“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 some of the wiredness from her. Now he himself wanted only to sleep.
He went back inside, leaving the outer door open but closing the inner one and making up his own bed on the floor with his body against it, the door itself open just a tiny crack for air. To get in, Wolf or anything else would have to push him aside. And that would wake him. Merry and the baby were protected.
He was woken for short periods at indefinite times after that by Merry wanting something more to eat or drink. Each time, he felt his way to the nearest electric light and switched it on. The second time, Merry suggested a light be put down where she could reach it herself. All the headlamps were on long cords and easy to move. He shifted the one closest to the bed; and, momentarily while awake, as long as he was up, he stepped outside again and found that Wolf had come back. He was curled up in his usual corner of the lower room. Beyond the open outer door, the day showed itself at mid-to-late afternoon.
He went all the way outdoors, to feel again the summertime and reach for a trace of the remarkable feeling of completeness he had felt earlier. Turning back in, his eye caught something by the side of the door and he remembered that sometime after the baby was born, he had wrapped the afterbirth in plastic and put it out here, to dispose of later. It was still there. But the plastic had been neatly ripped away from it. It was completely exposed, but untouched.
The ripping away of the plastic was clearly Wolf’s work. But he—who would eat anything that was eatable—had not touched the afterbirth. Jeebee’s heart gave a curious lurch in his chest. What could have made Wolf respect that, where normally anything eatable would have been snatched up and carried off by him?
Jeebee tried to remember something in the books about wolves that he had read which could explain this. But there was nothing. Slowly the thought formed in him that he was doubtful of accepting, because it simply might be a matter of sheer wish-fulfillment. It had occurred to him that perhaps Wolf might have respected the afterbirth because he had made an association of it with as much of the birth scene as he had witnessed, and with Merry and the baby itself.
If so, then it could have been the beginning of a recognition that the baby was part of their family, part of the pack, as Wolf would have thought of them. It was a long jump into sheer supposition. Jeebee was only too aware of how little he knew about wolves. But he wondered if perhaps Wolf’s experience with the amniotic fluid in his face, and his later shoulder-rolling in the sheet that had been stained when Merry’s water bag burst, as well as his watching of the birth—plus Merry’s warning him off—if all these things had not acted as a form of something like imprinting.
It was pure guesswork, but maybe it was a possibility. When he went back in, he located the chain he had found at the ranch and that he had equipped earlier with a snap on one end so that it could act as a leash, as the storekeeper woman had walked with Wolf on a leash in the town where Jeebee had lost his motorized bike. He had never gotten around to trying whether Wolf would remember and accept the leash with him. Now Jeebee hung it from a nail in the frame of the inner door, where it would be close at hand. Later on, he would try out the leash.
It seemed he had hardly closed his eyes before he was wakened by scratching at the door and Wolf whining and snuffling through the crack, it seemed right into his ear. He sat up as Merry turned the light on, having herself been woken by Wolf’s demands to enter.
“Do you want me to let him in?” said Jeebee, putting his hand up to the chain. “I’ve got the leash here now. I can keep him on that. I really think we want to start getting him used to the baby right from the start.”
He thought fleetingly again of the afterbirth outside with the plastic carefully peeled away from it.
“Shall I leash him and then let him in, just close enough to see you and the baby again?” Jeebee repeated when she did not answer.
“Yes,” said Merry, “but don’t let him get any closer than the edge of the bed.”
Jeebee got up, holding the door shut by leaning against it with all his body weight. He unhooked the chain, and then, still holding the door shut, moved around and opened it only enough to push himself through the opening and push Wolf back. Jeebee looped the ready-held chain loosely around Wolf’s neck as he imprisoned him with his arms and snapped the snap into one of the links. It was attached to Wolf now, but it hung loosely around his neck and the snap would keep that looseness so the chain would not choke him. Wolf did not seem to object. Beyond the wide-open outer door, twilight held the sky. It was the regular time for Wolf’s evening visit.