But it was no longer a wolfs paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmothers hand.

Now the child lived in her grandmothers house; she prospered.

Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes Ive baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter.

Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. 九*九*藏*書Harsh, brief, poor lives.

The good child does as her mother bids -- five miles trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your fathers hunting knife; you know how to use it.

Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St Johns Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch -- some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, they strip the crone, search her for marks, for the supernumary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death.

Thehttps://read.99csw.com wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when she saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolfs paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmothers house. Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured.

Winter and cold weather.

She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking, and shrieking like a thing possessed. https://read.99csw.comBut the child was strong, and armed with her fathers hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been, festering already.

The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife and turned on the beast.

She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket九九藏書, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolfs paw fell to the floor.

It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.

It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineers child would have died of fright at the sight of it. It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her fathers knife and slashed off its right forepaw.

To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the na?f style and there a九_九_藏_書re no flowers to put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that.

The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and came rushing in. They knew the wart on the hand at once for a witchs nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead.