Now when Mac cecht was lying wounded on the battlefield, at the end of the third day, he saw a woman passing by.
‘Come hither, O woman!’ says Mac cecht.
‘I dare not go thus,’78 says the woman, ‘for horror and fear of thee.’
‘There was a time when I had this, O woman, even horror and fear of me on some one. But now thou shouldst fear nothing. I accept thee on the truth of my honour and my safeguard.’
Then the woman goes to him.
‘I know not,’ says he, ‘whether it is a fly or a gnat(?), or an ant that nips me in the wound.’
It happened that it was a hairy wolf that was there, as far as its two shoulders in the wound!
The woman seized it by the tail, and dragged it out of the wound, and it takes the full of its jaws out of him.
‘Truly,’ says the woman, ‘this is ‘an ant of ancient land.’’
Says Mac cecht ‘I swear to God what my people swears, I deemed it no bigger than a fly, or a gnat(?), or an ant.’
And Mac cecht took the wolf by the throat, and struck it a blow on the forehead, and killed it with a single blow.