His watch informed him it was twelve minutes past ten in the morning. He was reproaching himself with having slept a good chunk of the day away when he realized suddenly that for some weeks now he must have been on Mountain, rather than Central Time, and set the digital display of the watch’s clock mode back an hour.
The aspirin was proving itself useless against the pain. Like all hurts, his seemed to bite at him ever more viciously as he began to pay attention to them. He gave in and took a half Dilaudid, telling himself he would hold off for at least another six hours before taking the second half. After taking the half he waited expectantly. Finally, the pain began to back off somewhat. In half an hour it was ignorable.
He had been lying on his bed as he waited. Now he got to his feet, using the staff of his crutch simply as a staff. The crosspiece had come completely loose as the leather thongs failed. It struck him that probably it wasonly rawhide that shrank itself really tight if it was put on wet and allowed to dry. Or, perhaps, it had been stretched as it dried because of the wobbling it had done as he walked. In any case, once on his feet with the aid of the staff, he found he could limp around that way.
The horses were still finding graze where he had tied them. He went back to Sally’s packload and routed out flour, bacon, and a frying pan. He hated to dig into the bacon this early, but he needed strength and that meant he had to have food, and this was the only reachable food left with the high caloric content and in quantities that would fill that need.
He made a bannock with the flour, water, and bacon fat and rolled the fried and rewarmed bacon inside it.
With the food inside him, he literally felt as if he had been given a new lease on life. He went through the complicated procedure of rigging up the block and tackle as high on the trunk of one of the lodgepole pines as he could reach to chop notches for its holding rope. With this, he finally lifted the packload, once more enclosed in the net, onto Sally’s back again.
He saddled Brute with his one good arm and a knee in the horse’s belly as he tightened the cinch strap.
He was ready to travel.
What he was looking for now was a site for a semipermanent camp. Someplace a little larger and more suitable than where he was. Water was the first requirement, and he already had that in this stream. The only question about where to look therefore was upstream or downstream? Upstream, then.
Curiously, although they were getting higher into the foothills, for a little while the slopes became gentler and the going easier, with even some spaces among the stands of trees that surrounded them on all sides.
They went slowly. Jeebee’s leg still bothered him when it hung down in the stirrup, and was not really very comfortable pulled up and crooked around the pommel of the saddle. But the little stream led them at last to what could fairly be called a mountain meadow. Jeebee estimated it at something like three hundred yards in length and about half that in width.
Here the stream split of from a much wider one. In fact, the other was one that might even be called a small river. It was shallow, full of large boulders, but fast running. There would be no way, Jeebee thought, sitting Brute and looking through its clear water at its bed of large boulders, of leading the horses across it. Even if he was physically able to do so, which he still was not, the boulders were impassable. They were too large and unpredictable and would be too slippery for hooves. The chance of a broken leg for either animal was almost certain.
He tied Sally to a tree at the meadow’s edge and rode Brute around the rest of the area to look it over more closely.
He went first to examine the point at which the little stream split off from the larger one. It was as he had suspected on first seeing the two streams. The smaller one showed clear evidence of having been deliberately man-made. He suspected it had been deliberately diverted to provide water directly to the ranch, the dead ranch now some distance behind and below them.
He continued with his survey of the meadow. It was more or less a wide aisle between the trees, with the end at which he had entered being fairly sparsely treed, and open; the trees gathered in closer beyond and were overshadowed by two rises of the hillside that began on either side and continued beyond the trees surrounding the meadow and up ahead, leaving only space for a narrow bed for the larger stream—so that the meadow was almost enclosed in a natural rampart of landscape, beyond its belt of trees.
The banks of the lower part of the stream were at present only a couple of feet above the water level, but farther up toward the end of the meadow that bank rose, almost abruptly, as the slope of the ground there itself rose, to a small bluff like that which had crowned the shale slope Jeebee had twice crossed the day before to take a look at the ranch.
The bluff became almost vertical in its last twenty or thirty feet, and here, as in the one above the shale slope, there was a hole, that might once have been the opening to some animal’s den. Jeebee rode closer, and as he got close enough, the daylight was enough for him to see that while the hole was at least a couple of times larger than the one on the shale slope, it was only a shallow opening into what seemed soil that was nearly pure sand. He changed his mind about it possibly being a onetime den. It looked far more likely to be the result of some natural spill of the loose material of the bluff—possibly freezing and thawing of the earth.
Certainly, it was empty. There was no animal sign, and no vegetation inside it, or any indications that there had been, recently.
He was intrigued by the sight of it. With a little work and use of the tarpaulin and his other plastic cloths that he had gotten from Paul, it was the sort of place that he could make into a rain-proof, halfway comfortable chamber for himself to bed down.
As a matter of fact, that sandy earth he saw looked as if it would be easily diggable. Perhaps it had indeed been dug out by an animal at one time, after all, or at least the digging of it started by some animal. It would not be difficult to dig more deeply and make more space within. Then with something to cover the opening, Jeebee would have a den of his own for the first time since he had left the wagon.
CHAPTER 25
Three days later a large change had been accomplished. The horses were much better for the rest and the steady feeding. That trek from the stream by the willows up past the ranch had undeniably taken it out of them, but they were at last showing the signs of complete recovery. Now they were both almost frisky; even Sally, normally so staid and quiet, seemed impatient at being tethered.
As for himself, Jeebee considered both his arm and leg now almost as good as ever. He had even tried sleeping that second night in the cave of the meadow without even one Dilaudid, taking just aspirin instead, and found that, tired as he was, he had dropped off and slumbered without trouble.
Since then he had taken four doses of Tylenol in the last three days, and that was all. Now, while both leg and arm protested at being bumped against something or the muscles in them being used too abruptly, for the most part he could simply ignore the fact that they had been hurt. Both arm and leg still showed dark from the bruising, but the swelling in each was almost gone.
He had benefited from this improvement during the last couple of days by being able to ride Brute down at night into the flatlands. He had even gone out beyond the destroyed ranch, in hopes of finding a range cow and shooting it; and had actually done so.
The job he had done of butchering out the more eatable portions of meat had been clumsy. And packing them back on Brute to the meadow had been a problem. Brute had objected ardently to carrying the meat, which smelled to him very strongly of blood. But Jeebee limped back on foot, leading the horse firmly by the head, with a close grip on the reins just in front of his teeth. Brute’s only option was to follow.