The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"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.

You"ll never know about the hard way.

Awkward held eye-contact for a while, and then looked down.

Gavin snarled something. Half a dozen of the wolves, led by Angua, loped off towards the forest.

They returned twenty minutes later. Angua was human again - at least, Gaspode corrected himself, human shaped - and the wolves were harnessed to a big dog sled.

"Borrowed it from a man in the village over the hill," she said, as it slid to a halt by Carrot.

"Nice of him," said Gaspode, and decided not to pursue the subject. "I"m surprised to see wolves in harness, though."

"Well, this was the easy way," said Angua.

It"s odd, Gaspode mused, as he lay in the sled alongside the slumbering Carrot. He was so int"rested when Bum talked about the howl and how it could send messages right up into the mountains. If I was a suspicious dog, I"d wonder if he knew that she"d come back for him if he was really in trouble, if he decided to gamble everything on it...