The cloak was red, it came from his grandmother's wardrobe, and she gave it to Tam for his birthday with a long face and a short speech. "Try it on," she said. It came down to his elbows, roomy in the shoulders, with the hood standing up off his head like the top of a barrel. In the looking glass he looked nine and extremely dangerous. "Now tell me something true." "I am eight." The cloak went slack and soft and settled on him like a blanket over a chair. The shoulders dropped. The hood lay flat. Tam felt a foot taller. "That is how it works," said Grandmother. "It grows on the truth and shrinks on a lie. Not on a thought. On a lie. It does not care what you meant."

He tested it in the kitchen on a lie he had never told anybody. "I am nine." It was like being stepped on by the door. The cloak cinched at the neck, down the arms, round the ribs, and squeezed, and Tam made a strangled noise and found that his elbows were touching. In the glass was a red sausage with a boy's head out of the top of it. "I want it off." "You cannot have it off. It is not a garment you have. It is a garment measuring you. Say something true." "I have eaten six biscuits out of the tin and one of them was the last one." It let go all at once and dropped on the floor like a towel.

On Friday his grandmother had a cough and stayed in bed, and asked him to take a basket to the house at the top of the wood, with the bread and the small pot of butter, and to come straight back. "Directly back. Before dark. I know what I am saying." The basket came out of the cupboard. Tam stood in the hall with it in one hand and looked at the cloak on its peg, and thought about how soft and heavy and comfortable it was when it went slack. "I am going up to the wood," he said.

He put it on and picked up the basket, and out on the cobbles at the corner he said, to nobody, "Only as far as the wood. Nobody could notice." The sleeves came in over his hands. The shoulders met behind his back. By the first tree he was carrying the basket in front of him like a man carrying water in a bowl, and he could not get his elbows out far enough to swing.

He sat down on a log at the top of the wood. "Honest," he said, "and it goes soft. And soft means it fits. I don't want it soft. I want it enormous. I want it to be the biggest thing in the valley and everybody frightened of me in it." Nothing happened, which was worse than if it had shrunk, because it meant it had not even counted it. "I am frightened of the wood and I am also hungry, and I have made a fool of myself with a cloak." It came off him like a rope coming off a gatepost. He stood up in it. It swung. And the wolf came out from between the trees.

The wolf was thin and grey in a worn grey coat, and had been standing further back than Tam had thought. "Good evening," said Tam. The wolf stopped. "You have got my basket." "It is my grandmother's and I am taking it to the house at the top of the wood for a woman who comes to the door. And I have already eaten the bread, because it shrank on me, so I cannot give them the whole loaf." The wolf's ears went back an inch.

There are things a wolf is required to do when a small person stops in the wood and tells the truth like a shopkeeper. The low voice. The step forward. The very large description of what is about to happen, delivered from a position of advantage. He does not enjoy it, but he does expect to be able to start. "I have a larger wolf in the wood," said the wolf. "Behind me. Much bigger than me. He does not talk to people." "Your left ear moved." The wood was extremely quiet. "It did not."

"It did, when you said the big one. It went back, the way mine does when I am pretending I am not nervous." His hands had gone cold and his voice had not, because the cloak was loose and there was nothing in the world that could tighten it now. "And I think you made him up just now. And I think you are disappointed." The wolf's shoulders came down about an inch.

He was. It came out as a bad-tempered laugh. "Right," said the wolf. "Fine. I have been doing this a long time and it does not work like that, and I am going home." "You are not going to take the basket?" "I am going home. You have not been frightened once. I have to be back for the soup, and there is no point." He went into the trees. The branches took him in about four steps, and he did not look back, and the last thing Tam saw was the grey coat going off through the bracken, and it was going quite fast.

Grandmother was in the kitchen with her feet up. She took the pot of butter and looked at him. "How was the wood?" "Noisy. No, it was quiet. I met a wolf." "Did he frighten you?" "No." "Then what happened?" "He found out I was telling the truth, and he did not like it, and he went home." Tam could not make it sound important. "It came loose when I said I was frightened of the wood and I was hungry, and then it stayed loose, and I said my name, and it was the sort of name I have, and he could not get anywhere with me."

Grandmother put the pot down. "I have one question for you, and then we eat." "Is it what I think it is?" "No," said Grandmother. "It is not. I have been waiting all afternoon to ask you, and I am not going to be disappointed in the question, because it is the only one I have."

It took Tam a long time over the butter. Then Grandmother said, "Tell me the truth about the road and the wood and the wolf, and nothing you have added to make it a better story than it was." The cloak came open.

It came open the way a paper bag comes open when you blow into it. The red cloth went out flat and hard, past Tam's shoulders, past the table, and caught the lamp and lifted it a foot off the table, and hit the ceiling, and the kitchen filled up with red, and the plates went along the shelf and the tea towels came off their nail, and Grandmother said, "Ah," and put a hand on the table and watched the edge of it go past the window.

Then it stopped. It hung there for a second, enormous, and came down slowly, and settled, and lay along the floor and round the table leg, and it was the right size again by the time it stopped.

They ate the butter on the bread and drank the tea. Afterwards Tam carried the cloak up to hang on its peg, and as he put it on the hook he heard something at the bottom of the road, and went to the window. Down at the turning there was a light, and then there was not, and a shape went by with a long grey tail behind it, toward the common, without hurrying itself, and it did not look up.

Tam went to bed. Down the long hall the cloak hung on its peg at exactly the size it was supposed to be, and the wool at the shoulder had come loose where he had carried it all that afternoon under one arm. On Monday his grandmother said it was worth a trip to be altered, and he said there was nothing the matter with it, and she looked at him a long while and then said, "No," and put the needle down.