consolation; Jeebee must either move as normally as possible when Wolf was around or remain immobile—as sick and injured wolves do.
All the time he was thinking this, he was feeling his way upstream next to the bank, the barrel end of the rifle in his right hand, the rifle butt below the water, tapping the bottom ahead of his feet like a blind person’s cane for potholes or obstacles.
So far he had been lucky, encountering neither. Nor had any roots, projecting from the bank beside him into the water, tripped him up. It was not far to the horses now. Still his mind was glass clear and diamond sharp, concentrating on searching for whatever might need to be done or endured.
Perhaps, he thought, it was his own, human instinctive system, triggered by the need to survive, that was helping him now.
But finally, he was wading around a last bend in the stream and seeing the horses where he had tethered them. It was time to look for a place where he could climb, crippled as he was, out of the stream up onto the bank. There was waist-deep water and two feet of vertical light brown earthen bank to surmount. He solved the problem at last by laying his upper body down on the bank, still holding his rifle, and then rolling his body away from the stream to pull his legs after him out of the water. He rolled over the pistol in his belt, bruising himself.
He hauled himself to his feet with the help of the rifle and limped toward the horses. Wolf was nowhere around, he was glad to see. Perhaps his fear of an instinctive attack was foolish; but he would rather not test the chance.
It was fortunate his left arm rather than his right had been damaged by the bear. He was right-handed. Nick Gage had made him practice with the pistol in his left hand, but he was just not accurate as a lefty marksman.
He bound his wounds with wet compresses made from cut and torn strips of blanket, and swallowed his first dose of antibiotic. It was Augmentin, which he had carried in his backpack from Michigan for just such a moment as this. He washed the pill down with the bag of disinfected water he had always carried at his saddle. Only then did he take time to empty his boots of water and take off the soggy socks beneath them.
He was beginning to feel his wounds now. It was not real pain he felt from them as yet. But he was conscious of them being there. But there were still things to be done before he could give in to them. It seemed that almost as soon as he had stepped out of the cold water, the swelling in his leg and arm had begun to develop and stiffen those limbs. If he was going to lose the ability to move, soon, there were things that had to be taken care of, first.
He might become unable to unload the horses. If so, he would have to leave Sally with her pack and Brute with his saddle for several days, and that was unthinkable. There were no trees here large enough so that he could rope Sally’s pack up out of Wolf’s reach—even if he had been up to climbing a tree at the moment. Even the thought of climbing a tree was ridiculous, now, hurt as he was.
The best he would be able to do would be to dump both the pack and the saddle off their backs, and leave both horses where they could reach water, as well as whatever grass was within reach.
Once the packload was lying flat on the ground, there was no way he could think of to protect its contents from Wolf. Then it occurred to him that he could drop it between the two horses; and lie on it himself. Hopefully, in that case, Wolf would not try to get at it.
It was a gamble, but he had to gamble now. For the first time he realized how even a minor wound could cripple a wolf enough to threaten its ability to survive.
Difficult as it was with one hand, he managed to untie and throw off the rope of the hitch from Sally’s load, and then, with even more difficulty, single-handed, to loosen the cinch strap holding the blanket underneath it. Crowding Sally against some willows so that the slim stems pressed the cinch strap against her far side as it slipped loose, he managed to slow the descent of the pack as he pulled it to the ground with his one good arm.
He was able to do no more than break its fall with that single arm. But he ended up with it in a not too untidy pile, which he was able to rake together so that the groundsheet would cover him and it, once he lay down upon it.
That left several things yet to do. The arm and leg were definitely beginning to hurt now, and he thought of the Dilaudid, the painkiller that was also in his pack.
But it was not that bad yet—in fact probably far from as bad as it was going to get—and also he had to get the saddle off
Brute and the backpack under the groundsheet with him so that he had his drugs at hand if he ended up so that he could barely move.
He undid the cinch strap on Brute and got the saddle, backpack, and saddle blanket off him. By bad luck they all went off on the other side of Brute, but he was able to reach an end of the cinch strap and pull all three things to him underneath Brute’s belly. Brute was either in unusual good humor or indifferent, for he made no attempt to step on either item, or protest at something being done underneath him.
Jeebee hauled to him both saddle and pack, detached the pack, took out from it the drugs, and stowed all of this under the groundsheet, but with the pouch holding the drugs separate and close to his hand once he would be lying down.
There was still a final job to do, but now he was beginning to come out from the strange state of intensive clearheadedness he had been in up until this time. For the first time he was beginning to feel a weakness take over his legs and pain spread out in his leg, arm, and head.
He pushed himself to keep rummaging under the groundsheet until he came up with a spare water bag. He put in it the proper disinfectant pills and limped to the stream to fill it with water, taking advantage of the opportunity to thoroughly soak once more his three clumsy bandages, on leg, arm, and head.
For a moment he thought resoaking the bandage around his head had disturbed the broken scalp to the point where a heavy flow of blood had started again. But it was merely diluting what had already dried up there. He wiped the reddish wetness out of his eyes with his good hand and took the filled bag, hobbling along with the rifle still to support him, to the groundsheet pile between the two horses. Gratefully, at last, he sat down on it.
Seated, he took the half-full and disinfected water bag he had already had hanging from the saddle, so that he now had a full bag and a half-full one within arm’s reach. He pulled the bags with him under the tarp and moved the softer materials beneath him into something that would do as a bed. He piled these high at the foot end to elevate his legs; and stripped off his wet clothes. He was fortunate enough to find dry underwear, pants, and shirt with the blankets under the packload tarp.
He pulled his wet clothing off and toweled himself dry with a dry shirt. The air temperature of the growing day around him must already be at fifty degrees, but he was beginning to shiver uncontrollably as hypothermia set in. He cursed weakly when he found he could not pull on the dry clothes over his compresses; throwing them down for him to lie upon, he settled for under-shorts and socks. Then he cocooned himself in his blankets and wedged himself under the groundsheet, shivering while his face flushed. He was panting heavily. His eyes hurt and he was beginning to feel very weak indeed, and the pain was coming more fiercely from the wounded areas.
He lay there, thinking that he would put off taking one of the Dilaudids as long as he could. But with nothing else to occupy his mind but the consciousness of it, the pain seemed to grow swiftly toward the point of being unbearable. Meanwhile, he was already feeling so weak that the thought of getting up from where he lay was something to be contemplated only in an emergency.
He warmed finally and tried to doze in the sunlight. He woke in midafternoon, however, shivering again. There were no more blankets to add to his pile. In desperation, he pulled at the groundsheet, feebly struggling for more blanketing. Then he pushed it back to make sure that it still also covered all of the load.
It was time. He fumbled in the drug pouch and brought out the container of Dilaudid. He awkwardly shook one of the small, orange, two-milligram pills from the bottle that held it into the palm of his right hand, and washed it down with a swallow of water from the half-filled water bag.
He held the bottle up to read the prescription directions and they were for one to two of the pills four times a day with a one week limit, but less if possible. He knew that while effective, they were addictive, and the last thing he wanted to happen to him, out here alone, was to become hooked on some medicine. Once it was gone, he would have no way at all of getting more, even if it were safe for him to have more.
