and brought it around to his lap, his foot still jammed tight between the boles of the two aspens.

  He thought carefully about what he could afford to lose, then removed his spare shirt from the pack. He took out his knife and cut the sleeve away from the shirt then carefully cut that into strips. He did the same with the other sleeve.

  Nearby blowdown provided enough wood for splints, and the strips of flannel allowed him to tie the splints in place, two pieces of brittle aspen wood on each side of the broken leg.

  Wolfe did not feel a bit better after the splint was tied in place but he knew it was necessary if he wanted the leg to heal. And he still had a very long way to go on that leg.

  “Now,” he said. “What are we going to do about supper?”

  The dog wagged its tail, apparently agreeable to whatever Wolfe decided in that regard.

  “Food,” he said, again aloud. “We need food, don’t we? So how does fish sound to you?”

  He rummaged in his backpack for a coil of fishing line and plastic pack of small hooks.

  With the splint on his leg he was able to crawl more easily. He made his way slowly, very slowly, downhill, out of the aspens and into some tall grass. There he caught three small grasshoppers.

  With those he figured he was in business as a fisherman.

  Halfway down to the stream, which he most seriously hoped contained some pan fish, he saw a trio of cow elk coming down to water.

  Wolfe put his hand on the dog’s neck to keep it from chasing the animals and mumbled, “This is a fine time to’ve left the rifle behind, isn’t it? Well, that’s the last time I’ll make that mistake.”

  When the elk had had their drink and moved on, Wolfe and the dog continued their slow, painful trek down to the creek.

  It would be daylight soon. And Wolfe was hungry.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By several hours past dawn he had three small fish. Coming from Florida, he knew a bit about fishing, but those were saltwater species. He had no idea what these three might be. But whatever they were, he intended to eat them.

  Wolfe sat up and coiled his fishing line then slipped it into his shirt pocket. “One for you,” he said to the dog, “one for me and we split the last one. How does that sound to you?”

  He took out his knife and cleaned the three fish then crawled laboriously back up the slope to where he had left his things. He gathered some twigs and small sticks together and used a magnifying glass to start a fire. He still had several butane cigarette lighters in his pack but wanted to save those since it was daylight and there was sunshine enough to use the magnifying glass.

  Wolfe dug into his backpack again for the one cooking utensil he carried, a small skillet. He had no grease to properly fry the fish in but searing them on hot metal would have to do.

  A half hour later he was still hungry but much more comfortable than he had been with a completely empty belly. Wolfe gave the dog a pat, then stretched out in the grass and went to sleep, goggles firmly in place over his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Damn,” Wolfe muttered when he woke up. His little campsite, such as was, was covered with a thin dusting of snow. And if he was to judge by the dark clouds rolling in from the north there was more to come.

  Crawling, straining, and reaching, he managed to come up with some slender saplings that he laboriously chopped down with his knife and, farther uphill, he reached a stand of older growth that sported some well-needled pine branches.

  He chose the two shortest saplings and planted them into the ground, using the knife to dig out holes to receive them, then laid the longer saplings across these at about waist height and leaned the rest of the saplings onto this horizontal support.

  The pine boughs were placed onto the saplings, effectively forming a lean-to.

  Wolfe moved his few things into the shelter and built a fire just outside the mouth of the lean-to. The sun had long since set so he had to use one of his precious butane lighters to start the fire, but under the circumstances he considered heat more important than frugality.

  The hillside and dead aspen provided fuel for the fire, and once he was inside the lean-to with a fire blazing just outside the mouth he was not only warm, he was uncomfortably hot.

  That brought a smile of appreciation to his weather tanned face. He had read about such structures but had never before actually built one.

  “Come on in here, dog. It’s close quarters but there should be room enough for both of us.” He dropped another stick onto the fire and said, “Sorry, but we’re going to bed hungry tonight. Maybe tomorrow, eh?”

  The dog wagged its tail and lay down, curling into a hairy ball when it did so.

  “I wish I could do that too,” Wolfe said with a grin. “All right now. Let’s us both get some sleep and hope that tomorrow will be better.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The second day he lay in wait where the elk came down to drink.

  One well-placed shot and he had a cow on the ground. He could not run to finish her off, but he could crawl. And got there while she was still thrashing around and whistling.

  “Cold as it is, we’ll as good as have the meat refrigerated, dog.”

  With considerable difficulty Wolfe skinned the animal – which probably provided several hundred pounds of meat – and cut the carcass into manageable pieces.

