It is a northern try; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.
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 i of the virgin behind a guttering dle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives.
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 toug townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the na?f style and there are no flowers to put in front of them, no flrow there, so they put out small, votive s, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears e lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight especially on urgisnacht, the Devil holds pii the graveyards and ihe witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, ahem. Anyone will tell you that.
Wreaths of garli the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child bor first on the night of St Johns Eve will have sed 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 e, search her for marks, for the supernumary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Theoo death.
Winter and cold weather.
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.
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.
The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she khe 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.
It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineers child would have died ht 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.
The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when she saw what had happeo it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off dissolately betweerees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife on her apron, ed up the wolfs paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes a 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.
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, to use it to make the old woman a cold press, and the wolfs paw fell to the floor.
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 ohird finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she k for her grandmothers hand.
She pulled back the sheet but the