out of her way,
Peter, quick!"

But it was too late. Thrusting out a skinny hand, the hag scratched
Peter on the ankle with the long curved, poisonous nail of her
forefinger. Then, with an evil smile on her lips, she turned over on her
back, and expired. And before Peter could be got home he, too, was dead.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WERWOLF IN RUSSIA AND SIBERIA

The ideal home of all things weird and uncanny--is cold, grey, gaunt,
and giant Russia. Nowhere is the werwolf so much in evidence to-day as
in the land of the Czar, where all the primitive conditions favourable
to such anomalies, still exist, and where they have undergone but little
change in the last ten thousand years.

A thinly-populated country--vast stretches of wild uncultivated land,
full of dense forests, rich in trees most favourable to Elementals, and
watered by deep, silent tarns, and stealthily moving streams,--its very
atmosphere is impregnated with lycanthropy.

At the base of giant firs and poplars, or poking out their heads
impudently, from amidst brambles and ferns, are werwolf flowers--flowers
with all the characteristics of those found in Hungary and the Balkan
Peninsula, but of a greater variety. There are, for example, in
addition to the white, yellow, and red species, those of a bluish-white
hue, that emit a glow at night like the phosphorescent glow emanating
from decaying animal and vegetable matter; and those of a brilliant
orange, covered with black, protruding spots, suggestive of some
particularly offensive disease, that show a marked preference for damp
places, and are specially to be met with growing in the slime and mud at
the edge of a pool, or in the soft, rotten mould of morasses.

Werwolves haunt the plains, too--the great barren, undulating deserts
that roll up to the foot of the Urals, Caucasus, Altai, Yablonoi, and
Stanovoi Mountains--and the Tundras along the shores of the Arctic
Ocean--dreary swamps in summer and ice-covered wastes in winter. Here,
at night, they wander over the rough, stony, arid ground, picking their
way surreptitiously through the scant vegetation, and avoiding all
frequented localities; pausing, every now and then, to slake their
thirst in deep sunk wells, or to listen for the sounds of quarry. Hazel
hen, swans, duck, geese, squirrels, hares, elk, reindeer, roes,
fallowdeer, and wild sheep, all are food to the werwolf, though nothing
is so heartily appreciated by it as fat tender children or