How much had he taken in that confused time? He could not remember, but since he had remembered hurting badly each time he woke, he probably had not exceeded the permissible dose by too much…
“Mhrmmp…? Mhrmmp…? Mhrmmp…?”
Wolf was still by him, now making small, inquiring sounds in the back of his throat. Jeebee half rose on his good elbow, looking at him, and Wolf hastily backed off several steps. He was watching Jeebee now, ears folded far back in a strong signal of peaceful intentions, tail awag. His head was cocked a little on one side, with what, from long experience during their months together, Jeebee recognized as an interested, worried look on his face.
“Sorry,” Jeebee said hoarsely, looking at Wolf. “I’m not mad—”
He tried to lift himself higher—but pain stopped him and his elbow gave way beneath him. Wolf came forward a step. Literally, Jeebee realized, he could not get up. He reached out with his hand toward Wolf, and Wolf came forward another step and licked at it. Jeebee reached up into the thick hair under Wolf’s neck and scratched there.
Wolf licked at his hand again. Then—as suddenly as if a switch had been turned off—all appearance of interest or concern vanished from him. He turned and trotted off into the surrounding willows, leaving Jeebee suddenly alone.
Jeebee lay where he was. Slowly, the Dilaudid began to take effect and the pain to recede. As it did so he was aware of the fact that a full bladder was bothering him.
He found himself in a quandary. He literally could not move. Even with the pain reduced, the left arm and leg were stiff as wood. However, with some effort he was able to roll slightly over on his right side again to the extent that he could urinate beyond the edge of the goods piled underneath him. A suffusing rush of warmth as well as relief spread through him. He remembered then that Dilaudid, like codeine, morphine, and all other opiates, increased parasympathetic activity—which meant that it would be slowing down his normal bowel action and causing constipation. If he was to be confined to the packload for several days, this side effect would be a help. Also, if he remembered correctly, Dilaudid caused nausea, which would lessen his normal hunger for the next day or two.
The physical relief was tremendous.
He lay back, relaxing. He was in shade right now, this early in the day, but the sun would be up and shining directly on him in a couple of hours. Well, there was nothing to be done about that except possibly use something he could reach, either underneath or beside him, to shade his eyes from the direct glare.
He was becoming relatively comfortable with the Dilaudid in him and he was slept out. His mind was much calmer than he had expected. Some of Wolf’s pragmatism had apparently rubbed off on him. He was in danger here by the little river and among the willows. A rancher, a rancher’s dog, even another bear could stumble across him. He must get able to ride, or at least to sit a horse long enough so that he could move out of this grazing land and up into the country of the foothills, where the cattle would be unlikely to go, and consequently the ranch people as well.
The real problem would be getting the gear below him packed back onto Sally. He might be able to pull himself around after a fashion in a day or two, but it was almost inconceivable that he would be able to repack and resaddle.
On the other hand, there was nothing he could do about that right now. What his body needed was rest. What his wounds needed were cold compresses and to continue to be elevated.
Right now, the cold compresses were out of the question. He could not even pull himself to the edge of the bank so that he could dip into the water the cloths that had been wrapped around the damaged parts of his body. On the other hand, he could after a fashion keep his hurt arm, leg, and head elevated.
Just before he’d fallen asleep, he had evidently built up part of what was beneath him to make the mounds on which both the wounded arm and wounded leg could lie. With Dilaudid reducing the pain, he clumsily pulled them up on these mounds again. Anything beyond this would have to wait until he was stronger.
He remembered now, from the wolf books, that the saliva of wolves was very acidic, and therefore destructive to bacteria. Wolf had probably done him a favor by licking the wounds clean. There was no real bleeding; but if he craned his neck so that he could see arm and leg, he could see, exposed from where the bandages had been pulled away, a certain amount of suppuration from the torn areas. Wolf’s nose would pick up the smell of that, and perhaps he would automatically clean them with his tongue again.
His mind went away on a slight tangent. He was still amazed at Wolf’s concern for him. The thought that had been uppermost in his mind had been of Wolf as a danger, not as an aid. At first thought, his partner’s behavior seemed to run against what he had read in a number of different places in the books.
It was too easy simply to assume that a depth of affection he had not noticed in Wolf before was suddenly operating within the other. He remembered the small noises, somewhere between a whimper and a grunt, that Wolf had made, watching him just before he had left. Certainly, Wolf had sounded concerned.
But there must be a more reasonable explanation than that. Jeebee’s mind sorted through his memory of what he had read in the wolf books. His memory was good, but it was not an eidetic memory, a photographic one. However, any fact he ran across that could find a way to hook onto knowledge that was already in his mind had a tendency to do so and thereafter hang on as if it was glued in place.
But nowhere, specifically, in the books, was an explanation for a deeper concern in Wolf than he had expected, or a sudden change of attitude in the other. Jeebee lay musing as the sun climbed in the sky and the shadows about him shortened. He was still in shade now, but just barely from his feet up. Another hour—another half hour—would see him in need of a sunshade for his eyes.
Abruptly, an answer came to him. He had been making a mistake, thinking of the situation only from the viewpoint of the complete amateur he was in all matters dealing with wolves. The wolf was a social animal, and he was a social scientist. Now, thinking about what he had read of the pack behavior of wolves from the standpoint of a social scientist, he realized abruptly that the behavior of a wolf in a pack might not necessarily be the behavior of a wolf in a situation such as existed between himself and Wolf right now.
A wolf pack was evidently rather like an Italian court of the early Renaissance, in which everyone smiled at each other while carefully guarding their own back and keeping their eyes open for any opportunity that would expose the back of another, particularly a superior, to their dagger.
Among wolves, ranking was important, but that was only under pack conditions. The situation he enjoyed with Wolf did not embody pack conditions.
Now that he stopped to think of it, there had been a great deal of study of wolves in packs, but he’d read almost nothing of nomadic wolves traveling either alone or in pairs. But what operated in the case of the pack was a delicate balancing act between the advantages of belonging to a cooperative social group and competition for the privileges of high rank—especially the privilege of reproduction. He and Wolf, traveling as they did, were a pair of bachelors with no contest for reproductive rights to make rank an issue and all the natural gregariousness of their species to hold the partnership together.
Certainly the gregariousness—the need for company on both their parts—was there.
He had been overjoyed to have in Wolf someone who could share his life with him. He also remembered telling Merry of Wolf’s first full submissive approach to him, which had come after he had seen the people chained to the wagons. It had come when he had essentially ignored Wolf, at a time when they were usually close.