As he took up his travels again, however, the walking began to warm him and some of the ill humor left. His mind began to work to some purpose.
Somehow, he must come to grips with the food problem. He chewed on dried grasses as he went along, having read somewhere that this would help. But it did not seem to. There was an answer to his need to fuel his body, if only he could think it through.
As usual, however, his mental engine, faced with one problem, immediately went off on another. As it frequently did, it had to do with Wolf. How far afield did the other go when he was gone like this? On impulse, Jeebee stopped, lifted his head, and cupped his hands around his mouth.
As he had done the evening before, he howled.
The sound lifted, hung, and died on the soft morning air. It was another bright day with only flecks of clouds to be seen; and howling seemed ridiculous. The long moments went by, and Jeebee was about to stop listening and go on. Then, from some distance, but so obviously an answer that Jeebee’s hair stood up on the nape of his neck as he heard it, a howl came back in answer. But it was not the high-pitched trilling response Wolf had made to the coyote, the night before. This, while lower in pitch than last night’s, had more in common with the mournful plaint of a train whistle.
Was it Wolf—his Wolf who had answered? It could be another wild one of the same breed. Jeebee lifted his hands to his mouth to howl again, but something very like an instinct seemed to caution him against pushing his luck.
Not now. Later, sometime, he could try again, and if he again got an answer, he would be ready to see if he could be sure it sounded like the answer he had just gotten. It would be unlikely that there would be a strange wolf answering close to him and Wolf far off—and if Wolf was likewise close, why had he not likewise answered?
The question was suddenly wiped from his mind by the glimpse of a small form scurrying out of his sight into the tall grass ahead and to the right of him.
The .22 he had carried in his right hand so long leaped to his shoulder and fired almost before he had registered the movement. Jacking another shell into the chamber, he went forward as cautiously as if he was stalking a wounded bear and came upon a porcupine with its head almost torn off by the .22 slug.
Carefully, he flipped the carcass on its back with the muzzle of the gun. He had read about porcupines. In some states they had been protected as “survival food,” since they were slow enough for a human to run down and kill with a club or heavy stone.
Now, remembering what he had read, he slit the carcass down its belly, hooked a finger in the slit and dragged it back to an open space where he could build a fire. He was overjoyed by the dead weight of it pulling against his finger.
He built a small, hot fire with his tinder sticks and some dead branches from a nearby bush. Then he began, unskillfully but more or less successfully, to get the meat of the animal out of its quill-protected body. He had nearly managed to complete this job when Wolf appeared.
Jeebee stiffened in reaction, knife in hand. He had literally forgotten the other’s existence in the glory of suddenly having a possible full meal in hand. Whether Wolf had returned as a result of the exchanged howls, or simply chanced to come back, this was one time Jeebee intended to fill his own belly first, before anyone else. Wolf approached, but came to a stop less than two feet from him. He whined.
Jeebee tensed, expecting Wolf to make a try for the porcupine meat. Ready for anything, but determined to hold on to his food, Jeebee finished loosening most of the chunk meat from the bones and cut off as much as he thought he could eat at one sitting. He dropped the rest back in with the carcass and pushed it with his rifle barrel toward Wolf.
Wolf buried his nose in the carcass. Jeebee set about trying to cook the chunks of raw meat he had, by impaling them on sticks that he held out over the fire.
Wolf went through the eatable parts of the porcupine that had been given him in what seemed to be no more than a couple of seconds. Finished, he moved close to the opposite side of the fire; and Jeebee warily withdrew the sticks he held, holding them as close to himself as possible while still keeping them in the heat of the flames. A sort of madness of hunger was on him and he found he regretted having only the knife in his hand that did not hold a food-laden stick. In that moment he was quite ready to kill Wolf if the other tried to take the food from him.
Wolf did not try, however. Instead he stretched out his muzzle with laid-back ears and made a series of small whines, almost puppyish whines.
Jeebee did not trust him. He took one stick from the fire and gulped down the half-burned, half-raw meat that was on it, then devoured the other one. Wolf continued his appeals until all the food was gone; but once it had disappeared, he stopped, stared companionably at Jeebee for a moment, then turned and disappeared off into the brush again.
Jeebee sat back, conscious now of singed fingers and a burned tongue, but with an incredible sense of satisfaction in him. He had never before known such a feeling. To have his belly filled, as it was now, was like being lord of all the world.
CHAPTER 4
They had reached the interstate highway Jeebee had set as a goal for himself, nearly five days before. But now that they were there, he was taking time to explore up and down a twenty-mile length of that double ribbon of concrete before settling on a position of observation, to make sure of both his knowledge of the area and a food supply.
The food-supply question had reached the critical stage. Wolf, gone most of the time, had not shown any signs of suffering from a lack of it. It was impossible for Jeebee to tell how well fed he was simply by looking at him. Underneath his almost ragged-looking summer coat of fur, dark on back and sides but lightening almost to white on the belly, he had appeared lean, almost skinny, since he had shed his winter coat. But without any real proof of the belief, Jeebee felt fairly sure that Wolf, unlike him, had been able to find and hunt down some kind of prey, even if it had been no more than hare or ground squirrels.
In Jeebee’s case, however, the small supply of emergency irradiated food was long since eaten. He had found little to put in his stomach since the porcupine, except for a few mushrooms he had been able to identify safely as morels—one of the three species he could recognize from possibly deadly kinds—that he found growing on the decaying roots of a tree in a wood clump. But these were quickly eaten and not very satisfying to his clamorous belly. He was conscious of a sort of continuous hollow feeling. It could be ignored, if necessary, but in fact it was always with him these last few days. More troubling was a general weakness of body. He tired more quickly than he liked, after even a few hours of walking.
Now, however, on his fourth day of exploration he had come across a farmhouse, abandoned and half broken down, that had at first looked promising. If he could find even some sprouted grain that had been originally stored for feed animals, he could cook and eat that…
But after a thorough search of the barn and what was left of the house, he had found nothing. He was about to leave when he suddenly caught sight of Wolf, who had not been with him since the dawn, also nosing around the place. He paid no attention to Jeebee, but seemed intent on his own investigations.
Jeebee suddenly felt something like resentment. He had been about to give up this place as having nothing worth taking. But now that Wolf was investigating it, he was suddenly reminded of the fact that his comrade’s keen nose and intense curiosity might be able to find things he had missed.
Accordingly, Jeebee went back to searching, himself. He had pretty well examined the house and felt sure he had not overlooked anything at all that he could eat, but now he would look again. He began to search the immediate perimeter of the former dwelling.