His searching took him on a spiral outward from the foundations of the building until it brought him to a fairly large patch of foot-high, year-old dead grass.
It had seemed to be nothing more than that; but as soon as he began searching through it, to his annoyance Wolf came also to nose about in it a few yards from him. Abruptly Wolf appeared to have found something. His tail and ears went up and his muzzle dipped out of sight below the tops of the grass stems. He seemed to be engaged with something.
Jeebee went hastily to join him. After a couple of strides, he saw that Wolf was standing in an open patch in the grass, worrying with his teeth at some kind of bolt that had to be first turned up, then slipped back from a hasp to free up a metal cover that lay level with the ground around it, its gray surface splotched with rust, but having the appearance of a fairly thick piece of sheet iron.
Jeebee knew better by now than to try to push Wolf away and simply take over the hasp himself. Wolf was extraordinarily protective of anything that he had near his mouth. On the other hand, there was that curiosity of his…
Jeebee backed off a little way out of the patch of grass and quietly picked up a couple of plum-sized rocks. Wolf’s head was down, still worrying with the hasp. Jeebee chucked one rock into the grass about fifteen feet beyond Wolf and another one as much again further on a second later. Wolf’s head came up, his ears pricked, and he bounded forward, searching into the grass about where the first rock had fallen, and then continued on, searching further out. In four quick strides, Jeebee reached the metal plate lying in the ground. He reached down and took hold of the hasp, just as Wolf’s muzzle poked back into his circle of vision.
But Jeebee was holding the hasp now, and if Wolf was protective about things right under his nose, he had so far likewise seemed to respect Jeebee’s ownership of anything he held. Of course, this respect had not been tested with anything that Jeebee suspected Wolf really wanted.
Now that the bolt was back, it was obvious to Jeebee that the metal plate had been a trapdoor over something. He looked for what must be there and now saw the two hinges, overgrown with grass in the edge opposite the one in which the bolt had been set. He took hold of the bolt and lifted. The cover was heavy, but it came up without too much trouble, though with some squealing that signaled long unuse.
Wolf backed away. Ahead of them and beneath Jeebee was a black hole of unknown depth in the ground. The top of a ladder led down into it.
Jeebee looked over at Wolf. He was five or six steps back. His posture was a picture of conflict between timidity and curiosity; and his raised and furrowed eyebrows gave a humanlike impression of concern as he craned his neck toward the darkness below.
It occurred to Jeebee he would be wise to get down the ladder as soon as possible, before Wolf overcame his original reaction at finding what was underneath the metal.
He turned, cradling the .22 in the crook of his arms, and began cautiously to back down the ladder. The .30/06 was in its sling on his back and pressed against him in unusual fashion as he descended. He went down into the darkness.
A moment later the toe of his left boot, searching downward, encountered something solid, and he stepped down on to what had enough give to feel like a dirt floor. He searched around with the toe of the boot to make sure there was adequate standing room at the foot of the ladder, then came all the way down with both feet.
For several long moments he could see nothing. He heard an almost querulous whimpering above him and looked up at a suddenly blinding patch of blue sky framed by the opening, and just a slice of Wolf’s muzzle, still some few feet back from one edge of the opening, looking down after him. A gray-furred paw reached tentatively down to the ladder’s topmost rung, and was swiftly withdrawn.
Jeebee made a mental note that Wolf was either not happy about entering unknown dark places belowground, or did not like descending ladders.
Whether the other could even see him or not down here, Jeebee did not know. And it did not matter.
Gradually his eyes, adjusting to the gloom, revealed to him, like a picture developing in a darkroom in its first tray of fluid, a cavelike area lined on all sides with shelves loaded with cans, some boxes, and even a few sealer jars.
Jeebee’s mouth suddenly watered. This was something that used to be common at every farm before rural electricity had come in, bringing with it refrigerators and freezers—a root cellar. Back in that time, these shelves would have been filled with glass sealers like the few he saw. Now, just before or at the time the house was deserted and damaged for whatever reason, its owners must have gone, leaving it still filled with the many things they had not taken with them. What was down here was food. And the canned stuff, at least, might still be edible.
Ignoring the little sounds from time to time of Wolf above him, Jeebee reached over his shoulder to fish in his pack and come up with a candle stub like the one he had used in the cellar where he had found the leather jacket.
Briefly he lit the two-and-a-half-inch piece of candle and began examining the cans closely. With the heat from the candle flame almost searing his eyes and the can at the end of his nose, he was at last able to find that most of them had been dated on the metallic circle of the bottom of each one. To his joy, the date stamped on there was no more than nine months earlier, and in only a couple of cases a year or more beyond what his multimode watch told him was the present date.
Hastily, he stuffed as many of the safely dated cans as he could into his backpack, filled his pockets, was about to pile more in his arms when a thought made him pause.
Wolf’s jaws, from what Jeebee had seen him do with them, would have no problem at all puncturing and tearing open one of these cans.
Slowly, he put back the few extra cans he had just picked up, reached back to take the .30/06 from the sling and replaced it with the .22. He gathered cans again into the crook of his left arm and looked once more about the root cellar before blowing out the candle. It had a wooden roof, braced by two-by-fours, about five feet above the floor, and with stoutly built shelves all around the sides. He would be back.
He blew the candle out, replaced it in the backpack, and took the .30/06 in his right hand, butt foremost, holding it balanced by the middle with the first three fingers while he used the last two to cling to the ladder rungs as he went up them. He mounted slowly and awkwardly. It was not unlikely, he thought, that Wolf had smelled the food that was in the glass sealers, if not that which was in the cans. The food in at least some of the glass sealers had probably gone rotten and the odor of them—detectable to Wolf’s sensitive nose, if not Jeebee’s own—had seeped out. If so, Wolf could not help but know that what he was now carrying up was at least potential food.
Jeebee tensed as he climbed. True, Wolf had not so far tried to take from him anything that he was actually holding, even the bits of porcupine meat that were merely close to him. But that was no guarantee Wolf would not try to appropriate the cans he was now carrying, or contrive to make him drop them.
Moreover, Wolf was really an awesomely dangerous animal, with those teeth and the speed and power Jeebee had seen him show over the past few weeks. If it came to a real contest between them…
Nonetheless, as he approached the top of the ladder, he became aware of the strange change inside of him. For days now he had been deeply and sincerely grateful to Wolf for staying with him. Even with the other’s undoglike strangeness and what might fairly be called selfishness, it was hardly an exaggeration to say that Jeebee had come to love him.