CHAPTER 29
It was a long, hard struggle back to the cave. In spite of the fact that the air temperature stayed low, the horses found most of the going slippery, and the trailer was evidently a problem to pull, particularly when they ran into smaller drifts.
Jeebee went ahead of them to break trail and to make sure that the horses did not wander into a drift too deep to pull the trailer through. Its only load was the sledge, but under these conditions that was enough.
They reached the meadow in late afternoon. The bright, cloudless sky overhead, and the fact that the surrounding trees blocked out much of what little wind stirred, gave the meadow an appearance of being warmer than it actually was. Jeebee unhitched the trailer without bothering to take the sledge out, unharnessed the horses, and put them in the corral.
He went directly to the shelter of the cave for himself and built a fire in the fireplace. Wolf, who at first had been reluctant to venture inside the newly built wall at all, had some days since worked himself up to coming into the outer part. He had inspected every feature of the space minutely. Much of the wood bore exploratory chew marks, and one of the vertical studs had obvious stains. Wolf had found a corner of the wall where Jeebee had built a rough frame for a cloth weather barrier to stand between the smithy and the rest of the lower front room, and adopted it as a nice place to curl up and sleep.
Jeebee closed the outer door, now, but did not latch it; merely pulling it to, and fastening it with a loop of leather thong after Wolf followed him in as far as the front room. He was confident that Wolf would push on the door if he wanted to get out and would discover the thong. Even if he didn’t recognize that it held the door closed, he would almost certainly bite it—and thereafter Wolf would go for the thong whenever he wanted the door open.
Jeebee lit one of his battery-fed interior car lights and kept it lit long enough to get a fire started in the fireplace, using the dead wood and tinder he now kept stored beside it, ready for use.
The fire blazed up. It began to warm the interior room almost immediately. Jeebee turned off the electric light. Looking around in the firelight at the unfinished cave, he thought that it was not much of a place to come home to, offering little more than warmth and shelter. Only its front wall was finished. Its two side walls, including the one with the fireplace, were still in process of building, and the innermost wall was simply a slope of dirt and sand that every so often crumbled loose and slid down to join the dirt underfoot. Jeebee told himself that he must get around eventually to flooring the interior room, once he had finished sealing the walls, ceiling, and all else.
Meanwhile he had his fireplace. He had moved his packload bed inside and put those things like bacon, wrapped, up on the yet-unceilinged rafters, out of reach of anyone but himself.
Feeling secure, therefore, in a sudden burst now of good feeling at being out of the weather and warm again, Jeebee left the interior door open and tried to coax Wolf to come in by the fire. But the most he was able to achieve was a hesitant muzzle thrust partway through the door opening, just above the threshold.
Jeebee gave up on his coaxing. He turned his attention to moving his bed close to the fire for the night. Near it, even with the inner door open, and the outer one barely closed, he was comfortable enough. There was plenty of draft coming in to keep the fire going. The only thing to concern himself about was that he might run short of firewood in the night.
He went forth into the cold once more to gather sufficient heavy pieces of wood to last the night, and went to bed. He knew he would be roused by the increasing chill from time to time to add wood to the fire before it went out.
The last thing he remembered before dropping off was a bit of dirt falling from the unfinished ceiling into his hair. He brushed the sand and dirt away, sleepily, and muzzily reminded himself that he needed to make himself a cap for winter use. Fully dressed and feeling the warmth of the fire on his face, he drifted off, thinking that he would try out the snowshoes tomorrow.
But even during the night, the weather warmed. Jeebee woke up, with the fire out entirely, but was still comfortable underneath the two blankets over him and inside the clothes he was wearing.
He felt his way across the short distance of earth to the inner door and opened it to see the early-morning light. The outer door was standing wide, and the chewed remnant of the thong still hung from the jamb.
Wolf had wanted out, but he had not left the meadow. He was curled up in the sunlight outside. He got to his feet, shook himself, and came over to greet Jeebee as Jeebee stumbled out of the door. They had the brief interchange of greetings that Wolf usually insisted on before leaving mornings. Then he was gone.
Jeebee went through his own private morning process. He had changed his mind about the snowshoes. The day was warming up toward normal autumnal temperatures, and the snow was not so much melting as simply evaporating about him. A soft wind blew.
The most urgent thing, he realized, was what he had set out to do the day before. That was hunt for food. He hated to impose on the horses after their long haul through the snow of yesterday. But if one of them could stand the imposition better, it would be Brute. So it was Brute he saddled, and took Sally on a lead rein, not toward the ranch at all, but directly down and out into the flatlands to look for cattle.
Once down on the flat, however, he changed his mind. He angled southeastward until he hit the line of poles that had once carried electricity to the ranch. They paralleled a road that he had assumed was the ranch’s access to some main highway, somewhere to the east. The snow was now only a thin coating of icy crust on the land.
It had occurred to him that with the landscape suddenly all the same color, landmarks he had unconsciously become used to would be either hidden or changed, and it would be wise to have an anchor point. He could use his orienteering skills, but the poles were visible for some distance and could serve as an easy reference line. He could go out along them, and if he felt like looking northward for possible cattle, he could go in that direction with the assurance that if he only turned back southward, he would eventually come upon the line of poles again, which would lead him back to the ranch and familiar territory.
With the mountains behind him there would be no lack of at least two high points that could be seen for miles. If he took bearings on two such points, this would give him a point he could always get back to. It was almost impossible to get lost if you had a compass and a mountainous horizon.
It would not be the most direct route if he had to do that, back to the meadow and his cave, but it was a sure way of getting home again.
He followed the line of poles and rode slowly out along it, slightly south of east as to direction, according to his compass.
He stayed with the poles, but both south and north of them he swept the horizon steadily with his binoculars for any sight of cattle.
About midday he spotted some specks south of him, in the distance. He had counted poles as he went and he was just past the two hundred and sixteenth of these when he spotted whatever it was he was seeing to the south.
Now he wished he had had the forethought to bring along the hatchet he had found at the ranch and carried up to the cave, where it had proved to be very handy indeed. However, he had the next best thing in his smaller, working sheath knife at his belt.
Using this, he hacked a strip from the two hundred and sixteenth pole, exposing the lighter color of new wood by removing gray, weathered surface. The slash was on the south side of the pole, and should be recognizable through his binoculars from some little distance. He put the knife back in its sheath, redid the button closure, and once more located the specks with his binoculars.
They had moved, if at all, not very far from where he had first seen them. He rode toward them.
He was lucky. It was a cow accompanied by her almost full-grown calf. The calf had nowhere near the weight that it would carry once it was full grown, but it stood nearly as tall as its mother, and its frame was nearly as large.
Like the other cattle he had found and shot before, these two let him get quite close before they showed signs of moving off. Nearly all these cattle must have been used to being approached by humans on horseback and in vehicles, up until just a few years before, and there were not that many predators around that came either with horses or with vehicles to threaten them.
