Ashe’s plans would probably have been easily accomplished if the cave had been unoccupied. Without incident they came down into a hollow through which trickled a small stream, thinly edged with ice along its banks. Under Ashe’s direction Ross collected an armload of firewood. He was no woodsman and his prolonged exposure to the chilling drizzle made him eager for even the very rough shelter of a cave, so eager that he plunged forward carelessly. His foot came down on a slippery patch of mud, sending him sprawling on his face. There was a growl, and a white bulk rushed him. The cloak, rucked up about his throat and shoulders, then saved his life, for only stout cloth was caught between those fangs.
With a startled cry, Ross rolled as he might have to escape a man’s attack, struggling to unsheathe his dagger. A white-hot flash of pain scored his upper arm. The breath was driven out of him as a fight raged over his prone body. He heard grunts, snarls, and was severely pummeled. Then he was free as the bodies broke away. Shaken, he got to his knees. A short distance away the fight was still in progress. He saw Ashe straddle the body of a huge white wolf, his legs clamped about the animal’s haunches, his hooked arm under the beast’s head, forcing it up and back while his dagger rose and sank twice in the underparts of the heaving body.
Ross held his own weapon ready. He leaped from a half crouch, and his dagger sank cleanly home behind the short ribs. One of their blows must have reached the animal’s heart. With an almost human cry the wolf stiffened convulsively. Then it was still. Ashe squatted near it, methodically driving his dagger into the moist soil to clean the blade.
A red rivulet trickled down his thigh where the lower edge of his kilt-tunic had been ripped up to the link belt. Although breathing hard, he remained as composed as always. “These sometimes hunt in pairs at this season,” he observed. “Be ready with your bow—”
Ross strung his with the cord he had been keeping dry within the breast folds of his tunic. He fitted an arrow to the string, grateful to be a passable marksman. The slash on his arm smarted in protest as he moved, and he noted that Ashe did not try to get up.
“A bad one?” Ross indicated the blood now thickening into a stream along Ashe’s thigh.
Ashe pulled away the torn tunic and exposed a nasty looking gash on the outside of his hip. He pressed his palm against the gaping wound and motioned Ross to scout ahead. “See if the cave is clear. We can’t do anything until we know that.”
Reluctantly Ross followed the stream until he found the cave, a snug-looking place with an overhang to keep it dry. The reek of a lair hung about its mouth. He chose a stone from the stream, chucked it into the dark opening, and waited. The stone rattled as it struck an inner wall, but there was no other sound. A second stone from a different angle followed the first, with the same results. Ross was now certain that the cave was unoccupied. Once they were inside with a fire going at the entrance, they could hope to keep intruders out. A little heartened, he cast about a bit upstream and then turned back to where he had left Ashe.
“No male?” the other greeted him. “This is a female, and she was close to whelping—” He nudged the white wolf with his toe. His hands held a pad of rags against his hip, and his face was shaded with pain.
“Nothing in the cave anyway. Let’s see about this . . .” Ross laid aside the bow and kneeled to examine Ashe’s thigh wound. His own slash was more of a smarting graze, but this tear was deep and ugly.
“Second plate—belt—” Ashe got the words out between set teeth, and Ross clicked open the hidden recess in the other’s bronze belt to bring out a small packet. Ashe made a wry face as he swallowed three of the pills within. Ross mashed another pill onto the bandage he prepared, and when the last cumbersome fold was secured Ashe relaxed.
“Let us hope that works,” he commented a little bleakly. “Now come here where I can get my hands on you and let me see your scratch. Animal bites can be a nasty business.”
Bandaged in turn, with the bitterness of an antibiotic pill on his tongue, Ross helped Ashe limp upstream to the cave. He left the older man outside while he cleaned up the floor of the cave and then made his companion as comfortable as he could on a bed of bracken. The fire Ross had longed for was built. They stripped off their sodden clothing and hung it to dry. Ross wrapped a bird he had shot in clay and tucked it under the hot coals to be roasted.
They’d had their share of bad luck, he thought, but they were now undercover, had a fire, and food. His arm ached, sharp pain shooting from fingers to elbow when he moved it. Though Ashe made no complaint, Ross gauged that the older man’s discomfort was far worse than his own, and he carefully hid all signs of his own twinges.
They ate the bird with their fingers. Ross savored each greasy bit, licking his hands clean afterward while Ashe lay back on the improvised bed, his face gaunt in the half light of the fire.
“We are about five miles from the sea here. There is no way of raising our base now that Sandy’s installation is gone. I’ll have to lay up, since I can’t risk any more loss of blood. And you’re not too good in the woods—”
Ross accepted that valuation with a new humbleness. He was only too well aware that if it had not been for Ashe, he and not the white wolf would have died down in the valley. Yet a strange shyness kept him from trying to put his thanks into words. The only kind of amends he could make for the other’s hurt was to provide hands, feet, and strength for the man who did know what to do and how to do it.
“We’ll have to hunt—” he ventured.
“Deer,” Ashe caught him up. “But the marsh at the mouth of this stream provides a better hunting ground than inland. If the wolf laired here very long, she has already frightened away any game. It isn’t the matter of food which bothers me—”
“It is being tied up here,” Ross filled in for him with some daring. “But look here, I’ll take orders. This is your territory, and I’m green at the game. You tell me what to do, and I’ll do it the best that I can.” He glanced up to find Ashe surveying him intently, but as usual there was no readable expression on the other’s brown face.
“The first thing to do is get the wolf’s hide,” Ashe said briskly. “Then bury the carcass. You’d better drag it up here to work on it. If her mate is hanging around, he might try to jump you.”
Why Ashe should think it necessary to acquire the wolf skin puzzled Ross, but he asked no questions. The skinning took four times as long and was far from being the neat job the shock-haired man of the record tape had accomplished. Ross had to wash himself off in the stream before piling stones over the corpse in temporary burial. When he pulled his bloody burden back to the cave, Ashe lay with his eyes closed. Ross thankfully sat on his own pile of bracken and tried not to notice the throbbing ache in his arm.
He must have fallen asleep, for when he roused it was to see Ashe crawl over to mend the dying fire from their store of wood. Ross, angry at himself, beat the other to the task.
“Get back,” he said roughly. “This is my job. I didn’t mean to fail.”
Surprisingly, Ashe settled back without a word, leaving Ross to sit by the fire, a fire he was very glad to have a moment or so later when a wailing howl sounded down-wind. If this was not the white wolf’s mate, then it was another of her kin who prowled the upper reaches of the small valley.
The next day, having provided Ashe with a supply of firewood, Ross went to try his luck in the marsh. The thick drizzle which had hung over the land the day before was gone, and he faced a clear, bright morning, though the breeze had an icy snap. But it was a good morning to be alive and out in the open, and Ross’s spirits rose.
He tried to put to use all the woodlore he had learned at the base. But the classroom was one thing, the field quite another. He was uncomfortably certain that Ashe would not have found his showing very good.