He woke to find Wolf with his teeth set in a corner of the groundsheet, trying to tug it from underneath him.
“No!” Jeebee shouted instinctively—and, as instinctively, sat up and drove his fist at Wolf’s head.
His knuckles jarred on hard bone. Wolf let go and backed a step, his eyes on Jeebee’s without animosity, his head cocked slightly to one side.
“No! Leave it alone!” said Jeebee.
He lay down again, ready at any minute to feel again the tugging that had woken him. But it did not come, and when he lifted his head to look, Wolf had disappeared. Still too steeped in the need for sleep to worry further about it, Jeebee closed his eyes and was instantly in slumber again.
When he woke for the second time, there was still no sign of Wolf. The two horses were on their feet and looking at him. The sun was high overhead. But so thick together were the branched tops of the lodgepole pines, in their fierce competition for daylight, that down here on the thick carpet of dead brown pine needles all was in pleasant shadow. Brute lifted his head and neighed.
Jeebee struggled out of the confines of his bedding. Of course, the horses needed to drink from the stream from which their tethers kept them, and what little fodder they had been able to find in the needles underfoot was now cropped close.
He threw the last of the entangling blanket aside and staggered to his feet. He was suddenly aware that with the warming of the day, he had become drenched in sweat under the blankets. He stumped over to the horses, untied them, coiled up the now-loose ends of the ropes that had held them to their trees, and led them down to the stream.
They drank thirstily, and reminded of his own dryness of mouth, he stepped upstream to drink, himself, then remembered the danger of parasitical infection. He paused only to empty his bladder, then retied the horses, lowered the load with the water bags, and drank from the disinfected contents of one of these.
These primary needs taken care of, he reloaded the horses, gave them nose bags supplied with some of the grain in the loads, and let them eat.
For himself, he got from his saddle pack the last of the shortbread Nick had made for him before he had parted with the wagon. These hard, floury little cakes, rich with fat and sugar, tasted delicious in his mouth after the long, almost mealless day and night preceding. His conscience troubled him a little for eating them now. He could, he told himself, have saved them for a day or two and hoped to either pick up some game, or find an abandoned farmstead with the latest generation of crops run wild, to fill his empty stomach instead.
Instead, he finished off all the cakes, even licking the crumbs from the palms of his hands. He went back to the water bag, drank as much more as he could hold, then emptied what little was left. He refilled it from the stream, adding one of the disinfecting tablets he had gotten from Paul. In a couple of hours it, too, would be safe for him to drink. With Sally now carrying the full packload and Brute once more saddled, he led both horses down to the stream to give them also a chance at a final drink—which both took.
The trees about him were still too thick and the ground underfoot too sloping for easy travel off the road. He mounted Brute and headed them all back up onto the cracked pavement, heading downhill toward Ten Sleep.
It took him eight days, traveling north at an easy pace, to reach the neighborhood of Glamorgan, where Walter Neiskamp, the man who had kept wolves and been Paul Sanderson’s customer, lived.
The little town—it was barely more than a couple of blocks on either side of the main street, with no more than three rows of houses behind the stores—was close below the border of Montana. He approached the town just as night was coming down and made camp in the closest patch of trees to it, which was about a half mile distant. The next day and night, he spent observing it. Caution had come to be second nature with him now. However, he saw no signs of life about it. No movement of people in the daytime, no smallest flicker of light from a window after dark.
Finally, gingerly, he approached it. Wolf, who had caught up with him again, followed him perhaps a hundred feet out from the trees and then stopped, leaving him to go on alone. It was all open country, but he had picked the time just before twilight to make his approach. If it turned out that for some reason he had to run from it, after all, at least he could count on darkness closing down around him to aid his escape. He approached in a series of zigzags, keeping below the crests of the open but rolling land that surrounded it. He was puzzled by the lack of appearance of life around it. The cities, even the larger towns, had effectively destroyed themselves once their power, water, and communication with the outside world had been cut off, as the people in them had fallen to fighting among themselves for the necessities of life that were still available where they were.
But tiny towns like this had normally survived. For one thing, they were close to the country, which meant that they could draw upon or trade with their rural neighbors. For another thing, they were country people themselves, and more accustomed to being self-sufficient. Finally, there would be very little at a place like this for people to fight over.
So he thought. But, as the shadows deepened and he ventured at last around the houses and the stores into the main street, he had to face the fact that the town was entirely dead, and several of the houses at the far end had caught fire and burned down to shells. The stores themselves had their windows smashed and inside each of them things were strewn around as if a hunt had gone on for anything that might be useful or valuable.
For the first time the complete silence of the town impressed itself on him. He had been moving with extreme caution, out of the habits ingrained in him these last few months and the possibility that someone might be hidden in this otherwise deserted-appearing place. Now an absolute certainty settled in him that there was no one here. A faint breeze whistled softly through some of the broken doors and windows, but that was all that reached his ears, and for the first time he accepted that he was utterly, completely alone.
The place had been raided by some considerable armed force and was presently no more than a ghost town.
Without bothering to continue being particularly silent or trying to stay in the shadows, he ventured into several of the stores and buildings along the street. But they were all empty. There were no signs either of living people or dead bodies.
He worked his way down the street and at the very end he came across a small cemetery. In one corner of it a large area had evidently been dug up, at one end of which a rough wooden cross had been driven into the spaded earth, but with no sign or message upon it.
So, somebody at least had either escaped and come back, or come along, found the dead here, and buried them. It could not be otherwise. As for who had sacked the place, it had probably been raiders, a good-sized group to take even a small town like this so completely.
He shivered. He had been lucky so far not to encounter any such post-Collapse gang.
The further end of the tiny town reached into the fold of the foothills below which the town was set. A gravel road, already beginning to be overgrown with small plants of the spring, led off up into the fold. He followed it. Walter Neiskamp, the customer of Paul Sanderson who had kept wolves, had lived out just such a road at some little distance from this town—perhaps half a mile.
Jeebee had gone only a couple of hundred yards, however, before the turn to the road put hillside between him and the dead town. It was at this point that Wolf came out of the shadows and rejoined him. Together, they moved on. A small night wind whispered and muttered about them in the dark shapes of the trees flanking the road as the last of the daylight faded, and little patches of moonlight showed them enough to keep Jeebee from losing his way.