There was a reddish dampness on the hair around Wolf’s muzzle.
A sudden wild thought came to him. It was impossible, and under ordinary standards, unthinkable. But he had felt the fear of a weakness from lack of food that could keep him from surviving. He had nothing to lose by trying.
He pulled himself up on one elbow. Putting his face right up to Wolf’s, he deliberately licked at the moist fur around Wolf’s mouth.
The taste on his tongue was salty.
For a second nothing seemed to happen. Then Wolf seemed to cough, and as Jeebee pulled back his head, Wolf regurgitated onto the blankets some chunks of raw, red-gray meat, which steamed in the cool morning air.
Jeebee felt within him a leaping of ridiculous joy. It had been the craziest of possible chances. But he had taken advantage of the way wolves brought back food to their pups, and to the mother of pups when she was denned up with them. The regurgitation was reflexive—another of the social instincts that made it possible for wolf pups to enjoy an extended childhood and develop the intelligence they would need for group hunting. The wolf who had eaten could deliberately put himself in the position—as Wolf must have been doing these last few days— ofgiving up the food he had swallowed. But once he had been licked about the muzzle as pups of his species did instinctively, and Jeebee had just done, the reflex to regurgitate was uncontrollable.
It was a miracle out of nature itself. One of the writings on wolves had mentioned that an adult wolf would even bring food in this fashion to a den-bound mate—or even to another adult pack mate who might be too sick, or otherwise unable to get about, to travel or hunt.
The last seldom happened, Jeebee had gathered. But it could. It had happened now.
He realized suddenly that Wolf was looking at him, bright-eyed. Jeebee started to touch him in thanks, then realized that was not what Wolf was waiting for.
Jeebee changed his motion and bent down over the chunks of meat. Ordinarily the thought of eating something vomited up, whether by an animal or another human, would be nauseating. But Jeebee knew that Wolf gulped his food whole. There was no real chewing or digestion done in his mouth. His stomach acids would have begun to digest the meat only from the surface, and there could not have been time enough for that to work very much. At the most, the acids might have started to tenderize it; also, they would have effectively sterilized it, being very strong acids.
Acid would destroy any bacteria, even that which might be in the meat itself.
Jeebee put down his head and mumbled at the chunks with his mouth, pretending to eat.
Evidently, his act was good enough to satisfy Wolf. For when he lifted his head again, the other was gone. Jeebee took his water bag, which luckily was full, and washed off the meat, chunk by chunk, until it was thoroughly clean. Then, with fingers that shook with eagerness, he built a small fire, even though it was bright daylight. As soon as it was putting out anything like sufficient heat to cook, he threaded the chunks on a sharpened stick and held them over the flames.
His mouth was continually filling with saliva, which he alternately swallowed and spat out, as the chunks sizzled above the fire. He held out against the hunger in him as long as he could, then pulled the stick to him and began to eat the still-half-raw meat.
He had not tasted anything as wonderful since he had found the canned food in the root cellar, back before he had met Merry, Paul, and Nick. Fortunately, he remembered how the canned stew had made him sick, suddenly gulped down on a long-empty stomach. He was careful to eat slowly and with pauses; this time he avoided being ill.
From then on he licked Wolf’s whiskers whenever the other came to sniff at him, and Wolf brought him meat at fairly frequent intervals. This way he survived another week. At the end of that time his ankle had improved to the point where he could hobble around on it, even without the crutch.
At last he felt able to stand on Sally and let down the pack-load long enough to get flour and bacon out of it.
Fortified by several days of this food, he finally ventured to saddle the smaller packhorse, as the calmer and more surefooted of the two, and take the rifle down into the lowlands by a route that avoided the shale slope. There, he had the good luck to find another midsummer calf and kill it. He butchered from it what he estimated to be about thirty pounds of its flesh, with none of that weight being bone.
It was a larger load than he had tried to bring back on Brute, simply because Brute would not endure carrying the raw and bloody meat in any way on the saddle. Sally was more complacent. She was not only willing to carry the extra thirty pounds, but also Jeebee, since he could never have walked that distance by himself.
It was an effort above and beyond the call of duty for the little mare. She had to climb slopes with nearly two hundred and twenty pounds of burden, counting Jeebee, the saddle, and meat, but she struggled back up through the hills to the campsite without protest.
He pegged her out by the stream in an area of fresh browse, with deep gratitude, and a resolution that she could stand idle for at least the next few days while she recovered.
He cooked the meat. During the process, Wolf appeared. Jeebee squatted over the pile of raw beef, guarding it, but threw what he estimated to be about ten pounds of it, piece by piece, to his partner while the rest finished cooking. He figured that Wolf had earned his share of the calf meat. Besides, it would have been impossible to protect all of the food from him, in any case, while Jeebee was cooking it.
Once the beef looked done, Jeebee took what he had been able to guard and wrapped this in one of his blankets, which he tied into a bag with some of his extra thongs.
With apologies, he pressed Sally once more into service after all so that he could kneel on her back. He tied the bundle of cooked meat as close as possible to three of the ropes holding up the net of the main packload. His new package hung down a little farther than the packload itself. But Jeebee had put it up at arm’s length from a kneeling position on Sally’s back, and the trunk was absolutely vertical.
Jeebee did not think that Wolf could leap high enough to get his teeth into it. Wolf watched from below.
The daylight was ending. Jeebee went back to his single blanket and the fire. Wolf lay down opposite him and regarded Jeebee somberly.
Jeebee knew how the other was feeling and did not blame him. By Wolf’s standards, Jeebee should have eaten as much as he could hold of the meat, and then left it to Wolf to fill himself up with as much as he could hold.
In fact, Jeebee could have done so. But he knew that even with his stomach full, Wolf would still keep snatching up pieces of meat and running off with them to cache them someplace else, until all was gone.
He apologized to Wolf—not that it made any difference to the other, but it made Jeebee feel better—and then sat down with his back against the tree trunk, watching the fire and thinking deeply. He was on the verge of probably the most serious decision he had made since leaving Stoketon.
CHAPTER 27
The inescapable problem on his mind had been whether his ankle would be healed enough, soon enough, so that he could at least ride Brute. So that in a few days at most, he would be able to get the packload down from the tree and the horses ready to travel. But now that question had given way to one about whether he should go on at all, and try to find his brother’s ranch this year.
It was already August. In mid-August, the traveling should be all right. But by late August, there would be the chance of a freakishly early snowstorm. By late September, snow would begin to be a certainty, even if it was not frequent and steady.
That gave him no more than two months in which to find his brother’s ranch, and he had estimated it could be anywhere within over a thousand square miles of territory. Those thousand-plus square miles would be down in the flatlands. He would be moving across the property of other people who did not know him, and who might not even know, let alone like, his brother.
If he still had not found the ranch by the time the first heavy snowstorm, or series of snowstorms, caught him, he would not last long down below. Even if he was able to make it from where the snow caught him, up into
