First the mother, and
then the boy, she nursed back to life, locking the door against the two
husbands, who built themselves a shack in the edge of the forest. Half a
dozen times Meleese Cummins has gone through ordeals like that unscathed.
Once it was to nurse a young Indian mother through the dread disease, and
again she went into a French trapper's cabin where husband, wife and
daughter were all sick with the malady. At these times, when the "call"
came to Meleese from a far cabin or tepee, John Cummins would give up the
duties of his trap line to accompany her, and would pitch his tent or
make him a shack close by, where he could watch over her, hunt food for
the afflicted people and keep up the stack of needed firewood and water.
But there were times when the "calls" came during the husband's absence,
and, if they were urgent, Meleese went alone, trusting to her own
splendid strength and courage. A half-breed woman came to her one day, in
the dead of winter, from twenty miles across the lake. Her husband had
frozen one of his feet, and the "frost malady" would kill him, she said,
unless he had help. Scarcely knowing what she could do in such a case,
Meleese left a note for her husband, and on snowshoes the two heroic
women set off across the wind-swept and unsheltered lake, with the
thermometer fifty degrees below zero. It was a terrible venture, but the
two won out.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122