now. You’re safe. I’ll take care of you.”
He took the thermometer from his backpack, the same one he had carried in his medical kit from Stoketon, and put it in her mouth. After five minutes by his watch he took it out. She was not running a fever, as his cold hands had led him to believe. Instead her body temperature was a full three degrees below normal.
He piled everything warm he had upon her and built up the fire in the fireplace.
It came back to him then that the first thing to do with a person who has been overchilled is to get hot food into her. He had kept a soup continuously making over the fire when it was lit—a sort of pot-au-feu—using a bent metal rod from the ruined ranch house. He had stuck the rod into the ground beside the fireplace, its upper six inches bent at a right angle out over the flames, with a hook bent into its further end to hold the wire handle of a pot he had also taken from the ranch house. Swivel-ing the rod now, he put the pot above the flames.
Having done this, he went back and sat holding Merry’s hand while the soup heated. She lay with her eyes closed, and he did not try to talk to her. When the soup was heated, he filled a soup bowl and brought it to her.
The packload bed was so low that even kneeling beside it, he was too high. Still kneeling, he sat down on his heels and put the bowl of soup on the ground beside him. With his left arm he lifted her upper body into a half- sitting position and lifted a spoonful of the soup to her lips.
At first she seemed only able to take small sips. Then, she took larger ones. After a bit she was swallowing eagerly. But abruptly she closed her lips and shook her head slightly.
“No more,” she said. “Let me down.”
He laid her back on the bed. She closed her eyes and went almost immediately to sleep. He continued to sit beside her, feeding the fire and making sure the covers stayed piled on top of her. She had volunteered nothing about Paul, Nick, and the wagon. It was obvious something had happened to them or she would have mentioned them by now.
Plainly, there was a reason for her not speaking of them. Jeebee understood this out of his new knowledge of the world and himself. So he would not ask. When she was ready to tell him, she would. He suddenly remembered the horses.
It was probably better to take a chance and go out now to take care of them.
He did so, first unloading the bundle of meat from Sally. He put it safely within the latch door of the inner room, then took both horses to the corral and removed their saddles and blankets. He left them there and returned to Merry, who seemed not to have stirred. He took the pot of soup off the fire, and kneeling by the fire, filled a larger pot with chunks of the recently butchered calf meat and water.
This time he used another rod, bent roughly into a Y-shape at one end, to help support the increased weight of the bent-over end of the first rod. He hung the pot with the water and raw meat in it above the flames and began the slow process of cooking the meat he had just butchered.
CHAPTER 30
Two hours later, when Jeebee took Merry’s temperature again, it was up to normal. He breathed a sigh of relief and went on with his business of cooking the meat. Wolf came and scratched at the door, but Jeebee ignored him, and after a while the scratching ceased.
Merry slept steadily through that night and through most of the following day, waking for only short intervals. With the second evening, however, he took her temperature again on general principles and found it slightly up. It was only a small rise, barely over a single degree when Jeebee checked it shortly after eight o’clock on his watch, but it concerned him. She seemed no more than exhausted to him, but he did not trust his medical knowledge to be sure that the small temperature increase might not have some unrecognized importance. But by dawn she was a half degree below normal, which Jeebee took to be as much a sign of health as any temperature reading could be.
Wolf scratched on the door again and whimpered outside once more.
“Are you up to seeing him?” Jeebee asked Merry, and then realized he had mentioned Wolf in exactly the same way as he might have brought up the topic of a visiting relative, who wanted to visit.
“Yes,” said Merry, “for a few minutes, just. But I’d like to see him.”
Jeebee went to the door to open it. He did not know whether Merry realized that part of Wolf’s importuning to be let in was probably because of his curiosity. He would have become highly interested on scenting and hearing Merry here in the cave, when he had last seen her many days and miles away.
“Tell me when you want me to get him out,” he said over his shoulder to Merry, and opened the door.
Recently, Wolf had summoned up courage to venture first into the inner room of the cave, then to investigate all of it, and finally to make himself at home there. Jeebee had had to work out a method of evicting him, when his visits became too extended, or whenever he looked suspiciously like he was about to defecate or urinate. Wolf was inclined to relieve himself wherever he happened to be at the moment, and accounts Jeebee had read by people who had reared wolves in their homes agreed that wolves were extraordinarily resistant to housebreaking.
Jeebee opened the door, and Wolf bounded up inside, boldly enough, but checked after entering. He stood, with his attention riveted on Merry in the bed and his head cocked in an attitude of uncertainty, as though he didn’t quite recognize her.
“Hello, old Wolf,” Merry crooned softly. “Did you come to see me? Come on, Wolf. I haven’t seen you for a long time… ”
As soon as she spoke, Wolf pushed past Jeebee and shambled toward the bed. His ears were rolled back deferentially and his tail wagged slightly, but his head was high, signaling neither timidity nor appeasement—just a friendly and comfortable renewal of old acquaintance.
Arrived there, he licked at her face. She tried to dodge the tongue and reached out to scratch in the winter- thick fur under his neck. Wolf slipped quickly into the enthusiasm of his normal greeting, and the more Merry tried to restrain him, the more insistently he pressed his attentions.
“That’s enough,” Merry said finally.
Jeebee stepped forward and scooped Wolf up, one arm under his belly and the other between his forelegs. Wolf’s chest was cradled in the crook of his arm, and his neck was jammed against Jeebee’s shoulder, so Wolf could not turn and snap at his face in protest. Carrying the other so, Jeebee pushed his way through first the inner door, then the outer one. Outside, he kicked the outer door closed hard enough so it latched behind them. Then he set Wolf down.
Wolf tried to get back in through the front door, but Jeebee stood where he was.
“It’s no use,” Jeebee told him. “She’s got to rest. Later on you can see as much of her as you want to. How about that?”
As usual, neither the words nor the tone of Jeebee’s voice made any visible impression on Wolf, where they might have soothed the ruffled feelings of a dog. But, also as usual, Jeebee felt better voicing his thoughts aloud. After a few seconds, Wolf gave up trying to open the latched door, gave Jeebee a petulant stare, and stalked off. As suddenly as ever, he pulled his vanishing act, and the meadow was empty.
Jeebee waited a moment more to make sure he was gone, then let himself back in through the outside door, latching it behind him again and returning to Merry.
“I guess I’m weaker than I thought,” Merry said as he came in.
“You’ve got plenty of reason to be,” Jeebee said. His voice sounded gruff in his own ears. “Sleep, now. Or would you like something more to eat first?”
“No more food,” said Merry. “You’ve filled me up to where I could go five days without eating.”
“You’d probably gone five days without when I met you,” said Jeebee.
“Not quite,” said Merry. But her eyelids fluttered as she said it. A second later she was asleep again.
On the morning of the fourth day, her need for sleep and her general exhaustion seemed mostly to have left her. She woke when Jeebee roused himself. They could not see out the window he had put in the front wall with both doors closed, but Jeebee knew from habit that it was barely dawn. This morning saw Merry bright-eyed and looking almost as he had last remembered her at the wagon.
She insisted on rising, and frying some of the bacon herself, then making what she christened as their
