The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [66]
And for the first time since they moved into the new cave, Iza could draw a breath free of anxiety. She was glad the birth had gone so well, as old as she was. She had attended many women who had far more difficulty than she. Several came close to dying, a few did, and more than a few babies as well. It seemed to her that babies’ heads were just too large for the women’s birth passages. Her worry over the actual delivery had not been nearly as great as her concern over the sex of the child. Such insecurity about the future was almost unbearable for Clan people.
Iza lay back on her fur, relaxing. Uka wrapped the infant in a swaddling of soft rabbit fur and laid the babe in her mother’s arms. Ayla hadn’t moved. She was looking with longing curiosity at Iza; the woman saw her and beckoned.
“Come here, Ayla. Would you like to see the baby?”
Ayla approached shyly. “Yes,” she nodded. Iza pulled back the covering so the girl could see the infant.
The tiny replica of Iza had a light down of brown fuzz on her head, and the boney occipital knob at the back was more noticeable without the thick head of hair she would soon have. The baby’s head was somewhat rounder than in adults, but still long, and her forehead sloped back sharply from her not quite fully developed brow ridges. Ayla reached out to touch the newborn’s soft cheek and the baby instinctively turned toward the touch, making small sucking noises.
“She’s beautiful,” Ayla motioned, her eyes full of soft wonder at the miracle she had seen. “Is she trying to talk, Iza?” the girl asked as the infant waved small clenched fists in the air.
“Not yet, but she will soon and you will have to help teach her,” Iza replied.
“Oh, I will. I’ll teach her to talk. Just like you and Creb taught me.”
“I know you will, Ayla,” the new mother said, covering her baby again.
The girl stayed protectively close by while Iza rested. Ebra had wrapped the afterbirth tissue in the hide that had been put down just before the delivery and hid it in an inconspicuous corner until Iza could take it outside to bury it in a place only she would know. If the baby had been stillborn, it would have been buried at the same time, and no one would ever mention the birth; nor would the mother show her grief openly, but a subtle gentleness and sympathy would be extended.
If the baby had been born alive but deformed, or if the leader of the clan decided the newborn was unacceptable for some other reason, the mother’s task would have been more onerous. Then she would be required to take the baby away and bury it or leave it exposed to the elements and carnivores. Rarely was a deformed child allowed to live; if it was female, almost never. If a baby was male, especially first-born, and if the woman’s mate wanted the child, he could at the discretion of the leader be allowed to remain with his mother for the first seven days of his life as a test of his ability to survive. Any child still alive after seven days, by Clan tradition which had the force of law, had to be named and accepted into the clan.
The first days of Creb’s life had hung in just such a balance. His mother had barely survived his birth. Her mate was also the leader and the decision of whether the newborn male would be allowed to live rested solely with him. But his decision was made more for the woman’s sake than for the baby’s, whose malformed head and unmoving limbs gave early indication of the damage the difficult birth had inflicted. She was too weak, she had lost too much blood, she hovered on the edge of death herself. Her mate could not require that she dispose of the child; she was too weak to do it. If the mother couldn’t do it, or if she died, the task fell to the medicine woman, but Creb’s mother was the medicine woman of the clan. So he was left with his mother, though no one expected him to survive.
His mother’s milk was slow to start. When he clung to life against all odds, another nursing woman took pity on the poor infant and fed Creb his first life-sustaining