At length the grandeur of the mountains bees monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there. Above a certain line, no trees grow. Shadows of clouds move across the bare alps as freely as the clouds themselves move across the sky.
A girl from a village on the lower slopes left her widowed mother to marry a man who lived up in the empty places. Soon she regnant. In October, there was a severe storm. The old woman knew her daughter was near her time and waited for a message but none arrived. After the storm passed, the old woma up to see for herself, taking her grown son with her because she was afraid.
From a long way off, they saw no smoke rising from the ey. Solitude yawned round them. The open door banged backwards and forwards on its hinges. Solitude engulfed them. There were traces of wolf-dung on the floor so they knew wolves had been in the house but left the corpse of the young mother alohough of her baby nothing was left except some mess that showed it had been born. Nor was there a trace of the son-in-law but a gnawed foot in a boot.
They ed the dead in a quilt and took it home with them. Now it was late. The howling of the wolves mutilated the approag silence of the night.
Winter came with icy blasts, when everyoays indoors and stokes the fire. The old womans son married the blacksmiths daughter and she moved in with them. The snow melted and it ring. By the Christmas, there was a boung grandson. Time passed. More children came.
When the eldest grandsoer, reached his seventh summer, he was old enough to go up the mountain with his father, as the men did every year, to let the goats feed on the young grass. There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advang silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock. Then another wolf, following the first one.
If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have ied them so closely, their plush, grey pelts, of which the hairs are tipped with white, giving them a ghostly look, as if they were on the point of dissolving at the edges; their sprightly, plumey tails; their acute, inquisitive masks.
Theer saw that the third wolf rodigy, a marvel, a naked one, going on all fours, as they did, but hairless as regards the body although hair grew around its head.
The sight of this bald wolf so fasated him that he would have lost his flock, perhaps himself beeen aainly beeen to the bone fligence had not the goats themselves raised their heads, snuffed danger and run off, bleating and whinnying, so that the men came, firing guns, making hullabaloo, sg the wolves away.
His father was too angry to listen to eter said. He cuffed Peter round the head a him home. His mother was feeding this years baby. His grandmother sat at the table, shelling peas into a pot.
"There was a little girl with the wolves, granny," said Peter. Why was he so sure it had been a little girl? Perhaps because her hair was so long, so long and lively. "A little girl about my age, from her size," he said.
His grandmother threw a flat pod out of the door so the chis could peck it up.
"I saw a little girl with the wolves," he said.
His grandmother tipped water into the pot, got up from the table and hung the pot of peas on the hook over t