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 Jeebee 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.”
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.
