other travelers from whom it would be safer to trade—or buy.
Or rob. He put that thought from him. He had not yet become that desperate. Not yet, at least.
Luckily he had not dared show it to the woman back where he had gotten the gun, but in a money belt around his waist under his shirt were twenty-three gold coins he had bought long ago, as a result of casually answering a coin-of-the-month plan in a magazine advertisement. He had paid for the coins regularly until, one day, he had realized he really had no great interest in belonging to such a plan and had dropped out.
But now, they were there, under his shirt. If he could find someone safe to buy from, he would rather do that than rob—and perhaps have to kill.
But he told himself now that if necessary, he would do even those things to stay alive and get safely to the ranch.
His knowledge of QSD must live, therefore he must. Life had no meaning for him otherwise, now.
He began to scheme as he walked, a rifle in each hand. He badly missed his maps, most of which had been with the motorbike. But memory said the nearest large east-west highway had been south of where he was now.
It was strange how the study group at Stoketon had already become almost dreamlike in his mind—like a childhood memory of a home lived in once, but for a short time and long ago. Jer Shandeau, Peter Wilbiggin, Kim Allen—these and all the others he had worked with there—had acquired the sort of sunset aura that had always seemed to surround people in fables and fairy tales. It was hard now to believe that they, and the life he had shared with them, had been real at all.
He caught his thoughts sharply up from their wandering. A necessary change of route was what he had been thinking of. This day would be warmer than the one before. The gentler weather of spring was moving inevitably northward. So far, today was a day of sunshine and an occasional cloud, and the warmth caused his spirits instinctively to rise.
He had become used to using the sun as a timepiece. Though he still wore his watch with an experimental hundred-year battery, he had gotten out of the habit of glancing at it. The sun told him that the morning was perhaps one quarter of its way toward noon. South would be less than a half turn to his left.
To check that fact, he lifted the cord holding his compass around his neck and took the compass itself on the palm of his hand. It agreed with what he had read from the sun’s position, but was a little more precise in what could be read from its poised needle.
He had instinctively been moving within the woods since they had left their camping spot of last night. The turn south would take them out into the open grassland.
He regretted more than ever the loss of his South Dakota map.
What would be the type of east-west road he would encounter first, going south? He wanted a former freeway, or some kind of road that ran far to the west, not just something that had been a two-lane strip of asphalt joining two small towns together.
The routes of the former interstates would attract more travelers and give him a greater choice. He was, he thought, somewhere below what had once been the city of Pierre, South Dakota.
Pierre was too large a place to approach safely, these days. If anything was left of it at all, those leavings would be divided into territories by well-armed and watchful gangs at feud with each other, and all on the lookout for any easy prey such as he, alone, would be.
The change in direction unfortunately took him out of the occasional cover of trees in which he preferred to travel, when these were available. Wolf seemed to do so, too. One thing was certain; he could come and go like a shadow.
But he was clearly following a roughly parallel course to Jeebee’s; and sometimes, now that nearly two weeks had passed since they met, he stayed the night.
Jeebee was now traversing land that had once been largely farm- or pasture-land. Occasionally he crossed country roads, and every so often he sighted farm buildings in the distance.
It made for swifter, if more open, going.
But as if to compensate for this, the rainy weather that had given frequent showers, let up, and he went through a succession of days that were both warm and sunny. The dead grass in the untilled fields was drying out and a few blades of new green were among it.
These fields he circled, staying under cover or below the horizon as much as he could. It was in the process of going around one such that Jeebee learned his first lesson from Wolf. It was mid-to-late afternoon and for once Wolf had joined him early. They had come to a narrow band of brush and trees stretching off to his right, and without thinking, Jeebee had turned into it with the intention of bypassing the farmhouse he could see ahead, behind the leafy cover.
Wolf had hesitated. After a few steps Jeebee had realized the other was not with him and looked back to see Wolf standing and looking after him. Jeebee stood still; and after a moment of uncertainty Wolf trotted forward to join him.
But Jeebee was beginning to be able to read Wolf’s body signals. Right now, they were broadcasting definite wariness about going this way.
Jeebee himself had stopped. Now he studied the four-legged form beside him to figure out exactly what was giving him that impression of wariness. He recognized after a moment that Wolf was standing very tall, craning his neck, ears pricked forward to hear and see and smell anything that might signal danger, but his hind quarters were just a little crouched and his tail was down, indicating what Jeebee had learned to recognize as uncertainty. Overall, his body was tense, and Jeebee thought that he read in Wolf’s expressive face—and Wolf’s face as well as his body was very expressive now that Jeebee had come to know the other better—an expression that Jeebee read as reluctance or hesitation.
Jeebee frowned, looking ahead through the impenetrable screen of trees. At that moment there suddenly began the barking of a dog distantly ahead but off to the right someplace.
Jeebee looked back for Wolf, but Wolf was gone. Jeebee had developed his own wariness over the months since he had left Stoketon. The wind was roughly from the direction of the barking to him; nonetheless, Wolf had seen fit to steer clear of it, and it would do no harm for Jeebee to do likewise. He turned and went off in the direction Wolf had taken. If nothing else, the barking of the dog ahead had signaled the possible presence of living human beings. And any humans at all were likely to treat him as those back at the station where he had lost the electric bike—and there was no telling how they might react to Wolf.
Wolf did not appear again until Jeebee had camped for the night and was putting a last log on the evening fire he had built within a protecting patch of trees. Over the days they had been together, Wolf’s evening and morning greetings had progressed from the cautious sniffing that had marked his behavior both in the store and at the campfire of the first night after their escape from the station. Now Wolf appeared as silently and as suddenly as he always did. He walked slowly up to where Jeebee was sitting, sniffed at him, examined him for a moment, and then advanced a little further—enough so that he was within reach of Jeebee’s hand.
Jeebee slowly put out that hand and scratched in the ruff under Wolf’s neck—that ruff seemed to fairly call out to be scratched. From the neck, as Jeebee had gradually ventured to do over the days, he moved down Wolf’s chest and rib cage—cautious about handling this volunteer partner of his more freely than that. As his fingers moved, he scratched and plucked out the tufts of loose fur that were signs that Wolf now was beginning to shed his winter undercoat.
Wolf moved closer, to let himself be touched. His air was one of relaxed anticipation. His tail wagged briefly, just a little from side to side—but it was a wag. Jeebee continued now to scratch and groom him on both sides, but when he plucked a few tempting tufts from his lower ribs, Wolf swiveled his head toward the intrusive hand, drew back, stared at it for a long moment, then moved away and lay down beside where Jeebee was sitting.
The move was a clear statement that Wolf had had enough of being touched. Respecting it, Jeebee merely sat where he was, occasionally poking the fire and thinking his own thoughts while feeling a pleasure from the simple fact that Wolf was with him. It occurred to him now, sitting here before the fire with Wolf beside him, how much he was changed from the man he had been when he had fled from Stoketon.
When Jeebee had left that town with Buel Mannerly’s pellets whistling over him to speed him on his way, he had thought of himself as leaving with only a handful of the tools he needed to survive in this newer, cruder world. Now he found himself surviving with even much less.
Of course, it had never occurred to him that he would have to protect even this little he now had from his
