Jeebee slowly put out that hand and scratched in the ruff under Wolf’s neck—that ruff seemed to fairly call out to be scratched. From the neck, as Jeebee had gradually ventured to do over the days, he moved down Wolf’s chest and rib cage—cautious about handling this volunteer partner of his more freely than that. As his fingers moved, he scratched and plucked out the tufts of loose fur that were signs that Wolf now was beginning to shed his winter undercoat.
Wolf moved closer, to let himself be touched. His air was one of relaxed anticipation. His tail wagged briefly, just a little from side to side—but it was a wag. Jeebee continued now to scratch and groom him on both sides, but when he plucked a few tempting tufts from his lower ribs, Wolf swiveled his head toward the intrusive hand, drew back, stared at it for a long moment, then moved away and lay down beside where Jeebee was sitting.
The move was a clear statement that Wolf had had enough of being touched. Respecting it, Jeebee merely sat where he was, occasionally poking the fire and thinking his own thoughts while feeling a pleasure from the simple fact that Wolf was with him. It occurred to him now, sitting here before the fire with Wolf beside him, how much he was changed from the man he had been when he had fled from Stoketon.
When Jeebee had left that town with Buel Mannerly’s pellets whistling over him to speed him on his way, he had thought of himself as leaving with only a handful of the tools he needed to survive in this newer, cruder world. Now he found himself surviving with even much less.
Of course, it had never occurred to him that he would have to protect even this little he now had from his best and only friend, as he had come to think of Wolf. By now Jeebee had discovered that his tarp, and everything else he carried, ran the risk of being shredded by a curious Wolf, if he left them available to the other. He had learned from experience that the gnaw and chew marks he had seen in the woman’s store were not entirely, if at all, signs of Wolf attempting to escape, but simply an expression of his kind’s instinctively perverse, destructive nature.
He had believed then—and, in fact, he still thought so in retrospect—that he had less than was necessary of the muscle, the skills, and necessary combative instinct to survive in the new world that had come. But it was undeniable that he was toughening up and learning. It was curious that in some ways, survival in this harsher world required more sensitivity, rather than less.
Life had not trained him to fight his fellowman for survival. But it had trained him to be a superb and close observer, to note everything that was to be seen and put the observations together to produce conclusions that were based on the best understanding he was able to achieve; and this was a possibly critically useful ability.
Now, Wolf was equipped to be a survivor. From the first night when the attention of Jeebee’s mental engine had engaged itself with the question of whether Wolf was a dog or not, Jeebee had automatically noted, and tried to make sense of, everything he had seen the other do. Following that moment of escape from the station, and Wolf’s killing of the collie, he could not do otherwise than accept the fact that Wolf was, indeed, a wolf. On the testimony of the words Jeebee had overheard through the window from the black-bearded man, he had been caught by a trapper, then hand-raised from a pup by the same man who had owned the leather jacket Jeebee now wore. That same leather jacket that had caused Wolf to take to him in the first place. But if he had come to learn more about Wolf, what he had learned had merely opened the door on even greater puzzles. There must be a specific reason for Wolf’s continual leaving—as there must be a reason for his coming back. Just as there would be a reason for the meeting and touching ritual he expected to go through with Jeebee every time he showed up.
There was, Jeebee’s mind told him, a great deal more in meaning to Wolf’s facial and body expressions than he had ever expected in any animal. Dogs might or might not learn to read human facial expressions. Certainly they learned to read human tones of voice. But Wolf was an observer to a degree Jeebee had never seen in a dog.
It would be up to Jeebee to learn to act like a wolf, to think like a wolf—in the end, to “talk” as wolves talk, if he wanted to really communicate with Wolf. He could make a start by beginning to try to see things the way a wolf would see them.
Putting two and two together now, it struck him that Wolf had to be hunting on these absences of his. But the hunting must not take him too far from Jeebee’s line of travel, or else it would be more work than it would be worth to come back and find him—particularly if the reward was no more than Jeebee’s companionship. In short, he must gain something from being with Jeebee, since he was so superbly fitted to survive on his own. But what?
His thoughts were interrupted by Wolf just then getting to his feet. His head lifted, testing whatever odors the breeze brought him for a moment. He lowered his head but stayed standing.
Twilight was giving way to the darkness of night beyond the illumination of the fire. Suddenly, from far off, a banshee cry rose on the still air, quavered, and dropped, ending in a series of yips. For once, Jeebee recognized something heard or seen. It was the howl of a coyote. Radio and television shows had made it familiar.
Wolf got to his feet, lifted his own muzzle into the air, and opened his jaws. A howl, less full-bodied than Jeebee had expected, came from the furry throat. It was, in fact, a high, trilling, almost soprano howl. There were no yips at the end of Wolf’s howl; and, hearing it, something bone-deep stirred in Jeebee. He found himself tilting back his own head, cupping his palms on either side of his mouth, and howling back, himself, at the distant coyote—a long, drawn-out howl.
Wolf immediately howled again, with Jeebee—his voice harmonizing, working in and around Jeebee’s.
Silence flooded in. Jeebee looked over across the fire to see that Wolf had lain down again on his side, his eyes looking once more at Jeebee.
“You know what I hate—” Jeebee began softly and lovingly, then corrected himself, “what I hate and envy about you, you bastard? It’s your damn matter-of-factness about everything!”
For a long moment more the golden eyes continued to watch him while the silence about them filled with the little sounds of the night wood. Then the lupine eyelids drooped sleepily and the eyes closed. Jeebee settled down himself with his pack as a pillow—both for that purpose and to protect it from Wolf’s teeth.
When he woke, somewhat after sunup the next morning, Wolf was gone again. The fire was out and the ashes cold. He felt both cold and grumpy himself, and the thought came that somewhere, right now, Wolf might be finding food, while he had nothing. It put him in an ill humor.
He folded his solar blanket, which he had wrapped around him for sleep, and stowed it in his pack, put the pack on his back, then slung the heavier of the two rifles also over his back with a length of cord hacked from the coil he had carried to make a tent out of the reflecting tarp.
But the .22 was always in one hand or the other, ready for small game or any other use. He carried it loosely, by its middle, in his right hand at his side. More and more, he carried it this way, as he became more and more expert at reading the ground over which he passed, for signs of animal passage over it. So far he had gotten nothing but a couple of ground squirrels or gophers—he was not able to tell one from the other; and these he had eaten hastily, raw, before Wolf might happen to return and he would feel obligated to share his kill with the other.