  He removed the bladders and used the urine from them to dress the flesh side of the skin. Using the uric acid was not an ideal form of tanning, but it would have to do.

  He left the pelt to cure overnight while he made trips up to the lean-to carrying meat. There was enough of it to fill his backpack several times. He saved the best – the liver – for last. That night he feasted on fire-grilled liver until he could eat no more.

  The dog ate its fill also. They were a contented pair when they dropped off to sleep at daybreak the next morning.

  Wolfe spent several days cutting the meat into thin strips for drying and hanging the meat across the fans – fronds? he was not sure what they were called – of some low growing juniper.

  It was just as well that he was a nocturnal animal himself because he stayed awake to protect their supply of meat and twice had to warn off an inquisitive and possibly hungry bear that came calling.

  Their food supply, though, was
in hand, and Wolfe breathed a little easier.

  By their third week huddling under the lean-to it was impossible for Wolfe to fuel the fire with blowdown and ground litter. He made do by using his folding Swedish saw to cut down small aspen and cut them into segments. Soon, however, he exhausted that supply of wood and had to range further afield in order to find wood.

  By then he was wearing virtually every garment he owned and still was cold as soon as he left the relative comfort of the lean-to and the fire.

  “Dog, you and me got to do something about this. The problem is that I don’t know how long it takes for a broken bone to knit. For now I’m gimping along on my knees while you run and play, darn you.”

  The dog came to him and nuzzled his side. Wolfe smiled and scratched behind its ears.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The first snowfall was little more than a skiff that barely covered the ground. But it was a harbinger of what was to come.

  It had been Wolfe’s intention to be far to the south and into a lower elevation before winter set in, but the broken leg made that impossible. As it was he had no choice but to make do as best he could, where he could.

  “Dog, you’re lucky you got all that fur to keep you warm. Now lie down. Stay. I got to find us some more meat lest we starve before spring lets us walk out of here. Darn leg should be healed by then; wouldn’t you think? You agree? Good. Now stay put. I won’t be long.”

  He collected, butchered, cut and dried the meat from two elk and one bear, saving their pelts. The skins were not properly tanned, but they would serve until the weather warmed and that was all he asked of them.

  The bear skin, once it had been rough-cured and all the fleas had left, served as a bed, while the elk skins he carefully cut and sewed with elk skin thongs to make a cape that did well enough to protect him when he was away from the warmth of the lean-to.

  He collected rocks and piled them in a low wall to act as a heat reflector.

  Wolfe was surprised at how warm he could stay in the coldest of temperatures beyond the lean-to.

  The dog helped, curling up next to him when they slept during the days and alerting him whenever game was coming down the hillside.

  They had meat to eat, and that sustained them. But Wolfe would have killed for a hamburger and fries.

  Wolfe judged it had been about two months before he felt up to trusting his leg to carry any weight, and by then the hills to the south were deep in snow. They were stuck where they were until the spring thaw.

  Chapter Thirty

  They ran out of meat late that winter. The elk stopped coming down the hills, apparently having moved elsewhere. The deer disappeared as well, and the bears went into hibernation. Even the rabbits and squirrels holed up somewhere out of sight.

  Wolfe and the dog were reduced to eating the odd sparrow that Wolfe could bring down with the blowgun. And those had become rare as well. Eventually he realized they would either move. Or starve.

  The snow remained deep to the point of being nearly impassable, so Wolfe fashioned a pair of crude snowshoes made from young aspen growth tied together with thongs cut from a deerskin. There was nothing he could do to help the dog struggle across the drifts other than to sympathize.

  Wolfe continued to worry about his leg strength but it was something he would just have to risk in order to move.

  He packed his backpack, donned his elk skin cape and strapped on the backpack over it. Carrying his rifle, he and the dog set off, again moving as directly as possible toward the south and what should be warmer weather.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  On the fourth day away from the comforts of the lean-to they were crossing a broad basin high in the mountains. Wolfe was unconsciously seeking familiar territory. There probably would have been an easier route to walk but this one he had driven several times in his truck. He could not remember the name of the basin, but the highway and the surrounding hills were familiar.

  “What?”

  The dog had stiffened into a stance that resembled a bird dog’s point.

  Wolfe peered in the direction the dog was looking. He saw a flicker of movement. And then another. Closer inspection proved the movement to be that of an ear.

  Wolfe smiled as he raised the rifle and paused, waiting for the mule deer doe to step out from the brush that was hiding it. The rifle barked and eighty yards away the doe dropped, shot through the neck.

  The dog raced ahead as Wolfe plowed through the snow to reach the doe and bleed it out. He had his knife out before he even reached his kill.

