High on the Mountainside

By Marylyn Cork

Autumn is here. The short northern summer has slipped by with very little of the heat, fire, and smoke many of us had feared. The only blaze of any consequence was a ranch fire that scared a few people but was conquered by those called out to fight it, without death or injury or much real damage to anything, insofar as I know. We all breathed easily all summer without the smoke of last year, and the tourists were not inconvenienced.

Sally Montgomery, though, will never forget the day that transformed her from housewife to midwife, with no prior warning or training for such an event. The patient was not human, but a frantic beef cow having trouble bringing her latest calf into the world.

Sally, her husband Morgan, and their two nineteen-year-old twin daughters, Machaela and Makenzie, live on a mountain above Cocolalla Lake, up a long and twisting road that must make snowplow drivers shudder when the snow piles up in the winter. Sally’s many relatives live on the mountain as well.