The Fifth Elephant

dressed women watching him carefully. One of them was holding a kitchen knife in a trembling hand.
    “Have you come here to ravish us?” she said.
    “Madam! I’m being pursued by werewolves!”
    The three looked at one another. To Vimes, the sack suddenly seemed far too small.
    “Vill that take you all day?” said one of the women.
    Vimes held the sack more tightly.
    “Ladies! Please! I need trousers!”
    “Ve can see that.”
    “And a weapon, and boots if you’ve got them! Please?”
    They went into another huddle.
    “We have the gloomy and purposeless trousers of Uncle Vanya,” said one, doubtfully.
    “He seldom vore them,” said another.
    “And I have an ax in my linen cupboard,” said the youngest. She looked guiltily at the other two. “Look, just in case I ever needed it, all right? I wasn’t going to chop anything down .”
    “I would be so grateful,” said Vimes. He took in the good but old clothes, the faded gentility, and played the only card in his hand. “I am His Grace the Duke of Ankh-Morpork, although I appreciate this fact is not evident at the—”
    There was a three-fold sigh.
    “Ankh-Morpork!”
    “You haf a magnificent opera house and many fine galleries.”
    “Such vonderful avenues!”
    “A veritable heaven of culture and sophistication and unattached men of quality!”
    “Er…I said Ankh-Morpork ,” said Vimes. “With an A and an M .”
    “Ve have always dreamed of going there.”
    “I’ll have three coach tickets sent along immediately after I get home,” said Vimes, his mind’s ear hearing the crunch of speeding paws over snow. “But, dear ladies, if you could fetch me those things—”
    They hurried away, but the youngest lingered by the door.
    “Do you have long, cold winters in Ankh-Morpork?” she said.
    “Just muck and slush, usually.”
    “Any cherry orchards?”
    “I don’t think we have any, I’m afraid.”
    She punched the air.
    “Yesss!”
    A few minutes later Vimes was alone in the barn, wearing a pair of ancient black trousers that he’d tied at the waist with rope, and holding an ax which was surprisingly sharp.
    He had five minutes, perhaps. Wolves probably didn’t stop to worry about heart attacks.
    There was no point in simply running. They could run faster. He needed to stay near civilization and its hallmarks, like trousers.
    Maybe time was on Vimes’s side. Angua was never very talkative about her world, but she had said that, in either shape, a werewolf slowly lost some of the skills of the other shape. After several hours on two legs her sense of smell dropped from uncanny to merely good. And after too long as a wolf…it was like being drunk, as far as Vimes understood it; a little inner part of you was still trying to give instructions, but the rest of you was acting stupid. The human part started to lose control…
    He looked around the barn again. There was a ladder to an upper gallery. He climbed it, and looked out of a glassless window across a snowy meadow. There was a river in the distance, and what looked very much like a boathouse.
    Now…how would a werewolf think?

    The werewolves slowed as they reached the building. Their leader glanced at a lieutenant, and nodded. He loped off in the direction of the boathouse. The others followed Wolf inside. The last became human for a moment to pull the doors shut and drop the bar across.
    Wolf stopped near the center of the barn. Hay had been scattered over the floor in great fluffy piles.
    He scraped gently with a paw, and wisps fell away from a rope that was stretched taut.
    Wolf took a deep breath. The other werewolves, sensing what was going to happen, looked away. There was a moment of struggling shapelessness, and then he was rising slowly on two feet, blinking in the dawn of humanity.
    That’s interesting, thought Vimes, up on the gallery. For a second or two after Changing, they’re not entirely up on current events…
    “Oh, Your Grace,” said Wolf, looking around. “A trap ? How very…civilized.”
    He caught site of Vimes, who was standing on the higher floor, by the window.
    “What was it supposed to do, Your Grace?”
    Vimes reached down to the oil lamp.
    “It was supposed to be a decoy,” he said.
    He hurled the lamp down onto the dry hay, and flicked his cigar after it. Then he grabbed the ax and climbed through the window just as the spilled fat oil whump ed.
    Vimes dropped into the deep snow and ran toward the boathouse.
    There were other tracks