“Steady now, girl,” he said to Sally, “stand steady!”
Clinging to the tree trunk, he pulled himself up until he was kneeling on Sally’s broad back. The bone of her spine bit, hard and uncomfortable, into the bones of his lower legs. He ignored the discomfort. Reaching up as high as he could in this position, he felt his hands grip and hold on the netted plastic that carried the packload.
It was too dark to see where the edges of the plastic tarpaulin came close together under the flap of the one corner of it he had draped over the edges as a rain roof. But he felt his way through its folds until his fingers recognized the tarp’s edges, then worked his hands inside and felt for the rough-soft surface of his sleeping blankets.
And found them.
A few minutes later, triumphant, he was climbing down to a position back astride Sally, with three blankets wadded in his arms. Shortly after that, he was urging Sally back to the tree to which she had originally been tied.
He had been tempted to ride her to the fire and tether her to a tree beside it. But it would be unfair to tie her up where she could not drink. Once more he crossed the ground on hands and knees. Wolf had risen to his feet to stare at Jeebee as he approached. Jeebee had tucked the blankets inside his jacket for fear Wolf would be impelled to grab any loose ends in his teeth.
But Wolf made no move. In fact, if anything, he seemed a little wary of Jeebee’s shape, swollen by the blankets.
Jeebee made it back to his place by the fire, spread out the blankets, and gratefully rolled himself up in their double thickness. It was not until all this was done that Wolf lay down again. Thumped down, rather, with a grunt that sounded almost like a grumble.
Jeebee did not care. The Tylenol was taking hold. It touched the pain only lightly, but now that he had quit throwing it around, the leg seemed to recover a bit on its own. In moments Jeebee was warm; and shortly after that he was asleep once more.
When he woke the next day, Wolf was not to be seen. Jeebee found himself oddly worried by this. Since that evening Wolf had approached him with what Jeebee now knew to be submission behavior, Wolf had seldom left the campsite without touching base, first, with Jeebee, after the latter woke in the morning.
Did the leaving today signal changes in Wolf’s attitude toward him? There could be drawbacks as well as advantages to being accepted by Wolf as a pack mate.
But Jeebee was in no state to ponder that question at the moment. It was full morning and the pain of his ankle was gnawing at him again. He took more Tylenol, only three this time.
They did not seem to help at all. He lay there, sweating, but finally decided that while it hurt badly, the discomfort was not insupportable—at least as long as he did not move the ankle.
He found himself very thirsty and drank deeply from his full water bag, until he remembered the difficulty he might have refilling either or both bags now that he had the bad ankle. He checked himself then and his body reminded him of other necessities. He badly needed to urinate, and he would at least have to move away from his bedding to do so.
He moved, therefore, crawling sideways off the rise of land he had lain on, trying to hold the bad ankle in the air so that it would not be dragged. A sudden increase in pain made him grunt as he jarred the ankle while dropping the several inches from his sleeping mound.
He had counted on the thick folds of the blanket splint to cushion the ankle at least to some extent in his movement. But the pain was so abrupt and fierce that it was as if there was no cloth between the injured body part and the ground.
He lay for some minutes, waiting for the hurt to subside before trying to move again.
The pain went down slightly—or perhaps it was only his swollen bladder, insistent, that started him moving again. At any rate, he pulled himself a little farther sideways, then swiveled until he lay along the edge of the slope to the river below. His hand shaking, he managed to unbutton the stiff metal buttons of the work pants he had gotten from the wagon, and at last allow himself relief.
It was only afterward that he realized he should have brought at least one of the water bags with him so that he could take advantage of having moved this far to fill it from the running water of the river, a body’s length upstream.
At first he thought that once having made it back to his bed, he would never be able to face the thought of another trip, this time not only to the top of the bank, but down the sharp stones of it to the water’s edge. But once he had made it back, he realized that he would do it. Whatever he must do to stay alive he would do, in the end, as long as his body held out. And if he would do it in the end, why not now, before the point of desperation set in?
So he went after his water, and got it.
He did not in any sense conquer the ankle pain. But after a fashion he came to terms with it.
As the day wore on, he discovered he could, indeed, move around, by dividing the work into short moments of effort, then resting until he felt ready to try again. A stubbornness that he had not realized he had, grew in him. Also an inventiveness. He took a stone from the earth near the fire and put it into the fire to sterilize it. Then, after it had cooled, he put it into the empty water bag, ran a light rope through the cloth carrying handle of the bag, and tied it in a slipknot around the neck of the bag.
With a sidearm motion he threw the bag from his bed place out into the stream, and after it had sunk and filled itself with water, he hauled it back with the rope.
In spite of the fact that the slipknot pulled itself tight around the neck of the bag, some of the water in it slopped out and was lost as it bumped its way back to him. But it was so much easier a way of renewing his water supply that the loss did not matter.
The success cleared his head. He began to look on himself as a great deal less helpless than he had assumed. By thinking out easy ways of doing things and by making large movements in small, slow steps, he began to get things done.
This way, bit by bit, he gathered enough fresh fuel through the day for his fire to last the night. He even managed to chop through a pine sapling, cut off its limbs, and make himself another crude crutch.
It did not stand up any better to use than his earlier crutch. But by using it he was able, after several days, to move the horses one by one to a series of new tethering spots, where fresh ground cover was available to replace the sparse grass they had cropped off completely within the earlier circle of their tethers.
But the ankle was remarkably slow to mend. It seemed unreasonable that all the bear had done should mend so quickly, while a simple turned ankle was so slow to improve. Jeebee worried over the possibility that he had done something more than merely sprain it. He knew sprains were stubborn to heal, but… He also fretted over the time he was losing when he should be on his way. Until he took himself firmly in hand and told himself that worrying over the fact that he could not move on would not put him on his way any faster.
To take his mind off matters he returned to the wolf books, reading the few he had not had time to finish and rereading all the others.
He was trained at this type of attention by his academic years, and it was not long before he became once more engrossed in wolf lore. As he read, his mind finally solved a puzzle that had stayed with him since the moment in the willows, when he had found himself fighting for his life against the bear.
The last thing he had expected then had been that Wolf would come to his aid, as a storybook faithful dog comes to the rescue of its master.
But Wolf had come. It had seemed to be against all the pragmatic reactions and instinct for self-preservation that Jeebee had seen Wolf show otherwise. Wolf had nothing personally to gain by putting his own life at risk in tackling the bear that was engaged with Jeebee; and much to lose.