All about him he could feel the world turning forward through time, out of the darkness that had brought him here toward a brighter future.
The warmth, the soft air, the scent of the summer day now ending, filled him, enlarging him as if he was a balloon. He drew it deep into his lungs, feeling as if he grew with the inhalation. He must tell Merry about this moment, later on when she was rested and there was time. In fact, there would be a great deal for them to tell each other about this tremendous achievement at the height and best of the year. He drew the air deep into his lungs for another enormous breath. He was ready to build the cave behind him into a palace. He was ready to rebuild the world. He felt like a giant.
He let the air out, checking on a sudden thought. One other thing he had not talked about with Merry was his original plan of going on after the baby was born to finish finding his brother’s ranch. That whole part of their future had been pushed into the back of his mind as the birth of the baby came close, and he had almost forgotten it himself.
The truth was, he had never really faced the problems of traveling with the new baby. Now that the child was actually born, he could fully realize what would be involved in that. He, Merry, and infant Paul would necessarily be wandering about the higher plains, possibly to be shot at on sight by local ranchers, and living as people on the move had to do. It was suddenly clear how foolish the idea had been.
There could be no moving from here until next summer, at least, when Paul would be a good deal stronger and bigger, even if still young for travel, even carried in a basket of sorts, hung on back or chest, as the Indians had carried their youngest children. Merry must have simply taken it for granted he would eventually realize this. It must have been so obvious to her that he would eventually see this for himself that she had not bothered to point out the impossibility of it. She was very like her father in that.
Consciously, he had not confronted these facts. Unconsciously, he realized now, with all his plans of building the forge and adding on to the cave, he had come to terms with it long since. Jeebee looked around him again. The evening was glorious. He still felt like a giant. It was ridiculous for him to feel so, he thought suddenly. It had all been Merry’s accomplishment, not his. But that was the way he felt, nonetheless. Also, he abruptly recognized, he was hungry.
He went back in, turned on one of the interior lights that was farthest from the bed, and cut some meat and cheese for himself. He made his bed again on the floor against the door and turned the light out. In no time whatsoever, he, with the other two, was sleeping the sleep of the successful and the just.
CHAPTER 36
With the baby’s birth Jeebee went into a blur of activity. They had been concentrating so hard on the birth that they had almost forgotten the inexorable march of the seasons. Now it was as if young Paul was a calendar clock, who by his growth measured off the days for them and emphasized how much was to be done before the snow flew again.
Jeebee found himself coming to begrudge the necessary day a week he spent down on the flat, hunting meat. He could still generally locate at least one cow or calf within the sweep of a day’s ride under good conditions, but the supply would not last forever, although now there were young calves, which would be growing up and providing a future supply.
Still, though these promised well for the future, there was also the possibility that at any time a neighboring rancher might move in to take over this territory. In which case, without warning, he might someday discover armed men on the flatlands directly below him; and hunting would no longer be the safe thing that he had begun to take for granted it would be.
He started giving at least another half a day now and then to checking the foothill and mountain territory within several hours’ ride of the cave, looking for sign of deer travel or presence. He not only found what seemed to be deer trails, but sighted a number of deer.
Aiding him in this, of course, was the fact that fawns had been born with the spring. While these had already grown considerably, still to a certain extent they restricted the travel of their mothers and of such barren female deer who had stayed pretty much together during the winter past.
He decided that there was a fair amount of meat supply in wild game, which could be harvested if he needed it. He could even start harvesting them now; but there was an excellent reason for his not doing so.
The fact was, he had underestimated the amount of work he had planned to get done after the baby’s birth and before cold weather set in.
If he was going to stay here another year, there were needs he had to start facing now. One of these was ammunition for his guns, particularly if he was not going to reach any place where he could get more powder and possibly more shells.
He knew how to load his own cartridges, simply because Paul had carried the materials in his wagon, and Nick had shown him the technique. Paul had sold the cartridge makings cheaper than the finished cartridges themselves, partly because the materials were easier to transport in bulk.
He had become used to saving most of his brass for reuse, but neither primers nor modern smokeless powder would be easy to find, and they were impossible for him to duplicate.
Possibly he could make black powder, if he had to. But to the best of his present knowledge, he would have to be willing to make a long and probably perilous trip through strange territory, south, to get sulfur. The silver nitrate for the primers was there to be extracted from bird droppings. But gathering the droppings would require more time than he had to spare.
A much better alternative would be to have something else to kill cattle and large game with—something for which he could make the missiles himself. Something that would have the additional value of being silent so that he would not attract attention by the carrying sound of firing a firearm if someone was down, out of sight on the flatlands but still within hearing.
The ideal answer to all this would be, he thought, a crossbow. He had once handled and even shot a handmade crossbow, its bow part made of a steel leaf from an automobile spring. Its short, heavy bolt—or arrow—with its metal broad-head arrow point, had gone completely through a target of three-eighths-inch plywood. With the forge now operating, he could build himself such a weapon and missiles. By using the crossbow for hunting whenever possible, he could considerably stretch his remaining ammunition supplies.
In addition to this, he had planned, ever since it was clear they must stay, to make an addition above their present cave. He planned to use window frames and glass scavenged from the ranch, which like most isolated dwelling places, had its own supply of extra glazing materials.
So he could even put glass in one or several of those window frames that had had their glass knocked out by the raiders or destroyed by the fire. It would only require that the frame itself be solid. What he intended was to build a sort of skylight window in an upward-extended section of the wall of the cold room, which would let outside sunlight over a floor, sealing it off from the cold room, below, directly into the inner room.
The window he had in mind would actually be three of the ranch’s windows fastened, one on top of the other, so that essentially he would have triple glazing to keep the cold out and still let the daylight come through.