survive. If he had enough warning of the onset of winter to get off into the hills and den up like an animal in one of the holes in the earth like the one above the shale slope or the one here…
But even then, survival was unlikely.
His ankle was beginning to hurt again. He tried three aspirin to head off the pain. In any case he had some days now to do nothing else but think.
CHAPTER 26
Sometime in the night, pain woke Jeebee. Luckily, the night sky was as clear as the daytime sky had been for several weeks now. That could not last. They were getting to the end of summer and the good weather was bound to break.
He fumbled in the medicine container, found the Dilaudid container by feel, and brought it out, opening it with hands that trembled from pain and the urgency for relief. He stopped himself from taking it just in time. He reclosed the container with extra care and went searching for the Tylenol. Rationally, he knew that taking more than the recommended dose would not help cut the pain more; all the same, he counted out four. Then came a search for the water bag, which had evidently been moved by his body as he slept.
He located it less than an arm’s length away under the flap of tarp, and swallowed water from it to get the pills down. He was shaking now from chill, awake enough again to feel the cold. He scraped together some of the dry wood he had saved and got the fire going. But it cast only feeble heat as the flames slowly caught.
Instinct drove him to movement to warm himself. He crawled around and managed to find more fuel for the fire. Finally, his shivering stopped.
Wolf, curled up beyond the flames, with his bushy tail over his nose tip, regarded Jeebee with drowsy eyes.
He could not go on like this, without some kind of cover to hold in his body heat. He would die of exposure as soon as he ran out of fallen branches close enough to find by firelight. But the blankets were all in the packload up out of his reach. There was no way for him to get his hands high enough even to pull one out—
Swearing at himself for being such an idiot, he started off on hands and knees toward the dark shapes of the horses. Even in the dark, Sally’s silhouette and smaller size distinguished her from Brute.
Crawling to the side of her that was away from Brute, he literally climbed up her leg, pulling himself to his feet. Brute would not have put up with that for a moment, but Sally patiently let herself be used as a series of handholds.
“Good girl,” he panted. Sally turned her head to look at him through the dark. He crouched, jumped upward mightily on his good foot, and twisted; somehow he managed to throw his hurt leg up and over her back. The pain of the movement almost blacked him out for a second. A fury in him helped to beat it back. He pulled himself up on her. She braced herself automatically against his off-center weight as he climbed.
Finally on her back, he pulled himself forward along her neck and urged her up to the tree to which her halter was attached. He untied it and, with knee pressures and heel touches, steered her to the tree holding the packload.
He halted her beside it. He could just make out the dark bulk of it, like an enormous morel mushroom, clinging to the dark tree trunk overhead.
“Steady now, girl,” he said to Sally, “stand steady!”
Clinging to the tree trunk, he pulled himself up until he was kneeling on Sally’s broad back. The bone of her spine bit, hard and uncomfortable, into the bones of his lower legs. He ignored the discomfort. Reaching up as high as he could in this position, he felt his hands grip and hold on the netted plastic that carried the packload.
It was too dark to see where the edges of the plastic tarpaulin came close together under the flap of the one corner of it he had draped over the edges as a rain roof. But he felt his way through its folds until his fingers recognized the tarp’s edges, then worked his hands inside and felt for the rough-soft surface of his sleeping blankets.
And found them.
A few minutes later, triumphant, he was climbing down to a position back astride Sally, with three blankets wadded in his arms. Shortly after that, he was urging Sally back to the tree to which she had originally been tied.
He had been tempted to ride her to the fire and tether her to a tree beside it. But it would be unfair to tie her up where she could not drink. Once more he crossed the ground on hands and knees. Wolf had risen to his feet to stare at Jeebee as he approached. Jeebee had tucked the blankets inside his jacket for fear Wolf would be impelled to grab any loose ends in his teeth.
But Wolf made no move. In fact, if anything, he seemed a little wary of Jeebee’s shape, swollen by the blankets.
Jeebee made it back to his place by the fire, spread out the blankets, and gratefully rolled himself up in their double thickness. It was not until all this was done that Wolf lay down again. Thumped down, rather, with a grunt that sounded almost like a grumble.
Jeebee did not care. The Tylenol was taking hold. It touched the pain only lightly, but now that he had quit throwing it around, the leg seemed to recover a bit on its own. In moments Jeebee was warm; and shortly after that he was asleep once more.
When he woke the next day, Wolf was not to be seen. Jeebee found himself oddly worried by this. Since that evening Wolf had approached him with what Jeebee now knew to be submission behavior, Wolf had seldom left the campsite without touching base, first, with Jeebee, after the latter woke in the morning.
Did the leaving today signal changes in Wolf’s attitude toward him? There could be drawbacks as well as advantages to being accepted by Wolf as a pack mate.
But Jeebee was in no state to ponder that question at the moment. It was full morning and the pain of his ankle was gnawing at him again. He took more Tylenol, only three this time.
They did not seem to help at all. He lay there, sweating, but finally decided that while it hurt badly, the discomfort was not insupportable—at least as long as he did not move the ankle.
He found himself very thirsty and drank deeply from his full water bag, until he remembered the difficulty he might have refilling either or both bags now that he had the bad ankle. He checked himself then and his body reminded him of other necessities. He badly needed to urinate, and he would at least have to move away from his bedding to do so.
He moved, therefore, crawling sideways off the rise of land he had lain on, trying to hold the bad ankle in the air so that it would not be dragged. A sudden increase in pain made him grunt as he jarred the ankle while dropping the several inches from his sleeping mound.
He had counted on the thick folds of the blanket splint to cushion the ankle at least to some extent in his movement. But the pain was so abrupt and fierce that it was as if there was no cloth between the injured body part and the ground.
He lay for some minutes, waiting for the hurt to subside before trying to move again.
The pain went down slightly—or perhaps it was only his swollen bladder, insistent, that started him moving again. At any rate, he pulled himself a little farther sideways, then swiveled until he lay along the edge of the slope to the river below. His hand shaking, he managed to unbutton the stiff metal buttons of the work pants he had gotten from the wagon, and at last allow himself relief.
It was only afterward that he realized he should have brought at least one of the water bags with him so that he could take advantage of having moved this far to fill it from the running water of the river, a body’s length upstream.
At first he thought that once having made it back to his bed, he would never be able to face the thought of another trip, this time not only to the top of the bank, but down the sharp stones of it to the water’s edge. But once he had made it back, he realized that he would do it. Whatever he must do to stay alive he would do, in the end, as long as his body held out. And if he would do it in the end, why not now, before the point of desperation set in?
So he went after his water, and got it.
