The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

Gaspode had confused recollections of the rest of that night. The pack moved fast, and he realized that most of them were running ahead of Carrot, to flatten down the snow.

It wasn"t flat enough for Gaspode. Eventually a wolf picked him up by the scruff of the neck and carried him bodily, while making muffled comments about the foul taste.

The snow stopped after a while and there was a slip of moonlight behind the clouds.

And all around, near and far, was the howl. Occasionally the pack would stop, in a clearing or on the crisp white brow of a hill, and join in.

Gaspode limped to Angua while the cries went up around them. "What"s this for?" he said.

"Polities," said Angua. "Negotiation. We"re crossing territories."

Gaspode glanced at Gavin. He hadn"t joined in the howl, but sat a little way off, regally dividing his attention between Carrot and the pack.

"He has to ask permission?" he said.

"He has to make sure they"ll let me through."

"Oh. That"s giving him problems?"

"None that he can"t bite through."

"Oh. Er, is the howl saying anything about me?"

" "Small, horrible, smelly dog." "

"Ah, right."

They set off again a few minutes later, down a long snow-crusted slope in the moonlight towards the forest, and Gaspode saw shadows angling fast across the snowfield towards them. For a moment he was flanked by two packs, the old and the new, and then their original escort dropped away.

So we"ve got a new honour guard, he thought, as he ran in the centre of a wall of blurred grey legs. Wolves we haven"t met before. I just hope the howl added "doesn"t taste nice".

Then Carrot fell over in the snow. It was a moment before he pushed himself up again. The wolves circled uncertainly, occasionally glancing at Gavin. Gaspode caught up with Carrot, jumping awkwardly through the snow.

"You all right?"

"Hard... to... run..."

"I don"t want to, you know, worry you or anything," whined Gaspode, "but we"re not exactly among friends here, know what I mean? Our Gavin isn"t going to win the prize for the wolf with the waggiest tail anywhere."

"When did he last sleep?" Angua demanded, pushing her way through the wolves.

"Dunno, really," said Gaspode. "We"ve been moving pretty fast the last few days."

"No sleep, no food and no proper clothing," snarled Angua. "Idiot!"

There was growling and whining from some of the wolves around Gavin. Gaspode sat down by Carrot"s head and watched as Angua... argued.

He couldn"t speak pure wolf and, besides, gesture and body language played a far greater part than it did in canine. But you didn"t have to be bright to see that things weren"t going well. There was def"nitely a lot of Atmosphere in the atmosphere. And Gaspode had a feeling that, if things went all pear-shaped in a hurry, one small dog had all the survival chances of a chocolate kettle on a very hot stove.

There was a lot of whining and growling. One wolf - Gaspode mentally named him Awkward - was not happy. It looked as though a number of wolves were agreeing with him. One of them bared its teeth at Angua.

Then Gavin stood up. He shook some snowflakes off his coat, looked around in an offhand fashion, and padded towards Awkward.

Gaspode felt every hair on his body stand on end.

The other wolves crouched back. Gavin ignored them. When he was a few feet away from Awkward he put his head on one side and said, "Hrurrrm?"

It was almost a pleasant noise. But right down inside Gaspode"s bones it bounced a harmonic which said: at this point, we could go two ways. There is the easy way, and that is very easy.