As he had begun to cannibalize the ranch house to provide materials for his cave, he had discovered that there might be benefits in leaving the undamaged parts of the house and its outbuildings as intact as possible, for purposes of further shelter or use. Accordingly, he examined first the outbuildings that had been most damaged by the fire.
The worst off of these was a building that had originally, evidently, been little more than a roof and a couple of walls. It had been either the blacksmithy for the ranch or the building in which a portable forge had been set up to do blacksmithing. He had already discovered an anvil there, which he meant to bring back to the cave for his own use once he got down the list of other priorities to it. Right now, the need for it was far enough in the future not to concern him.
There was almost nothing left of this building. Certainly there had been nothing about it of the kind of material of which he was most in need.
What he had hoped for was to find a couple of six-to-eight-foot planks, both at least an inch in thickness. If he found them he could saw their ends on the diagonal, or if he could discover a saw around the place that would let him saw in a curve, he could put a continuous upward curve to the bottom edge at the end of each plank. The two planks could then form the runners of his sledge. After that it would merely be a matter of bracing between them with a few two-by-fours and putting light planks across the two top edges to make a bed. The whole thing need only be heavy enough to carry about a hundred pounds of beef, or an equal load.
But there was nothing left in the smithy outbuilding. He went on next to the most ruined shed, which had evidently been a storeplace for odds and ends of small equipment and tools in need of mending, or merely those that were potentially too useful to throw away.
This building had been only about half destroyed by the fire. Jeebee looked it over, but saw nothing of the thickness he wanted. He was just about to leave when he realized that what he was looking for was under his feet.
The floorboards of the shed, in fact the floorboards of all the sheds, were of thicker planks than those used in the sides of the buildings or the ranch house.
He had already taken a number of hand tools up to the cave. But lately he had seen the wisdom of keeping at least one of each of the more common tools down at the ranch, for work there as well. Accordingly, he went to his store of these things and found a claw hammer and a crowbar.
With these he pried up a couple of the floorboards. He found that there was a bonus attached, once he had. For not only were the planks as thick as he wanted, but they had been put down with nails larger than any of those he had so far salvaged from their original places in the house and other buildings.
He went to work with a saw that decidedly was not made to cut curves. Not only was it a straight-cut saw—unthinkingly, earlier, he had taken the best saw with him—but it was rusty and dull. But as it got close to noon, he finally got the sawing done and began to join the two planks with the heavy nails driven through their sides and into the ends of a couple of braces made of two-by-fours.
Planking over the top of the sledge with the lightest boards he could find took less than another hour. He attached a towing rope to the front ends of the runner planks. The end product was good. But he began to be a little worried as he looked at it and realized how much dead weight he would be pulling, even without any load on it. Heading into a blizzard with this dragging behind him, fully loaded, might be more than he could manage. He needed to save weight some way, but certainly he could not save it either on the runners or on the bracing boards.
He went looking for something else to cover the body of the sledge. He found it in a piece of half-inch plywood that had been used in a building that had evidently done double duty as a temporary barn for about three horses or three head of cattle. The plywood had been used to form partitions between the stalls.
Swearing under his breath at his waste of time, he removed the boards and replaced them with the plywood.
When he was done, the sledge was still not what might be called “light.” But it was the best he could do. Wrapped up in his work, he had almost forgotten the weather. But now he stepped outside the building in which he had been working and saw that the day had grown very dark. The snow was no longer a scatter of soft flakes, but hard, almost invisible pellets of ice. There would be no trying to get back up to the campsite and the cave today.
When the morning dawned, there were a good four inches of grainy snow on the ground. But the wind had ceased, and although the temperature was low, the absence of movement in the cold air made it bearable. It was even more bearable as the last of the clouds disappeared, and the sun came out.
The snow was not so deep and the temperature was not so low that what had fallen might not quickly turn into slush or ice, which could be slippery underneath the hooves of the horses. Still… he made a quick decision to load the sledge on the trailer and head back to the camp.
Once there, he could find shelter for the horses in the corral he had built abutting the small, right-angled wall of his smithy-to-be. The trailer would be safe at the campsite, and he would also have the sledge on hand. So that if the weather continued to be bad and more snow fell, he could head down into the flatlands with it alone.
On foot. As he had early imagined himself doing.
CHAPTER 29
It was a long, hard struggle back to the cave. In spite of the fact that the air temperature stayed low, the horses found most of the going slippery, and the trailer was evidently a problem to pull, particularly when they ran into smaller drifts.
Jeebee went ahead of them to break trail and to make sure that the horses did not wander into a drift too deep to pull the trailer through. Its only load was the sledge, but under these conditions that was enough.
They reached the meadow in late afternoon. The bright, cloudless sky overhead, and the fact that the surrounding trees blocked out much of what little wind stirred, gave the meadow an appearance of being warmer than it actually was. Jeebee unhitched the trailer without bothering to take the sledge out, unharnessed the horses, and put them in the corral.
He went directly to the shelter of the cave for himself and built a fire in the fireplace. Wolf, who at first had been reluctant to venture inside the newly built wall at all, had some days since worked himself up to coming into the outer part. He had inspected every feature of the space minutely. Much of the wood bore exploratory chew marks, and one of the vertical studs had obvious stains. Wolf had found a corner of the wall where Jeebee had built a rough frame for a cloth weather barrier to stand between the smithy and the rest of the lower front room, and adopted it as a nice place to curl up and sleep.
Jeebee closed the outer door, now, but did not latch it; merely pulling it to, and fastening it with a loop of leather thong after Wolf followed him in as far as the front room. He was confident that Wolf would push on the door if he wanted to get out and would discover the thong. Even if he didn’t recognize that it held the door closed, he would almost certainly bite it—and thereafter Wolf would go for the thong whenever he wanted the door open.
Jeebee lit one of his battery-fed interior car lights and kept it lit long enough to get a fire started in the fireplace, using the dead wood and tinder he now kept stored beside it, ready for use.
The fire blazed up. It began to warm the interior room almost immediately. Jeebee turned off the electric light. Looking around in the firelight at the unfinished cave, he thought that it was not much of a place to come home to, offering little more than warmth and shelter. Only its front wall was finished. Its two side walls, including the one with the fireplace, were still in process of building, and the innermost wall was simply a slope of dirt and sand that every so often crumbled loose and slid down to join the dirt underfoot. Jeebee told himself that he must get around eventually to flooring the interior room, once he had finished sealing the walls, ceiling, and all else.