Possessing him still was that same clarity and clearheadedness. Now, like mental tunnel vision, it was concentrating all his attention only on the seriousness of the moment, and what must be done right away. Time was now moving at its normal pace.
He must get back to his medical supplies, at the horses. From what he had read in the books on wolves, as well as in first-aid texts, with large-animal-created wounds, his greatest danger was probably that both arm and leg were deeply and massively bruised by the paw blows of the mother bear. The flesh, where it had been hammered by those paws, would flood with blood from broken internal blood vessels under the skin.
He would probably not lose much blood—he was not even losing much now, except from his scalp—which seemed the least important. But the real damage was the inside damage, below the skin. That would mean swelling, which would take about twenty-four hours in which to reach its peak.
Treatment for swelling? His mind searched his memories of first-aid manuals. Cold compresses. He had no compresses or material for them at the moment. But the water in the stream close beside him was mountain-fed. It would be icy cold and he had, back at the horses, clothes he could tear up and wrap tightly around both the lower and upper wound. Also his scalp—which was still doing most of the bleeding.
The sooner the cold was put to work the better. At his present hobble, it would be a while yet before he could cover what he estimated to be about a hundred and fifty feet back to the horses. Thank God he had tied them up where there was water and grazing before leaving them.
It was the willows in their clumps that was slowing him down. Sometimes he could push his way through or go around, but they slowed his progress. He glanced at the stream. It was no wider anywhere than about thirty feet and had looked no more than about three feet at the deepest. There were no willows in it, and he would get the double benefit of immersing the hurt leg in its coldness and at least begin washing the leg wound clean.
For that matter, he could also keep splashing water up on his arm as he went. Both actions would help to clean the worst of the dirt undoubtedly there from the bear’s claws and pads. At the same time, he could get to his destination in half the time it would take him, limping around these willows or forcing his way through them. And the water would slow him no more than the willows.
He veered toward the stream and checked himself at its bank, suddenly remembering that the water might carry toxic organisms. There was one—a parasite named giardia—that came from the excreta of beaver, and other wild animals, and was supposed to be found in western mountain streams like this.
But there was no real choice. It was a gamble of possible illness against the near certainty of being immobilized by his wounds, possibly dangerously so. Unable to walk, unable to get up, he would have trouble getting food or water as well as being helpless in the face of any predator or human enemy who found him. As he stepped down into the water that came almost to his waist, feeling the jar of his good foot against the stream bed, he remembered just in time to take the revolver out of his boot and stick it under his belt.
It was common, the books he had taken from the ruins of Walter Neiskamp’s home told him, for wolves that showed signs of weakness or disability to be harassed or mobbed by other members of the pack. An injured wolf that stood high in the ranking order was an especially inviting target of attack. True, the latter was usually supposed to happen only when the attacking wolf was old enough to become “political”—concerned with its ranking in the pack. This could happen, he had gathered, anytime after the wolf’s second year of life, when wolves in packs typically reached sexual maturity.
Wolf best fit the description, Jeebee now guessed, of being only a year or so old, when Jeebee had first met him; too young, theoretically, to be “political” yet. But what all of the books had agreed on—both the formal academic works and the first-person narratives by amateur wolf enthusiasts—was that wolves didn’t read the books that told how they were “supposed” to behave; the only thing predictable about them was their unpredictability. Wolves as decision makers were individual persons, as Jeebee himself had seen at first hand, with Wolf.
And prediction was even more problematic if there was validity in Frank’s claim that some aspects of wolf behavior were governed not by the animal’s own highly developed cognitive system, but by a separate instinctual system—which operated largely independently of the conscious, thinking system. Instinctive behavior patterns, triggered by cues a human might not even recognize, could cause a wolf to act in a manner its own mind could not control. Predatory reactions could be triggered by the awkward, uncoordinated movements of a crippled pack mate as easily as by the thrashing about of an injured deer. Whatever companionable feeling Wolf had for Jeebee, the man’s injuries could provoke an attack. That Wolf might later experience something akin to regret was little consolation; Jeebee must either move as normally as possible when Wolf was around or remain immobile—as sick and injured wolves do.
All the time he was thinking this, he was feeling his way upstream next to the bank, the barrel end of the rifle in his right hand, the rifle butt below the water, tapping the bottom ahead of his feet like a blind person’s cane for potholes or obstacles.
So far he had been lucky, encountering neither. Nor had any roots, projecting from the bank beside him into the water, tripped him up. It was not far to the horses now. Still his mind was glass clear and diamond sharp, concentrating on searching for whatever might need to be done or endured.
Perhaps, he thought, it was his own, human instinctive system, triggered by the need to survive, that was helping him now.
But finally, he was wading around a last bend in the stream and seeing the horses where he had tethered them. It was time to look for a place where he could climb, crippled as he was, out of the stream up onto the bank. There was waist-deep water and two feet of vertical light brown earthen bank to surmount. He solved the problem at last by laying his upper body down on the bank, still holding his rifle, and then rolling his body away from the stream to pull his legs after him out of the water. He rolled over the pistol in his belt, bruising himself.
He hauled himself to his feet with the help of the rifle and limped toward the horses. Wolf was nowhere around, he was glad to see. Perhaps his fear of an instinctive attack was foolish; but he would rather not test the chance.
It was fortunate his left arm rather than his right had been damaged by the bear. He was right-handed. Nick Gage had made him practice with the pistol in his left hand, but he was just not accurate as a lefty marksman.
He bound his wounds with wet compresses made from cut and torn strips of blanket, and swallowed his first dose of antibiotic. It was Augmentin, which he had carried in his backpack from Michigan for just such a moment as this. He washed the pill down with the bag of disinfected water he had always carried at his saddle. Only then did he take time to empty his boots of water and take off the soggy socks beneath them.
He was beginning to feel his wounds now. It was not real pain he felt from them as yet. But he was conscious of them being there. But there were still things to be done before he could give in to them. It seemed that almost as soon as he had stepped out of the cold water, the swelling in his leg and arm had begun to develop and stiffen those limbs. If he was going to lose the ability to move, soon, there were things that had to be taken care of, first.
He might become unable to unload the horses. If so, he would have to leave Sally with her pack and Brute with his saddle for several days, and that was unthinkable. There were no trees here large enough so that he could rope Sally’s pack up out of Wolf’s reach—even if he had been up to climbing a tree at the moment. Even the thought of climbing a tree was ridiculous, now, hurt as he was.
The best he would be able to do would be to dump both the pack and the saddle off their backs, and leave both horses where they could reach water, as well as whatever grass was within reach.
Once the packload was lying flat on the ground, there was no way he could think of to protect its contents from Wolf. Then it occurred to him that he could drop it between the two horses; and lie on it himself. Hopefully, in that case, Wolf would not try to get at it.
It was a gamble, but he had to gamble now. For the first time he realized how even a minor wound could cripple a wolf enough to threaten its ability to survive.
Difficult as it was with one hand, he managed to untie and throw off the rope of the hitch from Sally’s load, and then, with even more difficulty, single-handed, to loosen the cinch strap holding the blanket underneath it. Crowding Sally against some willows so that the slim stems pressed the cinch strap against her far side as it slipped loose, he managed to slow the descent of the pack as he pulled it to the ground with his one good arm.
He was able to do no more than break its fall with that single arm. But he ended up with it in a not too untidy pile, which he was able to rake together so that the groundsheet would cover him and it, once he lay down upon it.
