by the timeless picture of Merry feeding her child. Then his sense of urgency jerked him out of the daze suddenly. There was still work for him to do. He looked at the bed now and located the scissors he had boiled, before he had laid them there on one of the boiled cloths; and next to them an adjoining cloth supporting two clean strips of rawhide cord, almost small enough to be fish line.
With one of these he tied off the cord about an inch from Merry’s skin, and then tied the other cord about an inch and a half beyond that. Then using the scissors from a sewing box they had found at the ranch house, he cut between the two ties and the baby was free.
He rose unsteadily, suddenly aware that he could hardly stand on his cramped leg muscles after having sat in a kneeling position so long. Blood flowed back into his legs.
Gently, he picked up Merry with the baby from the birthing stool and laid them both, just as they were, on the clean sheet he had exposed in that moment in which he had stripped the stained top one and the plastic sheet after Merry’s water had burst.
Merry accepted the move without seeming to notice it. She was half sitting up now, with double pillows between her and the head of the bed to support her back. She was still having mild contractions, and every so often, a small flow of red-stained fluid that Jeebee remembered was called
It had been in preparation for this that Jeebee had sandwiched several layers of plastic between alternate layer of sheets so that when the sheet became too dampened, he could clear it away down to another, dry one.
A moment later, as he watched, the afterbirth, slippery with blood, emerged. He wrapped it in plastic and put it aside on a high, overhead shelf, to be taken out later.
The baby stopped nursing and closed his eyes. Merry, who had been watching him, let her head loll back against the pillows with a sigh of happiness. Her baby was alternately feeding and staring about, his blue eyes flickering here and there, then closing as he seemed to doze for a short while, then waking to search for the nipple again and feed some more.
With one of the boiled cloths dampened in warm water, he cleaned the rest of the baby and wrapped him in the warmest and softest cloth he could find. Then he wrapped both the baby and Merry in their softest blanket.
He turned away to start to clean up. Little whimpering noises of the kind Wolf would make in certain social situations made him spin back. He had forgotten all about Wolf being there.
To his surprise, Wolf was slowly approaching Merry and the baby in the bed, in his most submissive and ingratiating of postures. His head was held low, his ears were back, his tail wagging, wolf-style, and he was making the little whimpering sounds of reassurance and promise of the best of all possible intentions.
Merry, totally exhausted but fully alert, snarled at him with surprising strength and intensity. The snarl was so reflexive and real that it startled Jeebee. He did not have to be a wolf himself to read it very clearly. Merry was a mother and Wolf was not going to get any closer to her baby.
Wolf stopped immediately and Jeebee, suddenly coming to his senses, woke up and moved toward him to throw him out, bodily, if necessary.
But Wolf was gone through the door before he had fully taken the first step toward him. This time, however, he did not leave with any show of temper, but rather with a quick self-effacement that was almost magical in its speed.
“Take him,” Merry said, lifting the baby from her body. “Would you bring me that chamber pot? My teeth are floating.”
Jeebee moved to take the baby from her.
“Carefully!” Merry’s voice was almost as sharp as when she had snarled at Wolf. Jeebee felt a momentary flicker of indignation, which was gone as quickly as it came, as he moved over to accept the baby into his arms. He had handled the baby carefully enough before Merry ever held him, he thought. But the thought remained unuttered.
“Oh,” said Merry, getting out of bed slowly and painfully. “And will you get me some food, now? I’m starving! And I want a large cup of water—and maybe five more after that.”
The chamber pot was handy, the cup and the water were available. Merry got back under the covers and took the baby back again. He had woken when he was passed to Jeebee, and when he came back to his mother he searched once more for her breast. Then she sighed happily, again. A very, very deep sigh.
Jeebee was busy bringing her sandwiches made by putting a slice of cold cooked beef between two slices of cheese. They had been hoarding some of the cheese against this moment. Merry bit into it voraciously.
“Do you know, when he suckles there’s no pain at all?” She spoke with her mouth full; but that was all right. It was all right, Jeebee thought, with the world.
CHAPTER 35
Jeebee was exhausted, ready to take a couple of blankets, roll up on the floor, and try to catch at least some sleep.
Merry, however, was still hungry. He built a small fire in the fireplace to heat a good-sized cooking pot of the thick soup he had prepared. It was made mainly of root vegetables, because the garden down at the ranch had not yet begun to produce much in the way of this summer’s eatables. But they still had some carrots, beets, and rutabagas, plus dried peas from the ranch’s fruit cellar, saved for important occasions.
The root vegetables, dug the fall before from the garden there, had been kept with their tops chopped off, and buried in a box of sandy soil. They were a little dried and tough, but in soup form they became tender, and something to balance the animal protein of the cheese and meat.
Eventually, Merry’s hunger was satisfied. A little more than three hours after the birth she dozed off, then dropped into what seemed to Jeebee like a normal-to-heavy sleep, with the baby beside her in the bed.
Jeebee had worried before the birth about the business of her sleeping with the newborn child in the bed with her.
“You’ll be pretty worn-out,” he had said, only a couple of days before, “and you’ll probably sleep pretty heavily. If you roll over in your sleep, you might—”
“I’m not going to roll on my precious baby!” said Merry. “How can you even think something like that!”
“You might not know—”
“I’ll know!” Merry had said. “No one is going to have that baby with them but me, until I say so!”
Jeebee had necessarily left it at that. Later on, he had remembered something in one of the wolf books and looked it up. Sure enough, there was a statement there about surrogates, people who volunteered to take care of and raise very young animals from zoos and similar places that could not keep them safely with the adults of their own species, or where the animal mother was dead or incapable.
These humans often needed to sleep nights with the very young animals, and it was noted that they could do so safely. It had been established that as long as the human being was neither sedated nor affected by any drug or medicine, there was absolutely no danger of one of them rolling over in their sleep on the young creatures.
Now, looking at Merry sleeping with one arm still holding the sleeping baby close to her breast, he felt reassured and happy.
He finished cleaning up and went outside, stepping for a moment into the summer morning.
Wolf was gone from the front room and was nowhere to be seen around the cave. Nor was he visible in the meadow outside. About Jeebee, the early day was warming as the sun rose, and he found himself thinking that he had never felt quite so happy as he did at this moment.
In a sense, his world was complete. He felt enclosed in happiness under the straight-back pines, with the sound of a small breeze going through their branches and the two streams slipping by with other light sounds between their banks. Above him white clouds sailed demurely across the blue June sky. He felt fulfilled. In this moment, life seemed finally, utterly purposeful, and overwhelmingly satisfactory.
He was, for the first time since Merry had called him in, conscious of his own tiredness. Merry had evidently been wired up during those hours following the birth when she had been so hungry, and apparendy he had picked up
