Wolf and Iron

clothes seemed to indicate that it had been a man rather than a woman.

Suddenly glad that Wolf had not come in with him, since Wolf was attracted to carrion of any kind, Jeebee turned about and retraced his steps back through the house. He stepped out into the open, blowing out his candle and returning it to his backpack. Wolf was waiting there and greeted him like a long-lost comrade. Turning, Jeebee headed toward the area behind the former house.

Surprisingly, out here, Wolf showed far less hesitation. Behind the house there had been an arrangement of wire pens, a number of small ones individually capable of being locked; those led by further doors within them into a larger pen that seemed to have been some sort of runway. If the man, Neiskamp, kept wolves, here was undoubtedly where he had kept them; and, in fact, Jeebee could catch in the moonlight here and there a glint of white bone on the nearer dark ground of a couple of the wolf pens.

He found the doors that had let him into them. Lock had been too strong a word for what he had assumed kept them closed against the animals inside. Opening them was merely a matter of pulling a wooden peg from a latch that secured each door. The first door he so opened moved with a screech of metal that was surprisingly loud in the silent night. He went inside; Wolf pushed past him, went ahead, and began to sniff immediately at where Jeebee had seen the glint of white.

Catching up with Wolf, Jeebee found the bones of an animal about Wolf’s size. It was not possible to tell for sure in the moonlight, but it seemed to be the bones of a wolf, with some bits of fur still attached and possibly even some scraps of decayed flesh, although that was hard to tell in the darkness.

As best he could in the moonlight, Jeebee examined the skull of the carcass. It was shattered in front, broken by a large hole as if the animal had been shot. Wolf pushed past Jeebee, put his nose down on the remains, sniffed, then turned and began to explore the pen.

Jeebee left him to it and went to the next pen. It, too, held its bones. All in all, he found six cages, all with remnants of a carcass in each, and each carcass with a hole in the head.

It was fairly clear that the animals had been deliberately destroyed. Whether Neiskamp had destroyed them himself, for reasons of his own, triggered into action by the arrival of the raiders, or—more likely—the raiders had killed them, was an unsolved question, and its solution was probably unimportant. Jeebee let himself back out of the pens, leaving the door ajar so Wolf could join him, and, after a little while, Wolf did so.

That library, Jeebee thought, would have to be examined in daylight. There was no reason not to shelter inside the semi-destroyed house, but Wolf was still unwilling to enter it and Jeebee felt a certain sense of distaste at the thought of doing it himself.

In the end, he camped just outside the house, after fetching the horses, on the east side, where the sunlight would wake him early.

A brightening sky woke him some hours later. He got up and fixed himself some breakfast, taking the horses to drink at the little stream. There was plenty of ground cover for them to feed on here. In fact, around the house there was no lack of grass and the horses had been quietly cropping most of the night. After watering them, he tied them up once more, fed himself, and turned back toward the house. Wolf had taken off and was nowhere to be seen.

As daylight flooded down the rounded sides of the foothills enclosing them and the sun itself rose into clear view, the house was revealed as more damaged than it had appeared by moonlight. Apparently the raiders had wasted little time after tossing explosives into it.

Considering the damage, Jeebee became even more sure that it had been dynamite that had been used, rather than something essentially as antipersonnel as grenades. Going in by the back door to the kitchen, he found some confirmation for this in the fact that the single body there had several firearms scattered around it, one shotgun and two rifles as well as a couple of pistols. All had been too damaged by the explosion to be workable— undoubtedly that was why they had been left where they lay.

Jeebee’s best guess was that Neiskamp had been trying to hold the raiders off from here with enfilading fire. Possibly he had hoped to discourage them from trying to obtain whatever the house might hold. In any case his defense had not worked.

Jeebee went on into the library section. There, the room was half-full of collapsed roof parts as a result of the explosion that must have stressed it to the point where it collapsed inward.

The bright light of day streamed in and revealed a room even more bare of furniture than the living room with its single couch. In fact, the couch, the bed in the bedroom, a small table by the bed, and two chairs and the table in the kitchen were the total sum of furniture that the house had apparently owned. But the bookshelves were full. Now, needing neither candle nor any other type of illumination but the daylight coming through the broken roof, Jeebee began to brush the dust from the spines of the books he took from the shelves to examine.

It was a slow and dusty process, since he had to clean each book before he could identify it by the printing on its spine. There were a remarkable number of issues of magazines, like the National Geographic, bound in homemade covers. There was also a plentiful supply of books about the west in particular, particularly histories of the rise of the cattle industry.

But also, there were a fair amount of histories of the plains and mountain Indians of the west. Halfway around the room, he found what he was looking for, a respectably small number of books on wolves. He took these out, identified them one by one, and made a pile of them on the floor. It did not look like there were too many of them to be added to the load Sally was already carrying without putting her under too heavy a burden.

Eighteen books in all. He took them and left.

CHAPTER 20

Jeebee had time for reading in the days that followed for he continued to travel by night and lie up during the day. The first part of the daylit hours would necessarily be given to sleep, but after that there were always three to four hours before he felt safe to move again with the sundown.

In those few hours he first attended to whatever needed attention about packs and mounts and the welfare of the horses themselves, and refilled the emergency water bag that he carried fastened to his saddle from whatever fresh-water source was handy. He had gotten a large supply of the sterilization tablets from Paul, but realized that he was going through them fast.

Counting them now and looking at the rest of the days of the summer and possibly through the fall, he could see the point was coming where he would be reduced to boiling his drinking water as the only way left to be sure of its safety.

Still, for now at any rate, the time he had left over was at least a couple of hours a day, and in that time he absorbed as much as he could of the books from the library shelves in Neiskamp’s ruined house.

Academic habit made him begin by reading the reference lists, which all but one of the books provided, and then checking them against each other to see which of the volumes he had taken from Neiskamp’s house were most mentioned.

Only two of the titles had rung any kind of bell with him, though he had read neither book. One was Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat, for which he found only two citations, both of which referred to it as “semifictional”—which he knew to be academic shorthand for, “Don’t bother reading. Not a serious work.” The other was Wolf and Man: Evolution in Parallel by Roberta L. Hall and Henry S. Sharp, about which he remembered something. It might have been that a review had attracted his attention because of the idea put forth in the title, which intrigued him.

He read through the lot, beginning with the most-referenced works, L. David Mech’s The Wolf and a similarly titled volume by a Swedish-German biologist, Erik Zimen, and so working his way down his list.

When he finally did get to Never Cry Wolf, he recognized it as evidently the source of a movie he had seen once. Its authenticity may have been questionable, but he realized that besides being a fine work of writing, the author had produced a first-rate piece of prowolf propaganda. He tucked it away against some future day when Wolf’s survival in the cattle country of Montana might require a good bit of public relations.

Though Mech’s The Wolf was obviously—and from what he could see, deservedly —regarded by other authors as something of a Bible, there were several others that offered insights he could apply