Wolf and Iron by Wolf & Iron

Author:Wolf & Iron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Jeebee had time for reading in the days that followed for he continued to travel by night and lie up during the day. The first part of the daylit hours would necessarily be given to sleep, but after that there were always three to four hours before he felt safe to move again with the sundown.

In those few hours he first attended to whatever needed attention about packs and mounts and the welfare of the horses themselves, and refilled the emergency water bag that he carried fastened to his saddle from whatever fresh-water source was handy. He had gotten a large supply of the sterilization tablets from Paul, but realized that he was going through them fast.

Counting them now and looking at the rest of the days of the summer and possibly through the fall, he could see the point was coming where he would be reduced to boiling his drinking water as the only way left to be sure of its safety.

Still, for now at any rate, the time he had left over was at least a couple of hours a day, and in that time he absorbed as much as he could of the books from the library shelves in Neiskamp's ruined house.

Academic habit made him begin by reading the reference lists, which all but one of the books provided, and then checking them against each other to see which of the volumes he had taken from Neiskamp's house were most mentioned.

Only two of the titles had rung any kind of bell with him, though he had read neither book. One was Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat, for which he found only two citations, both of which referred to it as "semifictional"—which he knew to be academic shorthand for, "Don't bother reading. Not a serious work." The other was Wolf and Man: Evolution in Parallel by Roberta L. Hall and Henry S. Sharp, about which he remembered something. It might have been that a review had attracted his attention because of the idea put forth in the title, which intrigued him.

He read through the lot, beginning with the most-referenced works, L. David Mech's The Wolf and a similarly titled volume by a Swedish-German biologist, Erik Zimen, and so working his way down his list.

When he finally did get to Never Cry Wolf, he recognized it as evidently the source of a movie he had seen once. Its authenticity may have been questionable, but he realized that besides being a fine work of writing, the author had produced a first-rate piece of prowolf propaganda. He tucked it away against some future day when Wolf's survival in the cattle country of Montana might require a good bit of public relations.

Though Mech's The Wolf was obviously—and from what he could see, deservedly—regarded by other authors as something of a Bible, there were several others that offered insights he could apply more directly to what he had observed in his personal relationship with Wolf. One was a volume edited by

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