XXThe day set aside for hunting turned out to be a wet one and few of the lords were anxious to ride out. Yet news had come in that two wolves, a male and a female, had made their home within the thick wood that lay beyond the second ridge and that these beasts were ravaging the farmsteads outside Caerwent, dragging down the precious ewes wantonly and even attacking the shepherds. One wild-eyed man told the lords that he had been followed as he came down from his flock two nights before. He carried only a staff, which he broke in his nervousness, striking out at a stone which looked like a wolf in the moonlight.
When his pursuers saw that he was unarmed, and smelled the fear which he left behind him in the wind, they closed in on him, slavering and urging each other to pull him down, he s
