“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 automatically 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.
He had faced, through the summer now gone, the fact that it was impossible to continue the search for his brother’s place with Paul so young. But he had taken it for granted, as if it was still a fixed and unchangeable element of their plans, that they would all three take up that search next summer when Paul would be older and stronger.
Now it burst on him as an entirely new thought—an understanding like that of someone who becomes suddenly aware that the world is round when he had always believed that it was flat—that they need not go next summer, either.
They need not go on at all.
Why leave here? They would be giving up all that they had made together, all that was familiar and useful, and which had now proved its ability to survive in the face of an attack by a creature that could have destroyed both them and it.
Small as it was, it was a fortress. Armed, only as they were, he and Merry could defend it. Here, Paul could grow older in safety, instead of running the risks of traveling through unknown territory, where people might shoot all of them first, and come to find out who they were later. It was even not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might actually win to the very borders of his brother’s ranch and be shot down there by men who worked for his brother, but did not give Jeebee time to explain who he was.
Why leave all they had made here, to go hunting an uncertain future? Why take on a journey in which the three of them, and particularly Paul in the helplessness of babyhood, would be at the mercy of strangers whose
