It took a good deal of muscle on his part to transfer each one to the trailer, even once he had loosened them from the house. But he must have them. He had decided he would need solid-core, outer doors for his cave because he wanted them to be as resistant to low temperatures, wind, and snow as possible.
The frames were necessary because Jeebee had no faith in his ability to either build a door frame or hang the door within one. He had heard once that it was a tricky thing to do. The door had to be hung just right, both vertically and in the frame. In the end he got both of them up to the cave, where he put the first one into the opening he had left for it in the outer wall.
His weather front for the excavated home was now complete. Only the interior remained undone. But he could take his time about the work inside, he told himself.
He celebrated that day by taking down the wire fence. It was only late afternoon, but Wolf had already returned and watched him remove it.
To his surprise—although afterward, thinking about what he knew of wolf behavior, it should not have been —Wolf did not at once enter into the territory that the fence had guarded.
Instead, he began by taking his time about making a leisurely approach to the now rolled-up fencing, lying in the meadow a little way from where it had been set up. Finally, he got close enough to sniff it over completely, both the fencing and the angle-iron posts that had secured it. But then, little by little he came deeper into the earlier- denied space until he reached the wall itself, which he then examined closely, from one end to the other.
The next morning, after Wolf had left, Jeebee began work inside the wall.
His last work outside had been to put a roof over the end of it that was far enough away from the face of the cliff so that the space needed bridging—that space where he hoped to set up his smithy. He had needed to fit the rest of the roof tightly against the face of the bluff, digging into the actual earth, with wood slanting upward into it so that any rain would run off. Later on he would undoubtedly find chinks and openings in the roof and wall, but he could then patch them with clay. When winter came, snow and ice would help by filling any openings and freezing them shut.
He was so concerned with having the structure tight that when he finally went in at last to start work on the inner cave section, he discovered something he had completely forgotten. With the wall up and the roof in position, it was too dark inside to see what he was doing.
He had already established that the solar blanket would charge the car batteries, even if it took some time to do it. But he found that working in constant gloom, he used up the batteries’ charge faster than he could replace it.
He found his solution in connecting the batteries to the ceiling lights of the cars. The idea of using these had occurred to him earlier; but he had forgotten it. Now, it turned out to be ideal. The automobile interior lights gave him more than adequate illumination, and drained a battery only slowly.
But in the end he finally gave up and went back down to take out one of the ranch house’s unbroken windows and bring it back to put it in a space he cut in his front wall.
Accordingly, he lost another day and a half of working time before he was able to resume excavation of the cave’s interior in earnest.
He had made some preliminary sketches of how he might do the timbering. Now he began work by digging back the earth that faced the front wall from a few feet short of the end opposite to the blacksmithing area and over to the point where the bluff itself curved back to make the smithy space.
He had to pause occasionally to let dust clear the air of the cave and settle. This slowed him down still further, but he developed the habit of stepping out and doing some other little chore for a while. Eventually, however, he had created a space about four feet deep with a level floor. It was as far as he could go, simply digging.
He began the putting up of two-by-fours as studs, and building a second, interior wall, topping it off with an inner roof to hold back the sandy soil of the bluff above him. He would timber a bit, dig a little further, then timber again. Eventually, he planked between the studs of his inner wall as far as the curve of the bluff, leaving a space in it three feet in from the outer wall, and leaving a space in both outer and inner walls that would be filled by the two doors he had brought from the ranch house.
Once he had done this, he was ready to dig and timber the inside room of his cave. But his estimate of materials had been woefully short. He was forced into more trips to the ranch for used lumber and nails.
With these up at the meadow, finally, he began to work through the space of the door opening he had left in the inner wall.
He timbered as he went, and gradually excavated a room about eight feet wide and ten feet deep, with an interior ceiling over his head, both to support the earth above and keep it from trickling down upon him.
He had begun the interior room deliberately at a level a good two and a half feet above the level of the front room he had made with his two walls. Now, he was attempting to put to use something he had read about, which evidently worked in the building of igloos and snow caves. An igloo, he had read years ago, had its entrance, and a small interior area, below the level of a higher shelf on which much of the actual living was done. This arrangement caused a cold air barrier to form in the lower area. The heavier cold air below could not rise; so the warmth above was not lost to the icy outside temperatures.
The theory was undoubtedly excellent, but he found that in practice, even with both doors open to the outside, after he had worked a short while, the air began to grow bad. There was no real circulation into the area where he was digging.
He was forced to stop. Clearly he would have to provide some air circulation to the cave.
Happily, he had already made some plans to solve not only the circulation problem but the problem of heating the cave at the same time.
He went up to the top of the bluff, and by measuring, positioned himself over the space he had already cleared in the original hole, below. He began to dig a slanting hole down from there for about twelve feet. At this point he was sure he was well below the ceiling he would be excavating up to for the inner cave.
He went back to digging within the cave and soon, at what would be the left side of the inner room, as seen from the entrance, broke through to the point where the hole had been opened to the top of the bluff. He had brought up a length of chimney pipe from a dusty, long-unused, potbellied heating stove in one of the outbuildings of the ranch. He poked this up through the hole to just above ground level at the bluff’s top and anchored the pipe in place. Then he began building a clay-mortared stone fireplace and chimney up to and around the pipe.
Now that he had ventilation in one wall of the cave, he returned to the digging. Air came in through the open doors and was warmed by his body heat and exited up the pipe. When he experimented with the doors closed, still enough air leaked in to keep it fresh while he worked. Whether it would be safe to build a fire in the fireplace was another question.
He was extremely doubtful that his crude heating plant would work at all, or that if it did, it would not also smoke him out or otherwise asphyxiate him. But he built a fire in it with the doors open and there was a moment of extreme jubilation on his part when he found that it drew quite well. Even with both doors closed, it would draw, and the firelight within it illuminated the cave somewhat.
The illumination was not great, but it was enough to let him do without even the interior car lights if he had to.
It was only a stop-gap form of illumination, but would have to do for the moment. It was time for him to go hunting again. He had been doing a minimum amount of gathering meat, grudging the time that it took away from his work. But he was now scraping bottom from his last slaughtering trip to the flatlands, and the last of the meat had not really kept too well. It had not made him sick. But even though the nights were much cooler, outdoors it was still nowhere near refrigerator, let alone freezer temperatures.
Accordingly, that evening, by an outside fire—for Wolf would still not go into the inner room of the cave—he made plans to go down to the flatlands for at least a couple of days. The first he would spend hunting. The next would be at the ranch, gathering up at least several more of the vehicle batteries.
The air was chill in spite of the fire and he thought he felt a hint of snow in the dark night air around him. He changed his mind. He had originally been thinking of riding Brute down and taking Sally along as a packhorse to carry the meat and the batteries—which together would not make too much of a load for her.
Now he decided to take the trailer. He had put off bringing up the skis for it. He should get those and keep them with the trailer; after first finding out how they went on. He would need to have the necessary nuts, bolts, and wrenches—or whatever—with him to put them on in case he was caught unexpectedly by snow.
