Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett [48]
“Well…still fairly white.”
“Okay.”
When Nanny Ogg’s back was safely turned Granny permitted herself a small shudder.
She stared at the wolf, wondering what she could do for it. A normal wolf wouldn’t enter a cottage, even if it could open the door. Wolves didn’t come near humans at all, except if there were a lot of them and it was the end of a very hard winter. And they didn’t do that because they were big and bad and wicked, but because they were wolves.
This wolf was trying to be human.
There was probably no cure.
“Here’s your milk,” said Nanny Ogg.
Granny reached up and took it without looking.
“Someone made this wolf think it was a person,” she said. “They made it think it was a person and then they didn’t think anymore about it. It happened a few years ago.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve…got its memories,” said Granny. And instincts, too, she thought. She knew it’d be some days before she’d stop wanting to chase sledges over the snow.
“Oh.”
“It’s stuck between species. In its head.”
“Can we help it?” said Nanny.
Granny shook her head.
“It’s gone on for too long. It’s habit now. And it’s starving. It can’t go one way, it can’t go t’other. It can’t act like a wolf, and it can’t manage being a human. And it can’t go on like it is.”
She turned to face Nanny for the first time. Nanny took a step back.
“You can’t imagine how it feels,” she said. “Wandering around for years. Not capable of acting human, and not able to be a wolf. You can’t imagine how that feels.”
“I reckon maybe I can,” said Nanny. “In your face. Maybe I can. Who’d do that to a creature?”
“I’ve got my suspicions.”
They looked around.
Magrat was approaching, with the child. Beside them walked one of the woodcutters.
“Hah,” said Granny. “Yes. Of course. There’s always got to be”—she spat the words—“a happy ending.”
A paw tried to grip her ankle.
Granny Weatherwax looked down into the wolf’s face.
“Preeees,” it growled. “Annn enndinggg? Noaaaow?”
She knelt down, and took the paw.
“Yes?” she said.
“Yessss!”
She stood up again, all authority, and beckoned to the approaching trio.
“Mr. Woodcutter?” she said. “A job for you…”
The woodcutter never understood why the wolf laid its head on the stump so readily.
Or why the old woman, the one in whom anger roiled like pearl barley in a bubbling stew, insisted afterward that it be buried properly instead of skinned and thrown in the bushes. She had been very insistent about that.
And that was the end of the big bad wolf.
It was an hour later. Quite a few of the woodcutters had wandered up to the cottage, where there seemed to be a lot of interesting activity going on. Woodcutting is not a job that normally offers much in the way of diversion.
Magrat was washing the floor with as much magical assistance as could be afforded by a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush. Even Nanny Ogg, whose desultory interest in the proud role of housewife had faded completely just as soon as her eldest daughter was old enough to hold a duster, was cleaning the walls. The old grandmother, who wasn’t entirely in touch with events, was anxiously following both of them around with a saucer of milk. Spiders who had inherited the ceiling for generations were urged gently but firmly out of the door.
And Granny Weatherwax was walking around the clearing with the head woodcutter, a barrelchested young man who clearly thought he looked better in his studded leather wristlets than was, in fact, the case.
“It’s been around for years, right?” he said. “Always lurking around the edges of villages and that.”
“And you never tried talking to it?” said Granny.
“Talk to it? It’s a wolf, right? You don’t talk to wolves. Animals can’t talk.”
“Hmm. I see. And what about the old woman? There’s a lot of you woodcutters. Did you ever, you know, drop in to see her?”
“Huh? No fear!”
“Why?”
The head woodcutter leaned forward conspiratorially.
“Well, they say she’s a witch, right?”
“Really?” said Granny. “How do you know?”
“She’s got all the signs, right?”
“What signs are those?”
The woodcutter was pricked by