  He made quick work of butchering the young mule, then carried the carcass to a stand of aspen where he cleared snow from a sizeable patch of ground and built a fire, piling wood on until he had a roaring blaze.

  He slipped out of the backpack and brought out his trusty camp skillet that by now had seen a great deal of use. He put the skillet on the fire and scooped up snow to melt in it.

  When he had a good amount of water he let the dog drink then returned the skillet to the fire and added more snow until he had more water. This time he allowed the water to heat.

  The hot water tasted quite good, he thought, as good as any cup of coffee he had ever had.

  When he had some coals to work with he allowed the active flame to subside while he layered strips of venison directly onto the coals. The dog did not wait for the niceties of cooked meat but gorged on the raw meat that Wolfe tossed it.

  “Hello, who are you? Is that something cooking that I smell?”

  Wolfe grabbed for his rifle and stood over the fire, ready to fight if that was what was offered.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  A gaunt, red-haired man emerged from the trees. As far as Wolfe could see he was not armed. He wore a puffy, insulated coat that had seen better days and a Colorado Rockies baseball cap.

  “Be all right if I come close, mister?” he called out.

  Wolfe nodded. “Come ahead.”

  “Mister, I heard your rifle shot. It got my attention. There’s only a few of us living up here, and we ran out of ammunition a long time ago. Haven’t had much of anything to eat ever since then. That’s why I came looking for you.”

  The man hesitated, his eyes cast down to the snow while he scraped his right foot back and forth. “The thing is…and I hate to do this, it goes against everything I always knew…but I come over here to beg. That’s the blunt truth. I come begging from you, mister. A piece of meat, even the offal, anything you can spare because I got a sick woman and a kid and nothing to feed them.”

  “Nothing?” Wolfe said.

  The man shook his head. “Not for almost a week now.”

  Wolfe glanced down toward his fire where strips of venison were cooking, a thick aroma of searing meat and smoke rising from it.

  The dog had already eaten, and there was more than enough for Wolfe, hungry though he was. He had intended to pack the excess with him, but….

  “All right,” he told the redhead. “Do you have anything to carry this in?”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “A few” folks was exactly what Wolfe found at the cabin where the red-head led him. There was the man, a woman lying under a mountain of blankets and a red-haired girl who looked to be about twelve years old.

  From the state of things inside the cabin they had been living there before the nuclear conflagration that reshaped the country. When Wolfe arrived there was a blazing fire in a Franklin stove but even so the woman was shivering. The little girl was sitting at the woman’s bedside trying to get her to take a drink of water that Wolfe assumed was melted snow.

  “Mister, this is my wife, Harriet, and our daughter, Jennifer. My name is Miles, by the way. And you would be…?”

  Wolfe introduced himself.

  “What is your dog’s name, Mr. Wolfe?” the child asked, showing some animation as she dropped to her knees to pet the dog and hug it.

  “He, uh, he doesn’t have a name. I’ve never gotten around to naming him,” Wolfe
said.

  Jennifer looked first at the dog and then up at Wolfe. “His name is Buddy.”

  “You know that, do you?” Wolfe said with a smile.

  The girl nodded, her expression quite serious. “I do.”

  “So it shall be then,” Wolfe agreed.

  While Wolfe was talking to the girl, Miles was busy getting the cooked venison onto plates – actual chinaware…and cloth napkins – that he tried to feed to his wife.

  The woman was close to being unconscious and seemed uninterested in food, perhaps being beyond interest in food or in survival.

  Jennifer was certainly hungry enough for both of them, rushing to eat but slipping tidbits of the venison to the dog – to the newly named Buddy – at the same time. Wolfe did not mind. Nor did Buddy,

  “Under other circumstances, Mr. Wolfe, I would offer you some coffee, but…”

  “Hot water will do just as nicely.” Wolfe smiled. “I’ve come to actually enjoy it.”

  “Then hot water it shall be.” Miles left his wife’s side and put a kettle on the cast iron surface of the Franklin stove. “Will you stay the night with us, Mr. Wolfe? It would be nice to have company for a change.”

  It would be pleasant to have a night beneath a roof again, Wolfe thought. “I’d be pleased to, Miles.”

  “Jenny, make up a pallet for Mr. Wolfe, please.”

  “And one for Buddy, too, daddy?”

  “All right. And one for Buddy, too.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Wolfe woke early. The others were sleeping, Miles and the girl breathing softly but Harriet’s breath ragged and harsh. She sounded bad.