Dickson Gordon - Wolf and Iron

Her contractions gradually increased, and although she continued to walk, with only short rests, Jeebee himself became worried that she was spending too much of her strength this way. After six hours she gave in to his suggestions and agreed to sit on the edge of the bed for a good fifteen minutes.

The contractions had speeded up now. They were coming more often and lasting longer. They had both thoroughly absorbed the idea that a first birth would be slow, but secretly Jeebee had expected things to happen faster than this. He made an effort of will to put a damper on his imagination, which was threatening to envision all sorts of complications. He reminded himself that now was far too early to start imagining that sort of trouble.

“Sit down, yourself,” said Merry from the bed. “You’ve been on your feet as much as I have.”

“I don’t have a baby inside me fighting to get out,” Jeebee grumbled, still standing in front of her. “Besides we’ve got to keep that bed and stool area sterile.”

But he sat down on the floor at her feet, anyway, crossing his legs and telling himself that she had enough to deal with herself, she did not need to put up with his nervousness.

After a while she got up and walked again, for a little while, and then sat down once more. The contractions were now down to four or five minutes apart and stronger. Jeebee made a note of it while she was resting and before he sat down again himself.

The truth of the matter was he did not really feel like sitting down. The walking was nothing. He was used to walking all day on snowshoes or in his boots if necessary. But with the tension added on, he found a moment of sitting down was welcome, even for him, and certainly it masked his concern for her. He strove to exhibit the same matter-of-fact way in which she seemed to be taking matters.

It’s being helpless, not being able to do anything, he told himself. Men aren’t built to be helpless. Of course, women aren’t either. No creature is.

His concentration on her was so exclusive that he was not aware of the rest of the room. He was standing over her about 5:00 p.m., as she was sitting on the edge of the bed again, and without warning a wedge-shaped, furry head suddenly pushed past his left leg, plunging its nose toward the very center of everybody’s attention.

Wolf had appeared, and evidently Jeebee had failed to latch the inner door. In any case, Wolf had now slipped in without either Jeebee or Merry noticing it. Once inside it was inevitable that, with the active curiosity he had always shown, and that the books had told Jeebee was a prime characteristic of wolf behavior, he had tried to get in on the act.

“Wolf—” Jeebee shouted—and at that moment Merry’s water broke.

The short single shiftlike garment she had made to wear during the birth process was up above her knees. Her amniotic fluid stained the sheet and some even splashed onto Wolf’s intruding face. He disappeared like a flash of lightning, jerking backward out of Jeebee’s sight.

“Are you all right—” Jeebee began to Merry.

“Yes, I’m all right!” said Merry. “You might get me something to clean up a little with—and get Wolf out!”

Jeebee reached to the foot of the bed where he had piled a number of freshly laundered and boiled small pieces of cloth somewhere in size between a washcloth and a towel. He handed one to Merry and, now having a second to spare, glanced over his shoulder. Wolf was clear across the cave, as far as the small dimensions of the cave would let him be, down on the floor licking at his paws and using the dampened paws to scrub at his face, washing it like a cat.

“Get out of here!” said Jeebee. He remembered that a better way of talking to Wolf was, in effect, in Wolf’s own language, essentially. He snarled at the other. And the snarl was possibly one of his best efforts.

Wolf stopped washing his face and looked up. Merry snarled, too, and there was no doubt about the meaning behind Merry’s snarl.

Wolf got to his feet. After they had first met, it had taken Jeebee a few weeks to appreciate how expressive a wolf’s face and body could be. Now, Jeebee read absolute outrage in them. Wolf got to his feet and literally stamped toward the door, looking back over his shoulder with a snort and a facial expression that clearly said, “ I don’t have to stand here and take this kind of treatment! ”

He made a stiff-legged exit through the partially opened door into the lower room beyond. Jeebee turned back to Merry.

“Are you really all right?” Jeebee asked. “I could shut the door, but it’ll get awfully stuffy in here.”

“No,” said Merry, handing him back the cloth with which she had been cleaning herself. Jeebee threw it out past the tripod on to the open floor by the fireplace. There would be time to pick it up later. “He won’t bother me again.”

“No. He won’t!” Jeebee said, with feelings that had not reached that particular depth of sincerity since he had climbed up out of the root cellar where he had found canned food, and seen Wolf waiting, possibly with the intention of trying to take the food from him. He had been ready to kill Wolf then if he had to, and he found he was feeling almost as strongly about the other now. Undoubtedly, the moment and feeling would pass, but right now Jeebee was pure animal himself.

Jeebee told himself to forget Wolf. He was gone now. Being the practical sort of individual any wolf was, he had probably just curled up in the front room in his normal sleeping spot. Jeebee could forget about him and concentrate on important things. He turned back to the bed to strip the stained sheet and the first plastic underlayer from beneath it.

Merry got up and continued to walk. Jeebee walked with her for three or four minutes. Then a strong contraction stopped her. She sat down on the edge of the bed once more.

At twelve minutes after 7:00 p.m. she had two even stronger contractions, one and a half minutes apart, and then went almost immediately into contractions one minute apart and lasting a full minute.

From that moment on, time went by in a blur for Jeebee, and he was sure the same thing was happening to Merry. She sat on the edge of the bed and the contractions speeded up. He checked occasionally, as the words of the books he had memorized had taught him, using two fingers to see if the cervix, a little less than four inches inside the vagina, had opened to its full aperture. So far, it had not; nor had its ring of muscle thinned in stretching, to the point where the passageway was completely open and free for the baby to emerge.

By some time after 10:45 p.m. (Jeebee’s note on it was scribbled so badly that later he was unable to read what he had written), Merry’s contractions became very strong indeed, lasting a minute and a half.

She sat continuously on the edge of the bed now, and was having a strong urge to push at the end of the contractions. It was strange, thought Jeebee, because Merry knew what he was telling her better than he knew it himself, but the urge to push down in her was so close to being on automatic and out of her conscious control that it helped her to have him keep cautioning her against it.

“No, don’t push. Not yet,” he said, again and again.

At first, when he said this, she had nodded, but after a bit she stopped doing even that. She was panting like a puppy now, to keep from pushing, because she knew, as Jeebee also had learned, that if she pushed at this time, she might tear membranes, which would mean bleeding and possible infection.

Sometime—Jeebee later estimated it as being almost midnight—the contractions had become very strong indeed; and reaching in to check the cervix, he could no longer feel it as a ring of muscle. It had thinned to the point where it would allow the downward passage of the baby. The road from the uterus was finally completely open, and the tips of his fingers at last felt something that could only be the crown of the baby’s head. Thank God, it was head-down!