O and only one howls in the woods by night.
The wolf is ivore inate and hes as ing as he is ferocious; once hes had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
At night, the eyes of wolves shine like dle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lao flash it back to you -- red for danger; if a wolfs eyes reflely moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a pierg colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock-still.
But those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse of the forest assassins as they cluster invisibly round your smell of meat as you gh the wood unwisely late. They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, grey members of a gregation of nightmare; hark! his long, wavering howl. . . an aria of fear made audible.
The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.
It is winter and cold weather. In this region of mountain and forest, there is now nothing for the wolves to eat. Goats and sheep are locked up in the byre, the deer departed for the remaining pasturage on the southern slopes -- wolves grow lean and famished. There is so little flesh ohat you could t the starveling ribs through their pelts, if they gave you time before they pouhose slavering jaws; the lolling tohe rime of saliva on the grizzled chops -- of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for ibal tables, the wolf is worst for he ot listen to reason.
You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy braangle about you, trapping the unwary traveller is as if the vegetation itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends -- step betweeeposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famihey are as unkind as plague.
The grave-eyed children of the sparse villages always carry knives with them when they go to tend the little flocks of goats that provide the homesteads with acrid milk and rank, maggoty cheese. Their knives are half as big as they are, the blades are sharpened daily.
But the wolves have ways of arriving at your owhside. We try and try but sometimes we ot keep them out. There is no winters night the cottager does not fear to see a lean, grey, famished snout questing uhe door, and there was a woman oten in her own kit as she was straining the mai.
Fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems.
There was a hunter onear here, that trapped a wolf in a pit. This wolf had massacred the sheep and goats; eaten up a mad old man who used to live by himself in a hut half the mountain and sing to Jesus all day; pounced on a girl looking after the sheep, but she made such a otion that men came with rifles and scared him away and tried to track him to the forest but he was ing and easily gave them the slip. So this hunter dug a pit and put a du it, for bait, all alive -- oh; and he covered the pit with straw smeared with wolf dung. Quack,