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 the 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.
