“What do you mean, ‘My God!’ she said. “Here I tell you I’m carrying our child, and you say, ‘My God!’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“There’s no hospital! No doctors!” Jeebee said almost wildly. “We probably couldn’t even lay our hands on a nurse if we searched for miles around! All you’ll have is me, and I’m not worth a damn when it comes to something like having a baby!”
The breath went out of Merry in a long relieved sigh.
“So that’s it,” she said, in a calmer voice. She pushed him backward. “Sit down.”
Numbly, almost tripped up by the edge of his chair seat behind his knees, and under the impulse of Merry’s not inconsiderable strength, Jeebee sat down abruptly.
“Now,” said Merry, sitting down in his lap and speaking directly into his face from only about six inches away, “let me tell you a few things. First, I helped at a birthing the first year Dad had the wagon going on its route, five years ago. I was fourteen. Since then I’ve been at dozens. In fact, I deliberately asked about possible births at every place we stopped, asked if I couldn’t be useful so I could learn as much about what had to be done as possible. Lots of times there was at least a neighbor who was due to give birth, and Dad would hold the wagon there until I had a chance to be part of it. What do you think was one of the things on my list of recommendations to people I might have asked to hire me this winter, if I hadn’t found you? I’m the closest thing to a trained midwife that they’d be likely to find. Now, what do you think about that?”
“But I—” Jeebee began.
“But you, nothing!” said Merry. “Let me tell you as well that Dad not only waited for me when it was necessary so that I could be at a birthing and help and learn, he also got me three books as soon as he could find them, after that first birth I was at when I was fourteen. He came to me and shoved them into my hands. ‘Learn these,’ he said. ‘I mean, memorize them. You’re going to be in situations where maybe there’ll be no one around to help you. I want you to know what’s in them by heart.’ And I did. I memorized every word in those three books. What’s more, I’m going to teach them to you, starting now. By the time I’m through with you, you’re going to have them memorized, too. Now, what do you think of all that?”
“Fine,” said Jeebee, “and believe me I’m going to learn every word you know. But it’s still not going to make me into the equivalent of a real doctor, or even a real nurse. What if something goes wrong?”
“Sweetheart,” said Merry, “nothing is going to go wrong. I’m young, I’m strong, my hips are wide. What with the cheese, the beans, and the rest of the food we’ve been able to put together, and the vitamin tablets, I’m going to have proper nutrition during the months I’m carrying the baby. Nothing is going to go wrong. Just remember that women were having babies, sometimes all by themselves out in the middle of nowhere or in some cave, thousands of years before there were doctors or nurses or midwives. Besides, it’s not something you can change your mind about now. The baby’s on the way and I’m going to have it. Also, it’s going to be the best, prettiest, strongest baby that ever was. So you might as well just get used to the fact.”
“I will,” Jeebee said somewhat feebly, “just give me a little time, will you? I hadn’t thought about anything like this at all.”
Merry kissed him and got up off his lap.
“No, I don’t suppose you have,” she said. “Well, you can sleep on it tonight. But I’m going to start teaching you the first few paragraphs of the first book tomorrow.”
“That’s fine,” said Jeebee. But his voice still sounded a little weak in his own ears.
She grinned at him, her fists on her hips.
“You’re scared,” she said.
“Damn right,” Jeebee answered.
CHAPTER 33
He remained scared. Meanwhile, the winter wore on, the temperature lowered, and the snow grew deeper, until at last the curve of icy temperatures turned upward, the snow cover gradually began to decrease again, and they moved at last into spring. Throughout all this time, there were no lack of problems and emergencies that for the moment had been able to shove Merry’s condition out of the immediate center of his mind.
But the moment any of these were past, it returned to center stage in his thoughts, as the Powder River Pass had both filled him with foreboding but drawn him toward it.
As soon as he was free to think of something other than immediate necessities, the fact of the approaching birth would come back to him, inescapable, ominous, beckoning.
Face it any way he might, it remained a certainty that he alone was the only person Merry would have to turn to for help when the hour came. He was far from confident about how much help he would be then, in that time in which the life of not only the child growing within her, but her own, would be at balance.
It was something he had never imagined having to face. He, Jeebee, with a critical responsibility for the safe birth of a child and its mother. Nor did it help that the child would be his own, and the mother of that child the one person he loved most on earth.
There was no way he could alter or control what would happen. He knew that; but knowing this did not change his feelings. He took his fears out in a savage attack on what would be needed when the time came. Even the temporary relief this work gave him had to come in the intervals between his normal duties of keeping them fed, housed, and protected.
Survival required that he keep up his hunts down on the flatlands. Half a dozen more times before spring came, he was caught by storms while he was down there. On five of these occasions he managed without trouble. He waited them out, warm enough—if not exactly comfortable—in his homemade sleeping bag, under the shelter of the sledge and the snow that quickly drifted over him.
But the sixth time, the storm lasted sixteen hours, and after the first ten switched direction a quarter of the way around the compass. So that from this new angle the wind blew clear the drift that had accumulated over him and the sledge.
He had to wrestle the sledge into a new position, with the numbingly cold wind and snow pushing against him as if the sledge were a wooden sail, fighting him every inch of the way.
He had been exhausted when he finally established his new position and the snow began to build about them again. He did not think he could have worked another fifteen minutes before reaching the limits of his strength. But as it was, he saved not only himself, but the load of frozen meat he already had on the sledge. A load, unfortunately, which had made the sledge that much more difficult to shift.
On one other trip he had missed his shot at a range bull, which had been the only animal he could find. He had wounded it, but not enough to even slow it down. It had charged him. Only the fact that he had dodged behind the sledge and the bull had tripped over a snow-covered corner of it, trying to get to him, had given him time to pump another shot in just behind its shoulder and bring it down. At that, it was still not dead. He had to fire another shot into it before it finally lay still.
In the same icy months of January through early March, up at the cave, Merry had experienced her own near escape. Investigating a slight noise in the outer room one afternoon, she had all but stepped out on top of a cougar, who had come in through the swinging wolf door that Jeebee had built for Wolf, into one wall of the smithy.
The cougar had been attracted by the smell of the stored meat. Frustrated, like Wolf, by the wire netting over the storage pit, it was hooking its claws into the mesh and trying to pull it up, and this had made the sound Merry had heard.