His thoughts went back to the people who had lived below. No, there could be no one alive down there.
He realized abruptly that he was trying to talk himself out of something.
It would be the worst sort of foolishness to go down there. As it was at this moment, the trail of the raiders would draw any attention, if and when the neighbors showed up after all; and if they brought in dogs. Should he go down now, his own trail would be freshest. Though, to be honest, if the books had been correct in telling him that a wolf had to be almost on top of a day-old footprint in order to pick up its scent, it was unlikely that domestic dogs could find or follow anything older.
No, again; it was mostly the thought of the long walk down that hill, the very hard climb back up again, and the possibility of what might result from his going, that made it foolish to go.
But if he did not, he would hear a hurt and abandoned child crying in the back of his mind for the rest of his life.
He got to his feet with the help of his crutch and began cautiously to descend the slope before him. The slope here was greater than the grade a few hundred yards to his right that he must have come up the night before. But straight down would be quicker and he must think about getting back to the horses.
He had gone only a few steps before he realized that Wolf was not with him. He looked back and saw Wolf still standing on the crest of the hill looking down at him.
“That’s right,” Jeebee said to him, “you’re not a damn fool like me.”
He turned his gaze and his attention back to the business of descending the slope. He went down with the end of his crutch dug in, and his feet dug in, sideways to the descent. The last thing he needed now was a fall. The pitch here was not so bad that he would slide or tumble any distance, but the very idea of a fall on the hurt leg and arm made him wince.
He reached the ranch and began his examination of what was left there. He checked all places under or behind which a body might be, and found seven of them. A grown woman, three men, two boys, and a girl—the oldest of the youngsters looking about sixteen. The youngest, which was the girl, looked as if she had been about twelve. They were all dead, and had been dead for some long hours. He did not touch them.
Leaving the ranch buildings, he once more attacked the hill behind it.
There were undoubtedly tools and other things the raiders would not have wanted but he could use, still in the house and outbuildings. Even while searching the house, he had seen a short-handled, three-pound hammer untouched by fire in one of the outbuildings. It was a one-handed sledge or maul, of the kind Nick Gage had described to him. Ideal for use with the sort of backwoods forge Nick had described and Jeebee had lusted to build for his own use someday. But he could not take it now. Even with the crutch, he would have all he could do to make it back to the horses. Besides, the afternoon was getting on.
He turned at last to retrace his way up the slope. The climb was difficult. When he came to the top at last, to relatively level ground, he sat and indulged in rest longer than he had planned. Wolf, he saw, had disappeared again and the day was moving on. Finally, he struggled to his feet and began the long, slow series of small journeys necessary to get back to the horses.
By the time he got there, his arm and leg had begun to hurt very badly indeed. He checked his watch and was relieved to see that somehow he had used up close to six hours since his last Dilaudid. He was entitled to another, although that put him back on the four-pill-a-day dosage he had started with right after the accident. This was the last of the seven days that he had accepted was the most he could risk taking the medication, without danger of addiction.
Beyond the safe limit for Dilaudid, he could fall back on the Tylenol and aspirin that he also carried. But he imagined now how weak a substitute these would be for the more potent drug.
Nonetheless, he took a Dilaudid, rested awhile until the pain had begun to recede, then set about finding dry wood for a fire.
He got the fire going and the horses tethered in areas of fresh graze, but still next to the small stream. He sat down to gaze into the fire with his back to a tree. The afternoon was fading and he drifted off into a doze.
A large, sticky tongue slathered his right cheek unexpectedly, and a paw landed on his right shoulder. He woke to twilight and the return of Wolf.
They went through the usual ceremony of greeting and Wolf lay down by the fire. Jeebee, thoroughly roused now, set about adding some heavy chunks of dry wood to the flames and getting some of his small remaining store of food from the backpack, which he had prudently tied on top of the cinch strap he had left tied around Brute.
Wolf was by now too accustomed to Jeebee’s customary bed of tarpaulin-covered saddle and packload to indulge his instinctive urge to tear it apart. Jeebee ate, standing, then went to the load. He fished out another blanket and, rolling himself in the two he now had, lay looking at the fire and Wolf through half-closed eyes until he dozed again; and, dozing, dropped at last into solid sleep.
He slept long and hard, waking only briefly once or twice and going very quickly back to sleep again. Part of the night he dreamed that he and Merry were busily shopping to furnish a new house they had just bought.
When he woke a second time, the sun was well up in the sky, its light filtering through the upper parts of the trees near him. On first waking, his arm and leg hardly hurt, and his scalp not at all. But when he got up from his night’s bed, the now-familiar pain started.
Still, it was not nearly as bad as it had been, even on the day before when he had first woken up. Also, his watch told him it was nearly fourteen hours since the last Dilaudid. He was tempted to try to see if he could get by on aspirin alone.
Creakily, he found the aspirin and swallowed two with water from a water bag. Then he went about the business of restarting the fire. It had died in the night, the last embers probably close to morning. In spite of the fact that he was now seasoned in sleeping out of doors, the chill had crept deep inside him, and he shivered as he waited for the first small flame to build into something that would throw some heat his way.
Wolf was already up and gone, of course.
Warmed after a bit by the growing flames, Jeebee rose from the fire and went to Brute. He allowed himself another meager handful of the trail mix from his dwindling food supply, telling himself he would try to cook something once he had gotten his body warmed to full life and ready to move.
His watch informed him it was twelve minutes past ten in the morning. He was reproaching himself with having slept a good chunk of the day away when he realized suddenly that for some weeks now he must have been on Mountain, rather than Central Time, and set the digital display of the watch’s clock mode back an hour.
The aspirin was proving itself useless against the pain. Like all hurts, his seemed to bite at him ever more viciously as he began to pay attention to them. He gave in and took a half Dilaudid, telling himself he would hold off for at least another six hours before taking the second half. After taking the half he waited expectantly. Finally, the pain began to back off somewhat. In half an hour it was ignorable.
He had been lying on his bed as he waited. Now he got to his feet, using the staff of his crutch simply as a staff. The crosspiece had come completely loose as the leather thongs failed. It struck him that probably it wasonly rawhide that shrank itself really tight if it was put on wet and allowed to dry. Or, perhaps, it had been stretched as it dried because of the wobbling it had done as he walked. In any case, once on his feet with the aid of the staff, he found he could limp around that way.
The horses were still finding graze where he had tied them. He went back to Sally’s packload and routed out flour, bacon, and a frying pan. He hated to dig into the bacon this early, but he needed strength and that meant he had to have food, and this was the only reachable food left with the high caloric content and in quantities that would fill that need.
He made a bannock with the flour, water, and bacon fat and rolled the fried and rewarmed bacon inside it.
With the food inside him, he literally felt as if he had been given a new lease on life. He went through the complicated procedure of rigging up the block and tackle as high on the trunk of one of the lodgepole pines as he could reach to chop notches for its holding rope. With this, he finally lifted the packload, once more enclosed in the net, onto Sally’s back again.
He saddled Brute with his one good arm and a knee in the horse’s belly as he tightened the cinch strap.
He was ready to travel.
What he was looking for now was a site for a semipermanent camp. Someplace a little larger and more suitable than where he was. Water was the first requirement, and he already had that in this stream. The only question about where to look therefore was upstream or downstream? Upstream, then.
