“What is it?” Jeebee asked.
“Odds and ends—useful things, though,” said Merry, “and a lot of root vegetables from the garden. Some we’ll eat, but a lot we’ll keep as seed to start next spring.”
Jeebee opened his mouth to tell her they would be moving on as soon as the weather was good enough to travel in the spring. But he was stilled by the thought that after what she had been through, it would be wrong to rob her of this moment of pleasure. There would be plenty of time for her to find out that wherever they would be, it would not be around here, when any vegetables they had planted in the spring were ready for harvest.
He had been surprised by the amount of things she had gathered. But he was more surprised—and impressed—when they got back to the cave and she showed him exactly what she had found. The variety was large, from the outdoor thermometer she had talked about earlier, to a number of small cans of various spices, including supplies of salt, sugar, baking powder and baking soda, sacks of dried beans, peas, and other dried vegetables that Jeebee had not even thought to look for.
In addition to these were a number of other small but useful items, including hooks that could be screwed into their plank walls so they could hang up things, and old throw rugs full of holes or half worn away, which had been ignored by the looters—but which Merry now pointed out would be useful not to only make the floor of their cave’s inner room warmer but possibly the walls as well.
She had also brought back a great deal of yarn of various colors.
“Have you done any knitting?” she asked Jeebee.
Jeebee guiltily remembered her pushing knitting needles and yarn on him when he was ready to leave the wagon and emphasizing that he knit things like gloves and caps for his own use.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t had time.”
“Well, you’ll have time this winter,” she told him.
Merry was right about what she had said about the things she had gathered not taking up as much room in the inner part of the cave as Jeebee had expected, once they were stored in an orderly fashion. This was mostly around the walls, except for those things that would be of direct use in the cooking, and these she put next to the fireplace, saying that she would build shelves within reach of the fire to put them.
“In fact,” she said, “we could use a lot of shelving in here. That’s something else I can do while you’re busy with other things.”
Jeebee had to agree with her. Shelves were an obvious thing. He had even thought of them, but not as anything he would get to in the near future. Other things—even the forge for the smithy he needed to build— ranked before such things. But now, of course, the situation was changed.
Jeebee skinned the rabbits—it was a small pat to his ego that he was more experienced at this than Merry. She freely admitted this, saying that she was quite at home with cleaning and preparing domestic animals for cooking, but had little experience with wild game simply because at the wagon they had not eaten much of it.
They put the rabbits on to boil, and Merry cleaned and cut some of the vegetables into the pot with them. Jeebee had taken some from the garden himself, but only from time to time, figuring that it did not have enough vegetables in it so that he could eat them regularly without exhausting the supply.
The vegetables, with the rabbit, therefore, were a treat. The long-term problem of balancing their diet had also been met by Merry in an unexpected way. It had never occurred to Jeebee to look for vitamin pills down at the ranch.
Merry had gone looking and found nearly a year’s supply. She had also come upon a greater find. Jeebee had stared earlier when she pulled a number of bags of dried beans and dried peas from one sack. He had stared harder when, after that, she pulled a good six-inch-wide two-inch-thick wheel of paraffin-covered cheese out of one of the other bags.
“Where did that come from?” Jeebee said. “I could swear I went through that house a dozen times looking for some food that had been missed by the people who robbed it; and they’d taken everything that was ready to eat. I did find some flour, and things like that. But I even looked for a root cellar all around the place and couldn’t find one.”
“Did you think of looking under the kitchen floor?” said Merry.
“Under the kitchen floor?”
“Of course,” Merry said. “Where else would you put foods that you might want to get at in a hurry, but wanted to keep out of the way in the kitchen? Someplace cool but dry, and sure not to freeze?”
“The kitchen… ” said Jeebee thoughtfully. “I didn’t notice anything in the kitchen that looked like it was a trapdoor to a place below it.”
“The trap door was in that little pantry area with all the shelves around it,” Merry said. “The people that went through it simply grabbed what they wanted off the shelves and never looked down. You did the same thing, didn’t you? You looked into the pantry, saw practically nothing there but these spice cans, and gave up. Right?” Jeebee nodded slowly.
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t check the floor there. What made you do it?”
“I was just pretty sure that there had to be something like that. I’ve seen a lot of entries like that in the kitchens of houses off by themselves. It’s a natural thing to have. By the way, there’s a lot more still down there that we’d better pick up and take away before the really cold weather comes. Things that wouldn’t have frozen, ordinarily, because the house above them would be heated. But now it’s just a ruin, stuff will freeze as hard there as they will in our meat pit in the cold room, out front. There’re more cheeses for one thing. Oh yes, and more of this.”
It was then she had held up a large bottle full of long, dark tablets.
“Vitamins,” she said, “the one-a-day kind. We’re both going to take them from now on, as long as we have to live on so much meat. And the cheese’ll help. Good source of vitamins C and D.”
While the food cooked, Jeebee stepped into the outer room to see how far Merry had gotten with the freeze pit she had been digging in the floor of the cold room. It had occurred to him that he might use his time right now to finish it. But he saw that she had done remarkably well with the time she had. She was either stronger in some ways than he had thought, already, or else she had a particular pride in being able to do this bit of excavation. In either case, perhaps it would be best not to seem to step in and finish it for her.
Since he was outside and had the time, he went along the length of the cold room, past the corner where Wolf was now in the habit of curling up, and stepped into the area that would be the smithy.
There was nothing here yet but some stones he had already gathered, and a large pile of clay. He had found a clay deposit after searching down the bed of the larger stream for some distance and brought what was there back, load by load, in a couple of the buckets from the ranch.
The two full buckets each time had been a good load to carry that distance, but it was invaluable. The stone, mortared by clay, would make an excellent firepit. But it struck him now that he had better get the clay to the inner room before it froze where it sat. Or else he would never be able to break it into chunks to warm up, soften, and mix with added water for use as mortar.
The two buckets were still here. He got a shovel from the inner cave, where he kept the tools so that Wolf would not chew their handles to bits, and went out to load buckets and start bringing the clay inside.
“What’s that?” Merry demanded when he brought in the first two buckets.
He told her briefly.
“And you were worried about me filling up the space in here!” she said.
That was all she said, however. He managed to transfer the clay before the food was ready. He made a rough pyramid of it against their innermost wall of sand, the one wall of the cave that he would be excavating further once he was confined to the cave by weather and could only work inside.
The rabbits were tender and tasty.
“A change for the better, from beef all the time,” Merry said as they were eating, “don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” Jeebee answered.
The truth was, however, the change did not make a great deal of difference to him. Sometime since he had left Stoketon, appetite had become unimportant to him. Hunger was important, and food was good when he ate it. But he did not miss any particular taste, or regret things that he used to be able to eat that were no longer available.
The fact of the matter was that the feeling he looked for was that of a full stomach rather than the satisfaction of a particular taste.
