Response to "The Werewolf"

"They knew the wart on the hand at once for a witch's nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead. Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered."

This story seemed almost like the typical back-country werewolf story until the last paragraph or so. You would expect the little girl to be shocked or surprised or even horrified to find out that her grandmother was the werewolf that tried to kill her, but once she realizes it, its almost like she accepts it. She just holds her grandmother down until she sees the stump that was her arm and then screams- then the villagers take the grandmother out in the woods and pelt her to death. It was the very last sentence that threw me for a loop. The author just described this horrific scene of an old woman being beaten to death in the woods and the last sentence merely says that the child ended up living in the grandmother's home and now prospers. It gives us, as readers, a deep insight into the world that the characters live in. Everything in their world is temporary and there is no sadness in death, its just an accepted part of life. It describes a culture of superstition, in which everyone does what they can to survive. And this story manages to explain this whole culture in just two pages.