She slowly collapsed to her knees on the bedding, squatting at the feet of Waits-by-the-Water, and dragged back the top blanket so she could reach under it with both hands. Closing her wrinkled eyelids, Bear Below turned her head as if staring at the fire with those closed eyes while she felt about. Just about the time Waits began to pant through her nose again, Bear Below said, “That’s good. Let it come over you and carry you with it. Do not tense … do not—that’s it. You must remember not to tense your body, girl. Stay loose and the child will slide on out into this world.”
Bear Below rocked back onto a bony hip and settled there between the upfolded legs of the mother.
“Did you see or feel the child’s head?” Waits inquired.
“Not yet,” the old woman reassured her. “But very soon I think.” Then Bear Below turned to the white man. “Tell me, do you make good coffee?”
“I do—but I want to stay here beside my wife.”
Bear Below shifted her bottom so she could look over her shoulder at Magpie. “What is your name?”
“Magpie.”
“Do you make good coffee?”
She looked at her father, and he nodded. “Y-yes, I … well, my father tells me I do.”
“Make us a pot of your coffee, Magpie.”
As his daughter busied herself with the pot and some coffee grounds they brought north from Fort Bridger, Titus instructed his son, “Bring some more of that wood over here by the fire.”
The pot hadn’t been on the flames very long when Waits-by-the-Water announced, “It-it’s time now.”
Bear Below was already there between the mother’s knees, pushing the blanket off her legs, folding up the bottom of the long hide dress onto the swollen belly so that she had an unobstructed view of the birth opening. “Yes, girl—I think I see the head coming now.”
“I feel him coming!”
“A boy?” Titus asked his wife. “You think this is another boy?”
She nodded as she gulped air, huffing between her gritted teeth.
The old woman cooed, “There you go, easy now. That’s the head. Let’s turn a little and let those shoulders out too.”
Doing his best to keep his wife propped up as he leaned to the side, Titus attempted to get a look at this babe being born.
“You are doing good, mother,” Bear Below cheered as Magpie crabbed up close behind the old woman, looking over her hunched shoulders. “Just a little more. This next time you can push hard for me.”
Staring transfixed on the child emerging into the world, Magpie’s mouth hung open. “Little brother—do you want to see this?”
Flea asked, “Are you talking to me or to Jackrabbit?”
Magpie finally turned, finding Jackrabbit awake on the far side of the lodge, curiously watching the adults. “I was asking you, Flea.”
“N-no. I am fine right here where I am. I can see plenty well right here.”
“It’s a good thing too, Flea,” Titus told his eldest son. “You don’t want to get in the way right now—”
“It is done!” Bear Below cried out, moving that small child out of the shadows and into the fire’s illumination.
“Wh-what do we have for a child?” Waits inquired expectantly when the babe let out a gush of air, then began to howl.
Holding the newborn aloft, the long, purplish umbilical cord descending from its belly to disappear between the mother’s legs, Bear Below announced, “You have another girl!”
Waits began to cry, her tears tumbling off the edge of her face onto his arm. Bass wrapped up his wife in his arms, clutching her against him tightly. Then he slowly lowered her back onto the horsehair pillows and wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead. “We have another girl!”
“Here, white father of this new daughter,” Bear Below grumbled at him. “Hold your baby while I cut this cord and finish delivering this mother.”
Starting to tremble as he held out his hands to the old midwife, Titus felt his tears spill down his hot cheeks, his vision blurring with a salty sting. “L-look, Magpie!” he whispered as the child was laid in his arms. “You have a sister.”
Waits attempted to raise herself onto her elbows. But Bear Below scolded her, “Lay down while I finish the birthing, girl.”
So the new mother asked her husband, “Which of us does she favor?”
Bear Below looked up, her eyes briefly assaying Magpie. “Your oldest daughter—she clearly favors her mother, and a pretty creature at that.”
“Let me see her,” Waits begged.
“I think she will be a pretty one too,” Titus observed.
Stopping the work of her hands, the midwife said, “Even if she does look more like her father.”
“Oh, she does!” Waits gushed, clapping her hands together. She then reached out with both arms, imploring. “Here, I want to hold her too, husband.”
“Yes, see if she is ready to suckle,” he suggested as he positioned his infant daughter in the cradle of her mother’s arms and rolled her cheek against a swollen breast. The babe blinked its eyes in the flickering firelight and latched onto the nipple Waits rubbed against the girl’s lower lip.
“I-I wish my mother were here to see this granddaughter,” Waits sobbed, her shoulders trembling as she brushed a dark lock of her newborn’s damp hair back from the brow. She looked up at her oldest daughter. “How proud my mother was of you, Magpie.”
She was crying too when she told her mother, “I think she would be very proud of this new granddaughter.”
Waits looked at her husband a moment, then again at Magpie. “Tell me, daughter—you watched your sister come into this world. Are you ready to be a mother yourself?”
She shook her head emphatically. “No. Not yet, anyway. Someday. But not soon. I don’t have a husband yet. Not even a suitor to court me.”
“And that won’t be for a long time to come,” Scratch admonished, patting the robe beside him so his daughter would come sit with them.
“Here,” Bear Below said, holding up a six-inch section of the whitish umbilical cord to the new father. “You will want this for your daughter’s amulet.”
“Put it in this empty cup,” he suggested.
“You will help me make your sister’s lizard,” Waits declared to Magpie. “It will be good training for you—when your time comes to start having children of your own.”
“I am not ready to be married yet, I already told you that,” Magpie protested, then softened her tone, saying, “but I will do all I can to help you with my baby sister.”
“I am relieved to hear you say you are not ready to marry, Magpie,” he told his daughter. “Because your father isn’t at all ready to give you away to a young suitor!”
Three winters had come and gone. That new daughter born in the deep of an awful winter night was walking and getting her nose into everything, if not her busy little hands. And what a talker she was, almost from the start. Noisy as a little bird.
In fact, Waits had named this little girl Crane, after her own mother who had taken sick not long after Bass brought his family back to Absaroka late that autumn of ’47. Whatever it was that sucked away at Crane’s strength and made her weaker by the day had been merciful in taking the old woman quickly. In that year they had been south to Taos and away to Bridger’s post, this woman had wasted away to little more than skin and bones, so light when Titus picked up her body and carried her to their lodge there beside the Yellowstone as the first snowfall whipped around their camp opposite the mouth of the Bighorn River. She almost felt dried up, desiccated, as if she had been lying out in that hot, endless desert the Ammuchabas* called their home.
The family cared for the old woman at that camp, and at two more campsites in the weeks that followed, until Crane finally gave up breathing one morning, no more tears seeping from the edges of her tired eyes. While she had been ailing, slowly dying, Titus hadn’t thought he would end up crying when she was gone … but there he
