'Took me right back, seeing a great big hairy slathering thing heading towards me,' said Nanny, picking up one end of the stunned creature. 'Did you ever meet old Sumpkins?'
It was, indeed, a normal-looking wolf, except that it was a lot thinner than most. Ribs showed plainly under the skin and the fur was matted. Granny hauled a bucket of cloudy water from the well next to the privy and poured it over its head.
Then she sat down on a tree stump and watched it carefully. A few birds sang, high in the branches.
'It spoke,' she said. 'It tried to say “no”.'
'I wondered about that,' said Nanny. 'Then I thought maybe I was imagining things.'
'No point in imagining anything,' said Granny. 'Things are bad enough as they are.'
The wolf groaned. Granny handed the frying pan to Nanny Ogg.
After a while she said, 'I think I'm going to have a look inside its head.'
Nanny Ogg shook her head. 'I wouldn't do that, if I was you.'
'I'm the one who's me, and I've got to know. Just you stand by with the frying pan.'
Nanny shrugged.
Granny concentrated.
It is very difficult to read a human mind. Most humans are
thinking about so many things at any given moment that it
is almost impossible to pick out one stream in the flood.
Animal minds are different. Far less cluttered. Carnivore minds are easiest of all, especially before meals. Colours don't exist in the mental world, but, if they did, a hungry carnivore mind would be hot and purple and sharp as an arrow. And herbivore minds are simple, too - coiled silver springs, poised for flight.
But this wasn't any kind of normal mind. It was two minds.
Granny had sometimes picked up the mind of hunters in the forest, when she was sitting quietly of an evening and letting her mind wander. Just occasionally they felt like this, or at least like a faint shadow of this. Just occasionally, when the hunter was about to make a kill, the random streams of thought came together. But this was different. This was the opposite- this was cracked and crippled attempts at cogitation peeling away from the sleek arrowhead of predatory intent. This was a predatory mind trying to think.
No wonder it was going mad.
She opened her eyes.
Nanny Ogg held the frying pan over her head. Her arm trembled.
'Well,' she said, 'who's there?'
'I could do with a glass of water,' said Granny. Natural caution surfaced through the turmoil of her mind. 'Only not out of that well, mind you.'
Nanny relaxed a little. When a witch started rummaging in someone else's mind, you could never be sure who was coming back. But Granny Weatherwax was the best. Magrat might always be trying to find herself, but Granny didn't even understand the idea of the search. If she couldn't find the way back to her own head, there wasn't a path.
'There's that milk in the cottage,' Nanny volunteered.
'What colour was it again?'
'Well . . . still fairly white.'
'Okay.'
When Nanny Ogg's back was safely turned Granny permitted herself a small shudder.
She stared at the wolf, wondering what she could do for it. A normal wolf wouldn't enter a cottage, even if it could open the door. Wolves didn't come near humans at all, except if there were a lot of them and it was the end of a very hard winter. And they didn't do that because they were big and bad and wicked, but because they were wolves.