Merry led the dog, still bounding and licking at her hands, back toward the horses.
“Looks like we’re getting under way again,” said Paul. “Nick, will you put things away—you might give him a hand, Jeebee. Then join me up on the wagon seat and we’ll let you take the team again for a while.”
They continued westward in the days that followed, stopping mainly at isolated farmhouses where Paul did business. The routine for these visits was always that Merry, with the horses, dropped back, and Jeebee moved into the Quiet Room of the wagon with Nick and the weapons. Then Paul would drive, apparently alone, up to the place he was planning to visit. Merry, with the extra horses, would have fallen far enough behind so that she was out of sight.
This procedure, Paul told Jeebee, was followed even when the people were old friends and knew that Merry would be along with Paul. The reason was that nobody could tell what might have happened to the particular family or group—many of these isolated farmsteads now contained up to forty or fifty people—since Paul had seen it last. If there was to be trouble, he wanted Merry at a distance, where she could get clear. For the same reason, Nick and Jeebee had weapons ready and were waiting in the weapons room.
If things proved to be unchanged since Paul’s last visit, and the people still friendly, Paul usually called Merry in and let either Nick or Jeebee come out of the weapons room and also mingle with the customers.
The social scientist in Jeebee was aroused by what he saw at these isolated settlements. All of the communities they stopped at were ordered and disciplined, which did not surprise him, being precisely what his mathematical models predicted. But he felt a profound sense of discovery that his own off-the-cuff estimates of the varieties of their social systems should be as close to what he actually found.
They were all, like Paul Sanderson’s small group, variations on a common social adaptational theme centered on cooperative daily efforts required for survival.
There were, of course, differences in matters of social power and authority, and marriage conventions had already begun to vary widely. Over the course of the weeks he was with the wagon, Jeebee encountered a good bit of monogamy—after all, one resource gatherer was adequate for the survival of a human infant only under a limited number of resource conditions. There was a fair amount of polygyny—again there were few species of mammal who were not polygynous—but also there was some polyandry, though these were rare and largely confined to regions where food resources were especially abundant.
Interestingly, there was less promiscuity than many of the people who had guessed at possible futures had envisioned. In fact, many of these small groups were almost puritanical in attitude; and Jeebee could understand why. Sexual permissiveness was simply not the best competitive reproductive strategy.
Jeebee found himself fascinated by all this, and a part of him all but reverted to the researcher he had been. It became even more interesting when it occurred to him to speculate that his own comradeship with Wolf might also be regarded as one of the variations in social order directly spawned by the general social collapse.
The fact was, Wolf was a person—an individual, with his own likes, dislikes, wishes, desires, and purposes. In this he was no different from the people of the communities Paul visited. But Wolf was also a product of a social order, not that different in many ways from the human ones, which had given rise in Wolf to certain instinctual patterns of behavior and response, and these patterns had found a congenial mesh with Jeebee’s own, similarly derived patterns and responses.
It was likely, Jeebee thought, that the growing comfort he was finding in his relationship with Paul, Merry, and Nick were rooted in the same needs that had overcome Wolf’s natural timidity and, eventually, could drive him to approach the wagon and its company.
The fact remained that in his relationship with Wolf he had found an emotional satisfaction that he did not find in his own kind—the three of the wagon.
From the beginning of their acquaintanceship, Jeebee had wanted to get closer to this companion of his; and for that a better understanding of what made Wolf “Wolf” was needed. If only Jeebee had looked deeper into what made wolves what they were, back before the world had fallen apart and both libraries and experts had vanished…
Well, there was no point in yearning for what was not available. So Jeebee watched Wolf’s approaches to the wagon now with a fierce hunger for Wolf to come all the way in. Wolf was free in the most absolute sense of that word. There was no way to force him anywhere, short of wounding or trapping him, which would destroy the whole purpose of getting back together with him. Jeebee could only continue his watch and hope that Wolf would make the decision to join them by himself.
Gradually, it became apparent that he might.
He began to appear more often, a couple of hours before sundown, an hour or more before the wagon stopped for the day. At first he could only be seen occasionally, following and flanking the wagon at a distance. But eventually, his parallel movements became closer so that he was traveling within as much as fifty yards, where the terrain allowed.
As he got closer, Greta would often run out to join him. When she did so, the other dogs would often try to go with her—in which case, invariably, she would turn on them and drive them back to the wagon. Eventually, the other dogs became more used to his presence and no longer set up a chorus of barking at the very sight of him.
But, also, occasionally, when Greta was not around, one or more of them would charge out at him. In these cases, his behavior varied. If there were several of them running at him in a group, he usually turned and bolted.
The dogs of the wagon would follow him for a couple of hundred yards, and then would stop and come back, almost prancing in their pride and self-satisfaction at having driven off the intruder. Jeebee was secretly pleased to see that after all, Merry did not seem to like the dogs driving Wolf away in this manner any more than Jeebee did. But he recognized her quandary. If they were to remain effective guard dogs, she could hardly scold them for doing what they considered their duty.
If it was a single animal that rushed out at him, Wolf generally all but ignored it. No single dog of the wagon was any real threat to him. On occasion, his behavior was so indifferent that the dog, after sniffing him over, simply fell in beside him. Twice, the single dog was one of the males and actually tried to be aggressive. In each case, Wolf merely turned side on and twisted his body in a manner that threw the weight of it behind the impact of his left hip: and the other was sent tumbling. Only in the case of one other single attacker from the wagon was the dog persistent enough that Wolf turned on him suddenly and pinned him to the ground by the neck, clamping skin and neck alike in the vise of his powerful jaws so that it choked the other animal as well as locked it in place.
The dog ki-yied in fright and fled as soon as Wolf let him up. Back at the wagon, Merry’s exploring fingers could find no sign of injury on the dog that had been neck-pinned.
Wolf, Jeebee concluded interestedly, must have a fine-tuned sense of possible responses to threats.
With time, however, the contacts between Wolf and the dogs of the wagon gradually built up patterns of tolerance between him and at least some of the males; and gradually Wolf came closer and closer, until one day he finally greeted Jeebee beside the wagon itself.
Meanwhile, as they got into the western part of South Dakota, to the north of the Badlands, the country became rougher and they left the route of the interstate more often to get to customers.
The wagon was stoutly built and could be taken across fairly open country when it was absolutely necessary, but there were definite limits to where it could go. Consequently, Paul normally chose to stick to roads. Or to the shoulders of old roads, where the road itself was too pockmarked and pitted. At other times, where it was impossible for the wagon to go to the customer, the customer came to Paul.
Usually this meant that Paul would stop the wagon in mid-afternoon and wait until the following morning before going on. If whoever had been used to trading with him at that point showed up, business was done. Otherwise, if no one appeared, Paul moved on the following morning. Those who dealt with him knew approximately when he was due in their area; and if they still existed or were interested in trade, it was up to them to show up.
If they did not, that particular stop was removed from Paul’s customer list. Paul’s practice was to travel along a road as far as he could, then stop and fire four spaced shots in the air; not from his usual rifle, but from a black- powder muzzle loader.
Almost always, within half an hour, one or more riders on horseback would appear and come to the wagon. These would later be followed by most of the whole clan or family. In a few cases Jeebee saw a small, temporary tent city set up for a day or two by the wagon while deals with Paul were made; and a certain amount of hospitality
