A wolf pack was evidently rather like an Italian court of the early Renaissance, in which everyone smiled at each other while carefully guarding their own back and keeping their eyes open for any opportunity that would expose the back of another, particularly a superior, to their dagger.
Among wolves, ranking was important, but that was only under pack conditions. The situation he enjoyed with Wolf did not embody pack conditions.
Now that he stopped to think of it, there had been a great deal of study of wolves in packs, but he’d read almost nothing of nomadic wolves traveling either alone or in pairs. But what operated in the case of the pack was a delicate balancing act between the advantages of belonging to a cooperative social group and competition for the privileges of high rank—especially the privilege of reproduction. He and Wolf, traveling as they did, were a pair of bachelors with no contest for reproductive rights to make rank an issue and all the natural gregariousness of their species to hold the partnership together.
Certainly the gregariousness—the need for company on both their parts—was there.
He had been overjoyed to have in Wolf someone who could share his life with him. He also remembered telling Merry of Wolf’s first full submissive approach to him, which had come after he had seen the people chained to the wagons. It had come when he had essentially ignored Wolf, at a time when they were usually close.
Wolf clearly valued such social sharing as much as Jeebee did. It would make little sense, accordingly, to destroy the source of a comfort and a pleasure merely for the sake of relative ranking. Besides, if you did, there was then no point in being one up in the hierarchy because the hierarchy would be reduced to a single individual and cease to exist.
The sun climbed steadily up the sky until he was fully in sunlight. He pulled the corner of one light blanket, which was partially underneath him, over the top part of his head to shield his eyes. It would not have to be there more than an hour or so, because by that time the sun would have moved to the point where he would be getting shade from a clump of willows in a slightly different direction. Lying with his eyes hooded, but just able to look out from underneath them, and with the growing comfort of the narcotic pill within him, he dozed off.
He slept lightly and woke easily, this time to Wolf sniffing him all over. He opened his eyes and found Wolf now directing his attention to the wounded leg, which he proceeded to lick with a steady movement of the tongue. After which, essentially ignoring Jeebee in all other respects, as if he was busy at some business of his own, he moved up to lick the arm wound and then the head.
This time Jeebee lay still and let him work, only closing his eyes again when the wide tongue approached them. When the tongue ceased, he opened his eyes again. Wolf was in the process of backing off. He lay down on his stomach with forepaws extended, back legs angled out to one side, and his head on the crossed paws at the end of his front legs. His eyes seemed out of focus, as if he was watching nothing. But Jeebee had learned that any move he might make would be followed by a slight movement of one ear. Actually, he had come to understand that in moments like this Wolf was watching everything.
As it was, however, he could not move—or at least he could move only a tiny amount, and then with great pain and difficulty. The Dilaudid had not taken the pain away, but had reduced it to a level where his mind could operate. It was now early to mid-afternoon, as well as he could tell from the light and shadow around him. Possibly it might be time for another painkiller soon, but certainly not yet. Besides that, the less opiate, the better.
He was suddenly shocked to remember that when he had woken earlier he had scrambled around for the Dilaudid but could not remember taking the antibiotic. He wondered if he had taken it at all, after that first moment of his reaching the horses on his return. Painfully, with the hand of his usable right arm, he fumbled around for the drug pouch and found it. He got out the pill bottle that held the Augmentin, and by the process of spilling it carefully onto his chest so that none would roll off and away and be lost on the ground, he got the pills in position to be counted, if he craned his neck upward and separated them in bunches of five with his fingers.
There had been sixty of them originally, gotten on prescription through the doctor who had been on call for the study group. Now Jeebee only counted fifty-seven.
He had taken the first one yesterday morning. That meant he must have taken the other two during the blurry waking periods he could vaguely remember. The prescription called for three a day for at least a week, for up to ten days in a severe case.
The doctor had given it high marks, very high marks indeed, for effectiveness. It was supposed to be, he had said, effective against gram-negative bacteria and gram-positive bacteria as well as against staphylococci and against anaerobic bacteria.
Laboriously, he got the pills—all except one—back into their bottle, the bottle safely closed again and put away. Then, with a minimum of movement, he managed to wash down the remaining pill with water from the lighter of the two water bags.
Gingerly, for every movement was jarring to the sore side of his body, he tried lifting both bags to estimate how much water remained in them. The one from which he had drunk was nearly empty. The other was down somewhat but was at least three quarters full. He estimated he should be able to last until tomorrow without feeling any serious shortage of water.
For a short while he thought about rationing the water that remained. He decided against it. He was unclear, in cases of severe bruising, whether an adequate intake of water was needed for healing. Probably it was better to drink whenever he felt thirsty and let his body tell him how much and when.
Surely, by tomorrow, with Dilaudid freshly in him and the urgency of empty water bags facing him, he would be able to pull himself along the ground to the stream and refill both bags.
Once more he struggled to delve into his backpack, checking that the large, yellow, water-disinfectant pills were available and that there were plenty of them left. He had taken as many of these from the wagon stores as he thought would see him through a year. He must have several hundred left. Once those were gone—well, he could always boil for five minutes any water he wanted to drink or use in cooking. He wished now he had not lost the drinking tube with the ceramic filter he had carried from Stoketon in his backpack. With that, he could have risked drinking directly from the stream. But about two weeks ago he had looked for it and been unable to find it.
His semidrugged mind went off to other things that needed to be done. Wolf was still lying, apparently oblivious but actually alert. The big problem, Jeebee thought once more, would be loading Sally before he took off. An alternative, of course, would be to cache his supplies, to dig a place to hide it and cover it up so that neither Wolf nor any other wild animal would dig it up.
But he was in no better physical condition to do that than he was to load the horses, right now. A final solution would be to take what was absolutely necessary from it that Brute could carry and simply abandon the rest. Bringing Sally herself, of course, along for future use. That, and hope that he would be able to go back and find at least part of what he had owned.
But knowing the open country as he now did, he knew how unlikely it was that he could come back, even after a single day away, and find a pile of goods and food undisturbed. Humans might not find it, but the wild creatures would, and in less than a week, even if he did come back, there would be nothing worth picking up— probably.
Well, he would wait and see how much, if at all, he had improved by tomorrow. In any case, tomorrow he would be faced with the crawl to the stream. To a certain extent it all depended upon the effectiveness of the antibiotic and whatever aid in recovering he would get from the fact that he was in fairly good physical shape from the last few months of living an active physical life.
His mind went off on another tangent, triggered perhaps by Wolf’s presence. The trouble was, the focus of his interest in his four-legged partner had been sharpened, rather than satisfied, by the wolf books. He had begun just by wanting to understand Wolf because of his own emotional bond with this four-legged partner. Then that had developed into a genuine scientific curiosity about Wolf and his species. Now it had gone even one step further. He could see now that it was not going to be merely satisfying to understand Wolf better, but perhaps vitally necessary—perhaps a matter of life or death somewhere along the line.
For example, Wolf had turned out to astonish him by attacking the bear when Jeebee himself was attacked. A wolf’s instinct for self-preservation should have kept him prudently out of a battle with any predator larger than himself. What had overridden that prudence? It was only in the movies that Jeebee had ever seen one normally wild animal come doglike to the rescue of the human being with which it was familiar. Doglike—maybe that was the answer. Dog behavior had its roots in wolf behavior, and the evolutionary linchpin of wolf survival was social
