It would have been far more wise, Jeebee had thought then and afterward, for Wolf to stay back and see whether Jeebee won or not. And only then come galloping in, once it was clear that the bear was defeated. Prudently, that way, he would have avoided getting involved in a situation in which it might have been Jeebee who was being defeated, and the bear would then have been free to turn on Wolf.
Now, not from what was on the pages before him, but out of some coming together of all he had read up until this moment, he found himself understanding why Wolf had done what he did.
The key—as he’d fleetingly surmised while he lay recovering from his wounds—was social evolution. Social organization allowed wolves to hunt animals many times their own size and made them the most effective predator in North America until the arrival of Man. But group hunting required foresight, planning, communication, and other forms of intelligent behavior found only in creatures like humans and chimpanzees, creatures that matured slowly and so remained helpless and dependent for much of their lives. For pups to survive so extended a period of immaturity had required the evolution of cooperative care of the young and an instinct for cooperative defense.
It was not Jeebee, the person, to whose rescue Wolf had come. It had been to the assistance of a pack mate under attack. For a wolf it would always be the pack that was of first importance, the individual only second.
In short, Wolf had simply joined in as he normally would if some other wolf of his pack had become involved with a bear.
The discovery was like a bright light in Jeebee’s mind, illuminating a great deal of the rest of the material he had studied. He reminded himself again, out of his own scientific training, that there must always be an explanation.
Everything he had ever learned had always demanded that.
It did not mean that the explanation was always immediately available. But nothing happened without a reason; particularly as far as the actions of the higher mammals were concerned. There had to be a cause for every action.
That understanding brought his mind back to his latest concern about Wolf—that, against custom, Wolf had left without waiting for Jeebee to wake up.
Of course, Wolf had always come and gone as he wished. But his normal pattern lately had been almost exclusively to appear at twilight, stay through the night, and leave as soon as Jeebee had accepted his morning greetings.
Now, he was leaving before Jeebee was awake, but reappearing three or more times in the day—greeting Jeebee briefly, sniffing him over, and showing what Jeebee felt was a different sort of interest in him.
It was as if Wolf now was waiting for something to happen. However, invariably after he had been back for a little time, he would abruptly be gone again. Wolf never visibly came or went.
He was suddenly there, or he was as suddenly gone again. Except for the fact that Jeebee had long since become familiar with this behavior, it would have been a little like living with a ghost.
Jeebee found himself concentrating on the new puzzle of why Wolf was acting as he did. Again, there must be a reason. It was hard to think, because, although the pain was being controlled by Tylenol alone now, it had been days since he had eaten anything and he was becoming preoccupied with wanting food very much.
It was one thing to tell himself he could go without food for a few days. But now that the few days had stretched to nearly a week, the body began to send different and more urgent signals that nourishment was needed. It was not so much hunger as a sort of knowledge in brain and bones that it would be dangerous to go without food too long. And his body was telling him it was time he did something about the situation.
But, of course, there was nothing he could do. He was able to move around the clearing, but he could not even, as he would have to, stand on Sally’s back to reach far enough up and into his packload to find the flour and bacon; which had been packed, from prudence, in the very middle of it. He had been lucky, in fact, to have found the ends of the blankets as close to the edges as he had been able to reach.
Lately, he had been debating with himself over using one of his knives to slash open the net and plastic wrapping of the pack-load so that everything inside it would fall to the ground. But to do that would be self-defeating. He might get food for a few days, but it would have meant damaging, and exposing to damage, everything he had, for perhaps three or four days’ rations.
What was more, once his possessions were scattered on the ground, he would have no way of protecting them. Wolf, or other wild animals, would probably tear, chew up, or carry off a good deal of what he possessed.
Besides, the net itself would be irreparable. Theoretically, he had enough leather thongs to tie it back together again. But even if he could and did repair it, or could use another of the folded-up plastic tarps he carried in the packload—still, he would have to be able to climb the tree in order to reaffix it to the block and tackle and haul it up where it would be safe.
His own cleverness at tying the rope that secured both the blocks and the top of the packload to the tree trunk above the load itself now frustrated him from getting at what he needed.
Shortly after dawn one morning he was lying in his usual resting place on the blankets, straining his mind again for some way of getting at the packload, when Wolf made one of his visits back. By this time Jeebee was not only beginning to feel weak from lack of food, but also depressed. He hardly acknowledged Wolf as the other loomed suddenly above him and began to sniff at him. As Wolf sniffed up toward Jeebee’s face, Jeebee smelted an odor, with a nose that had grown more sensitive by a life in the open. In the same moment he noticed what he had smelled.
There was a reddish dampness on the hair around Wolf’s muzzle.
A sudden wild thought came to him. It was impossible, and under ordinary standards, unthinkable. But he had felt the fear of a weakness from lack of food that could keep him from surviving. He had nothing to lose by trying.
He pulled himself up on one elbow. Putting his face right up to Wolf’s, he deliberately licked at the moist fur around Wolf’s mouth.
The taste on his tongue was salty.
For a second nothing seemed to happen. Then Wolf seemed to cough, and as Jeebee pulled back his head, Wolf regurgitated onto the blankets some chunks of raw, red-gray meat, which steamed in the cool morning air.
Jeebee felt within him a leaping of ridiculous joy. It had been the craziest of possible chances. But he had taken advantage of the way wolves brought back food to their pups, and to the mother of pups when she was denned up with them. The regurgitation was reflexive—another of the social instincts that made it possible for wolf pups to enjoy an extended childhood and develop the intelligence they would need for group hunting. The wolf who had eaten could deliberately put himself in the position—as Wolf must have been doing these last few days—ofgiving up the food he had swallowed. But once he had been licked about the muzzle as pups of his species did instinctively, and Jeebee had just done, the reflex to regurgitate was uncontrollable.
It was a miracle out of nature itself. One of the writings on wolves had mentioned that an adult wolf would even bring food in this fashion to a den-bound mate—or even to another adult pack mate who might be too sick, or otherwise unable to get about, to travel or hunt.
The last seldom happened, Jeebee had gathered. But it could. It had happened now.
He realized suddenly that Wolf was looking at him, bright-eyed. Jeebee started to touch him in thanks, then realized that was not what Wolf was waiting for.
Jeebee changed his motion and bent down over the chunks of meat. Ordinarily the thought of eating something vomited up, whether by an animal or another human, would be nauseating. But Jeebee knew that Wolf gulped his food whole. There was no real chewing or digestion done in his mouth. His stomach acids would have begun to digest the meat only from the surface, and there could not have been time enough for that to work very much. At the most, the acids might have started to tenderize it; also, they would have effectively sterilized it, being very strong acids.