The snow cover on the ground built up rapidly. Jeebee was only able to make two more trips with the trailer. After that, he was reduced to going on snowshoe, without the horses, and pulling the sledge behind him.
In the foothills, particularly among the trees, the depth of the snow cover was exceedingly varied. Some areas were only very lightly covered. Others were ten feet or more deep in drifts. The shale slope was now a single glistening slope of unknown depth, and the less steep slope at the top of the bluff that crowned it was beginning to build up a massive, many-feet-deep cliff of drifted snow, which overhung all the slope below, threateningly.
Jeebee, after checking the area from a respectful distance, ignored it completely. It might be safe to try to cross it with the sledge, but there was no point in taking unnecessary chances. By this time he was familiar with the foothills in the area in any case, and had a variety of routes available to him down to the flatlands.
He settled on one that took him by means of folds of land, either through relatively sheltered, treed areas or down open slopes that were gentle enough so that he would be able to get the sledge back up them.
Several times, he had tried riding the sledge like a child’s sleigh down a slope. But it was almost impossible to guide. The fourth time it landed him deep in a drift that it took him some minutes to dig himself out of. He did not try again.
The ranch, when he had time and reason to visit it, was effectively being buried. The part of the ranch house that had been opened to the elements by fire was drifted deep with snow. Most of the outbuildings either had drifts within them or about them. No part of it any longer offered the shelter that it had given from wind and sleet, on the occasion of his overnight visit, a little earlier in the fall.
His life became a simple one of working on the cave and at the forge. He steadily enlarged and boarded in the cave. He also began real work at the forge, as much to learn from experience as to make what they needed—but in want of both.
Most of what he hammered into shape were things for the inner room in the cave. He made a more sturdy and permanent support for the hooked rod that had suspended kettles and pots over the flames of the fireplace. He also made brackets and support for shelving. Little by little, the inner cave was becoming more homelike.
Wolf had furred out magnificently with the cold weather. He still slept in his favorite corner of the cold room up front. It was evidently uncomfortable for him, fur-coated as he was, to stay in the warmth of the inner cave for any length of time at all. Still he insisted on coming in for his morning and evening greetings, particularly if he had been away from the cave.
Most of the storm time, however, he spent in that same corner, sleeping. It amazed Jeebee that he could sleep so much. When there was nothing going on, apparently, Wolf could sleep for sixteen or more hours, though his sleep was periodically interrupted by small wakings and movings around.
It was hard to keep him out of the inner room, particularly when they were stormbound for more than a day. But he was completely undisciplined as far as his bowel habits were concerned, and Merry now had the throw rugs down on the floor. Jeebee and Merry had gotten into the habit of going into the outer room, dressed for its temperature, to be with him at dawn and twilight, and he would join Jeebee in the smithy, until the heat of the forge drove him back out again.
In fact, the front room was not all that unpleasant. Its walls kept the wind out, and the pale, but sometimes bright, winter light came through its one window and illuminated even its further corners.
The cold-storage pit for the frozen cooked meat was finished and doing its job admirably, protected by the section of fencing Jeebee had brought up from the ranch. It was that same length of fence that had protected him from Wolf’s teasing playfulness while he built the front wall of the cave.
The books had been right. The fencing effectively guarded the pit from Wolf. Wolf tried to pull it out of place. But he was frustrated by the way Jeebee had anchored it, with large, metal, forge-made anchors, like spikes with their ends turned up. Plainly he did not like to walk or stand upon it. The books had been right in that. Also, they had been right in that he did not try to dig under the recommended three-foot skirt of it, that Jeebee had pegged down outward over the bare earth floor.
The storms tailed off. They became occasional. Sometimes a week or ten days would go without one. Jeebee had been unsure how successful Wolf’s hunting had been under these winter conditions. His conscience prodded him into sharing some of their stored meat with Wolf at intervals.
He had tried to do this always by taking the meat out of the pit when Wolf was away and thawing it in the inside room. Then, after Wolf had returned, Jeebee would carry it outside the front wall for some little distance and simply drop it in the snow. Wolf was never slow in collecting it for himself.
This worked well. But Jeebee could only guess whether he was merely supplementing Wolf’s diet or whether he literally needed to feed Wolf to keep him from starving. But in any case, Jeebee kept on doing it. The one natural and inevitable result was that they went through their stored supply of beef faster than Jeebee had expected. This forced him into taking more days to go on hunting trips.
He made a number of these during clear spots in the weather. Using the sledge to pull back the meat and sometimes the skin from more than one head of beef, however, turned out to be more than he could handle. The loaded sledge was a bastard—that was the only word for it—in the hills. He might have managed it with twice his usual load down on the flat surface of the plain. But going uphill, and over surfaces that frequently tipped sharply and unexpectedly to right or left, the double load was too much.
He had grown accustomed to the feeling that he should be able to make the trip down and back without trouble. Then came a trip on which, the second day out and having found no food animals, he was caught by a storm.
It came too swiftly for him to even think of getting back to the cave.
The first warning he had was a vague difference in the light. He looked up at the sky and saw, he thought, no clouds. But the blue overhead seemed more pale than usual, as if a layer of white gauze had been drawn over it. When he looked at the sun, its outline was unclear, as if a faint haze had developed, high up between him and it.
He took the glasses automatically to skim the horizon and found that the horizon was now indistinct. There was no line where sky and land should meet.
He had been out in the open for more than half a year now. There was nothing specific to fasten on, but an uneasy feeling grew in him as of something titanic and inimical looming over him. If he had been Wolf, Wolf would have been sniffing the still air tensely.
Where he might not have a year before, he now paid attention to that uneasiness. Stopping the sledge, he got out the tent and began setting it up alongside the sledge.
He had barely gotten it up with his blankets inside and one side staked down, when a thick mist seem to congeal around him all at once. The feeling of uneasiness grew. He drove the stakes on the other side of the tent and hammered its poles even tighter into the packed underlayers of hard snow. Taking the blankets out again, he scooped out snow inside to make up for the space he had taken away from the height of the tent.
He climbed within and fastened the ends of the tent as tightly as he could. He slid into his roll of blankets. The enclosed air space warmed quickly about him. Outside, the air remained still. But the uneasiness he felt was still with him. He kept on all his clothes and boots, and waited.
He did not have long to wait. Within minutes he heard the wind in the distance, like the sound of a hunting animal. Almost as soon as he heard it, it hit the tent, rising from a light push to a heavy fist blow of air that turned the tent’s interior icy cold, all at once. With it came the sudden rattling of ice particles against the tent fabric.
He pulled himself up partially out of the blankets so that his arms were free. He dug his mittened hands into the snow on the tent side away from the sledge and took hold of the stakes he had driven in there, putting his weight on them to help hold them down. The walls of the tent sucked inward, then billowed out again suddenly, with a crack. He could feel the pressure of the wind only inches from him, not touching him, but as if a great hand had taken hold of the tent with him inside.
He lay, the tent cracking and vibrating wildly around him, satisfied to just hold on if he could, until the gusts should pass.
But they did not pass. They came at slightly longer intervals for a while and then picked up again more fiercely than before. The foot end of the tent blew out suddenly and flapped wildly in the wind; its inner corners yanked by the force of the wind out from under the heels of his boots, with which he had been pressing them into the snow below.
There was nothing he could do but let it flap. He pushed down with one elbow on the flaps beyond his head, feeling the icy air reaching all around him. The storm was like some enormous living creature, trying to snatch the
