foothills, about half a mile from the ranch house.
Moving across the open flatlands, Brute settled down somewhat to pulling with Sally. Jeebee was optimistic that with time the male horse would become completely used to the work.
When they got to the cut, Jeebee got out of the wagon and began leading the animals. Brute was, if anything, relieved to be led. Still, there were problems of turns, and places where their path was along the bottom of one slope with another at an angle to it, so that the trailer traveled tilted up on one side for a little distance. About twenty minutes into the foothills, the rope hitch broke and had to be retied, so that they were a good four hours finally getting to the cave.
The final half hour of daylight barely saw them into the campsite. Jeebee unhitched the relieved horses inside the closed wire fence to protect the trailer and its load from Wolf. Then he put them in the wooden corral he had been building and carried the bundle into the inner room of the cave.
He started a fire and went back outside to the trailer, closing the fence behind him.
The moment he did, Wolf materialized out of the last of the gathering gloom, and Jeebee came back out of the fenced-in area to go through their regular evening set of greetings. Then Wolf, after some hesitation, gave the trailer as thorough an examination through the fence as he could. Jeebee had carefully placed it so the rope of the harnesses and the trailer hitch were beyond his reach.
Satisfied at last, Wolf came to the fire and lay down.
Sitting, watching the other, Jeebee told himself that Wolf must almost certainly have been following him, out of sight, down to the ranch these last few days, or even weeks. In fact, Wolf had probably been making the route down and back to the ranch parallel to him on many of his trips.
He had certainly not appeared where Jeebee could see him. But that was Wolf’s nature. He had been equally slow to approach Paul’s wagon. He would not want to come into any unknown place until he was sure it was safe to do so, no matter how used he was to seeing it from a distance. Undoubtedly, Jeebee thought as he finally rolled himself in his blankets, Wolf would end up in the long run coming into the buildings with him. Which might pose a problem in Jeebee’s gathering and collecting things he wanted to take back to the cave.
He turned out to be right within the next week. Five days later Wolf appeared just before he got to the ranch and came with him to the edge of its inhabited areas. In the next couple of days he came increasingly closer, until he was actually in among the buildings.
However, after a certain amount of limited exploring, staying as close to Jeebee as he could most of the time, Wolf made himself scarce once more. In the days that followed, Jeebee found that the problem he anticipated never really materialized. Wolf remained shy of entering any enclosed area. Also, many days he simply was not there.
Jeebee realized after some thought that most of his partner’s days needed necessarily to be given to hunting for needed food. Wolf might take some time off from this, but he could not take much. Normally, Jeebee ended up alone with the horses, in his process of getting what he wanted from the ranch.
He blamed himself for not thinking of making use of the two-wheeled wagon before. With it, he could have brought up the two-by-fours and much of the other lumber in just a few loads, if not in one large load. He had carefully been increasing the amount carried in the trailer, and watching the horses to be sure he did not work them too hard. It was as necessary to him, as to them, that they keep their strength.
Now he got into necessarily heavier loads, and into loads he had not thought of carrying originally. Ignored by himself as well as the raiders was an aluminum building set off at some distance from the rest of the ranch structures. This was something he recognized as a pole barn, a structure made of poles and aluminum sheets solely for the purpose of housing and protecting baled hay from the weather so that it could be stored into the winter and its contents available for use to whatever horses or other such animals were at the ranch. It had been set apart like that simply because hay caught fire very easily, and the whole structure could be destroyed in a twinkling by a carelessly dropped cigarette.
Now, on seeing it, he realized that he would have to lay in a supply of fodder for the two horses during the winter months up at the cave. Here was the fodder, ready for him, and the trailer could transport it. Not only that, but he found his attention attracted by the pole barn itself. Its doors, sides, and roof were modular, light enough to carry, and of a size that could be carried in the two-wheel trailer.
The side poles were set in the earth. The rafters were attached to horizontal boards nailed between the side and corner poles of the barn. The wall and ceiling strips of aluminum were four feet wide to bridge the distance between poles and some ten feet in height. All together they enclosed a remarkable amount of baled hay.
He could strip the siding and roof off, take the rafters and dig up the poles and simply transport the whole thing to the cave. On second thought, he need not even dig up the poles. He could cut and set log poles at the cave to attach the aluminum strips to. All in all, it was well worth the days it would cost him to take apart and transport the movable part of the pole barn and its contents.
He did so, accordingly, during part of the following week. The segments of the pole barn made an awkward, but not over-heavy load for the trailer. The hay was a slower business, not only to transport but to load—and it drove him crazy with the chaff and straws that worked their way into his hair and through his clothing to itch him to a frenzy.
Nonetheless, finally it was all done, and he had a strange sense of pride at looking at it, set up, filled with fodder, and ready to take care of the horses during the winter.
He turned back to moving his other necessities up to the cave and getting the cave itself finished. He was racing against the calendar. He wanted all his needed materials up at the meadow before snow came.
Two of his most difficult trips came when he began to break loose both the front and back doors of the ranch, complete with their frames. One of these at a time was a full load for the horses to pull to the cave. He was forced to make two trips to get them both up.
It took a good deal of muscle on his part to transfer each one to the trailer, even once he had loosened them from the house. But he must have them. He had decided he would need solid-core, outer doors for his cave because he wanted them to be as resistant to low temperatures, wind, and snow as possible.
The frames were necessary because Jeebee had no faith in his ability to either build a door frame or hang the door within one. He had heard once that it was a tricky thing to do. The door had to be hung just right, both vertically and in the frame. In the end he got both of them up to the cave, where he put the first one into the opening he had left for it in the outer wall.
His weather front for the excavated home was now complete. Only the interior remained undone. But he could take his time about the work inside, he told himself.
He celebrated that day by taking down the wire fence. It was only late afternoon, but Wolf had already returned and watched him remove it.
To his surprise—although afterward, thinking about what he knew of wolf behavior, it should not have been—Wolf did not at once enter into the territory that the fence had guarded.
Instead, he began by taking his time about making a leisurely approach to the now rolled-up fencing, lying in the meadow a little way from where it had been set up. Finally, he got close enough to sniff it over completely, both the fencing and the angle-iron posts that had secured it. But then, little by little he came deeper into the earlier-denied space until he reached the wall itself, which he then examined closely, from one end to the other.
The next morning, after Wolf had left, Jeebee began work inside the wall.
His last work outside had been to put a roof over the end of it that was far enough away from the face of the cliff so that the space needed bridging—that space where he hoped to set up his smithy. He had needed to fit the rest of the roof tightly against the face of the bluff, digging into the actual earth, with wood slanting upward into it so that any rain would run off. Later on he would undoubtedly find chinks and openings in the roof and wall, but he could then patch them with clay. When winter came, snow and ice would help by filling any openings and freezing them shut.
He was so concerned with having the structure tight that when he finally went in at last to start work on the inner cave section, he discovered something he had completely forgotten. With the wall up and the roof in position, it was too dark inside to see what he was doing.
He had already established that the solar blanket would charge the car batteries, even if it took some time to do it. But he found that working in constant gloom, he used up the batteries’ charge faster than he could replace
