Ocean's Breath Plateau a psychic wound

Pregnant. The word hit her like an avalanche, though the snowcliff had been unsteady for some time.

“I feared as much.” With a shaky paw, the offered meal was moved aside. On top of the sinking realisation that she was with child, the thought of eating sickened her stomach.

It was a logical first step to speak to the village women; Tulugak knew the seal hunter was right though she was hesitant to do so. Her first heat had been spent between villages, her second much the same. With no man to call on nor the experience of many women besides her own mother, the signs had escaped her like water off a duck’s back.

“You are a fool if you think I do not know what it means to lie with a man,” she fixed him with a beady stare. It was unfair, but she was not his child to treat this way! “And I was a fool to bed a man without thinking. Some villages do not take kindly to…bastard children.”

It was shameful to admit. “Now they will grow without a father, and I- I do not know that I am ready to be a mother.” Her voice quavered as her fears continued to spill. “I never wanted children, not like this.”