They continued to follow that crumbling highway, wandering on into the overgrown desolation that once had been called the State of Kansas, its broad prairies now given over to grasses, the beasts that fed on those grasses and the other beasts that fed on the grass-eaters. Now and again, they would chance upon traces of other humans, fairly recent traces—within a decade or so, they guessed—some of them, but most much older, probably twenty years old, possibly thirty or more. These findings were a significant disappointment to Milo, but Bookerman, the other leaders and the bulk of the people seemed not to care whether or not they were the only humans left to roam this vast land.
Milo himself was torn between two goals. One was to try to reach some of what had been the larger centers of population along the Kansas-Missouri border, and the other was a nagging presentiment to head due south before winter caught them in some ill-protected place. In the end, however, they continued their stop-and-go snail’s pace eastward, along old Interstate 70, while he salved his conscience with a plan to angle south on Interstate 135 at Salinas. But it was not to be, not that year.
XI
They did not reach Salinas, not that year. They were surprised by an early storm that became a blizzard, while somewhere between Dorrance and Bunker Hill, Kansas, and they halted and set up camp on the spot. And in their ill-chosen, exposed position, they very nearly froze to death before the weather blew itself out and Milo and Bookerman chivvied them, one and all, into striking camp, loading the transport, harnessing the teams, gathering the herds and moving with all possible speed farther east, to the next town, True, those buildings still standing were in poor condition after thirty-odd years of the worst the elements could offer, but at least they offered frail human flesh and bone more protection from those same elements than did thin canvas tent walls.
When once the people were settled in, Milo began to devote serious thought to something better, more protective than the tents, but equally transportable. It was Dr. Bookerman, however, who came up with the answer.
“Yurts, friend Milo, felt yurts are the answer to this problem. They were designed for just such weather in just such a land as is this—windy and very cold or windy and very hot.”
“Now where in the hell are we to get felt, Doctor, as much of the stuff as we’d need for the undertaking of this project, anyway? Or have you already figured out exactly how many fedoras and billiard-table tops it would take to make each family a home?” demanded Milo.
Bookerman shrugged. “Some of it we will be able to find in the various towns and cities—more in the cities, of course—but the bulk of it we will have to fabricate ourselves. But that will not be so difficult, you’ll find, not anywhere nearly as difficult as the fabrication of cloth, yet a good many of the women have learned to do that.”
Although Milo still had his doubts, within a few weeks of gathering materials, equipment and volunteers, Bookerman and his crew were actually producing a medium-weight felt from raw wool and animal hair.
“Where in the devil did you learn to make felt?” inquired Milo.
Bookerman allowed himself one of his rare, brief smiles and simply said, “Neveryou mind, friend Milo. Besides, you’d not believe me if I tried to tell you.”
With the felt production in full swing, Milo took the neat, professionally rendered sketches provided him by Bookerman and, aided by some of the cart makers, began to go about turning out the wooden frames and poles of center wheels needed to hold the felt walls and roofs of yurts. When the prototype framing was ready, he turned it over to the doctor.
On a bitter day, with yet another blizzard clearly on the offing for their chunk of prairie, a party rode out of the tiny ruined town on horseback and on two carts to a very exposed place. There they cleared away the snow down to the frozen earth beneath the white blanket, then painfully hacked out a firepit, lined it with stones and laid the fuel for a fire therein.
That done, the physician directed a crew of men in setting up the supports and frames, locating the doorframe, then beginning the layering of felt and canvas on roof supports and side lattices. The frame and lattices were anchored by being lashed to stakes laboriously driven deep into the frozen ground; the side felts were carefully surrounded with small boulders and chunks of concrete earlier collected.
When once the shelter was set up and the coverings all in place, the ground inside, all around the firepit, was covered first with waterproofed canvas, then with several thicknesses of carpet. Fuel supply was stacked near the doorframe, foodstuffs, cooking utensils and bedding were brought in, along with a kerosene lamp and its fuel, some books, a folding chair and table, a five-gallon can of drinking water, some spare items of clothing and Bookerman’s treasured rifle—a bolt-action Steyr-Mannlicher, stocked almost to the muzzle in some rare wood, firing 8x57mm handloaded ammo and, in his skilled hands, more than merely accurate out to chilling distances.
With the wind picking up force by the minute, or so it seemed, the carts and riders headed back into the town at a stiff clip, leaving the doctor within the prototype yurt, by his fire, reading a book. Milo frankly wondered if they ever would see the German again with life in him, for thick as the layers of felt and canvas were, strong as were the sides and supports of carefully fitted, well-seasoned wood, heavy as were the surrounding boulders and deep as had the stakes been driven, still he wondered if the fragile-looking shelter could be proof against the wind—already, knife-edged—and the cold of the fast-approaching storm.
The blizzard raged and howled through the streets of the town for two days, hurling snow and ice on hurricanelike gusts to punctuate the steady blast of arctic air. So bad was it out on the open prairie that the herds were brought into town where they might at least enjoy a measure of protection from the winds, although the only available food for them there was the dried weeds that had grown up here and there through the cracked concrete and macadam, the grain and hay being hoarded for the horses and mules and draft oxen.
Nor, it was soon discovered when the storm finally blew itself out and the people forced a way out into the yards-deep drifts, were the domestic stock the only ungulates which had taken advantage of the shelter of the building walls. There were at least twoscore bison to be seen huddling with the shaggy cattle, deer, native antelope and a scattering of more exotic herbivores, a small herd of wild horses and a smaller one of burros.
Justly fearing the bestial panic that the discharging of firearms might engender, which might cause death or injury to the intermixed domestic animals, Milo saw to it that those wild beasts harvested were taken with bows, or roped in the deep, movement-hampering snow, then dragged away to have their throats cut.
All of the leaders worried themselves almost sick about the fate of Dr. Bookerman, way out there on the open prairie, his low-crouching little shelter unseeable from even the highest of the remaining buildings. And it was simply out of the question, just then, to try to reach him either mounted or afoot, so deep were the drifts, so frigid the air, and so threatening of a new storm was the sky. But no fresh storm occurred that day, although it remained frigidly cold and, in the following night, dropped even lower in temperature. On the next day, however, the sun rose and the thermometers ascended to a surprising high of twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. When the wild creatures began to push through drifts and work their way out of the environs of the town, Milo and Harry Krueger decided that they could safely seek out the yurt site and see if Bookerman had survived his ordeal.
First, however, every available man and herd dog was required to try to separate the domestic from the wild beasts. This task proved very taxing and not a little dangerous, as it cost the life of one man, a couple of dogs, and the necessity for—stampede danger or none—shooting dead a huge, powerful, short-tempered bison bull and one feral cow fanatically overprotective of a calf that looked to be about half bison.