realized how useless its light slugs would be in stopping such an enemy. His fingers closed instead on the oversized knife in its sheath on the outside of his right boot.
He gripped the handle and pulled the knife loose, snapping the leather cord holding it from falling out, as if that cord had been thread. As he did so he felt the breath of air above his head from another blow of the bear’s paw that had missed him as he stooped. Coming upright, he was nearly felled by another solid blow, this time on his upper left thigh.
Straightening, he instinctively drove the point of the knife forward as he had been taught by Nick, toward the crotch of the bear; and felt the blade go in and up. Another blow just grazed his left shoulder lightly. Then the black body fell backward away from him. He stared down at it, unbelieving. As Nick had warned, his blade point had gone high. It had entered near the top of the soft stomach area. Somehow, he must have been lucky enough to hit a vital spot—maybe the heart was reachable, up in there behind the breastbone…
The cub had disappeared. Jeebee’s left leg suddenly gave under him and he sat down. Something was obscuring his left eye. He put his hand up and brought it away wet with redness. Reaching higher, he found something ragged hanging down, which turned out to be part of his scalp.
He pushed it back up. Wolf, having attacked again, had just leaped clear when the bear fell, then watchfully circled around toward its hindquarters. Now, with the bear down, he was making cautious approaches, pausing every step or two as he drew closer, and as Jeebee pushed his scalp back in place, Wolf took one last step and stretched his neck until his nose almost touched the black furred hind leg. His ears flagged up and down as he sniffed. Finally, he gave the leg a sharp prod with the top of his nose and leaped back. Then he stood watching, his ears now pricked, his eyes bright.
There was no reaction from the dead bear. Wolf moved forward confidently and began a more thorough inspection of the carcass.
Jeebee forgot about Wolf. His knife was still standing upright in the upper belly of the now plainly dead animal. Instinctively he retrieved it and wiped it on his pants leg before returning it to its sheath.
Surprisingly, he felt no hurt. He would, undoubtedly, any minute now. His mind still held that amazing clarity and calmness. The bear’s claws could have infected him with the bacteria in the dirt on them, he told himself with no emotion whatever. He would need the antibiotics in his pack sack behind Brute’s saddle, as soon as possible. He should get back to the horses while he could still move.
He tried to climb once more onto his feet and found his left leg reluctant to lift him. Looking down at his thigh where he had felt the blow, he saw the trouser leg torn and bloody. Almost enough of his blood available to paint with. The thought was funny, but he did not laugh.
With his fingertips he felt among the redness on his thigh.
Torn cloth, furrows in the flesh, and… holes where the claws had first struck. Surface wounds, then, but the bruising would immobilize him in hours. He would have to reach those horses. Undoubtedly there was internal bleeding under the bruised areas. Cold compresses for that, once back at the horses. The river water would be cold.
He felt his upper left arm and felt wetness there. More blood on his fingers. Happily, nowhere else did he seem to be bleeding. He looked around. His rifle was only about six feet away, teetering, half over the edge of the water. Rolling over on his good right side, he crabbed along the ground to the rifle, and when he got it, used it as a prop to get him up on his one good leg.
He began to hobble along the riverbank, downstream, back toward the horses.
CHAPTER 21
It was hard going through the willows. His wounds still did not hurt, though he was conscious of them.
Possessing him still was that same clarity and clearheadedness. Now, like mental tunnel vision, it was concentrating all his attention only on the seriousness of the moment, and what must be done right away. Time was now moving at its normal pace.
He must get back to his medical supplies, at the horses. From what he had read in the books on wolves, as well as in first-aid texts, with large-animal-created wounds, his greatest danger was probably that both arm and leg were deeply and massively bruised by the paw blows of the mother bear. The flesh, where it had been hammered by those paws, would flood with blood from broken internal blood vessels under the skin.
He would probably not lose much blood—he was not even losing much now, except from his scalp—which seemed the least important. But the real damage was the inside damage, below the skin. That would mean swelling, which would take about twenty-four hours in which to reach its peak.
Treatment for swelling? His mind searched his memories of first-aid manuals. Cold compresses. He had no compresses or material for them at the moment. But the water in the stream close beside him was mountain-fed. It would be icy cold and he had, back at the horses, clothes he could tear up and wrap tightly around both the lower and upper wound. Also his scalp—which was still doing most of the bleeding.
The sooner the cold was put to work the better. At his present hobble, it would be a while yet before he could cover what he estimated to be about a hundred and fifty feet back to the horses. Thank God he had tied them up where there was water and grazing before leaving them.
It was the willows in their clumps that was slowing him down. Sometimes he could push his way through or go around, but they slowed his progress. He glanced at the stream. It was no wider anywhere than about thirty feet and had looked no more than about three feet at the deepest. There were no willows in it, and he would get the double benefit of immersing the hurt leg in its coldness and at least begin washing the leg wound clean.
For that matter, he could also keep splashing water up on his arm as he went. Both actions would help to clean the worst of the dirt undoubtedly there from the bear’s claws and pads. At the same time, he could get to his destination in half the time it would take him, limping around these willows or forcing his way through them. And the water would slow him no more than the willows.
He veered toward the stream and checked himself at its bank, suddenly remembering that the water might carry toxic organisms. There was one—a parasite named giardia—that came from the excreta of beaver, and other wild animals, and was supposed to be found in western mountain streams like this.
But there was no real choice. It was a gamble of possible illness against the near certainty of being immobilized by his wounds, possibly dangerously so. Unable to walk, unable to get up, he would have trouble getting food or water as well as being helpless in the face of any predator or human enemy who found him. As he stepped down into the water that came almost to his waist, feeling the jar of his good foot against the stream bed, he remembered just in time to take the revolver out of his boot and stick it under his belt.
It was common, the books he had taken from the ruins of Walter Neiskamp’s home told him, for wolves that showed signs of weakness or disability to be harassed or mobbed by other members of the pack. An injured wolf that stood high in the ranking order was an especially inviting target of attack. True, the latter was usually supposed to happen only when the attacking wolf was old enough to become “political”—concerned with its ranking in the pack. This could happen, he had gathered, anytime after the wolf’s second year of life, when wolves in packs typically reached sexual maturity.
Wolf best fit the description, Jeebee now guessed, of being only a year or so old, when Jeebee had first met him; too young, theoretically, to be “political” yet. But what all of the books had agreed on—both the formal academic works and the first-person narratives by amateur wolf enthusiasts—was that wolves didn’t read the books that told how they were “supposed” to behave; the only thing predictable about them was their unpredictability. Wolves as decision makers were individual persons, as Jeebee himself had seen at first hand, with Wolf.
And prediction was even more problematic if there was validity in Frank’s claim that some aspects of wolf behavior were governed not by the animal’s own highly developed cognitive system, but by a separate instinctual system—which operated largely independently of the conscious, thinking system. Instinctive behavior patterns, triggered by cues a human might not even recognize, could cause a wolf to act in a manner its own mind could not control. Predatory reactions could be triggered by the awkward, uncoordinated movements of a crippled pack mate as easily as by the thrashing about of an injured deer. Whatever companionable feeling Wolf had for Jeebee, the man’s injuries could provoke an attack. That Wolf might later experience something akin to regret was little
