The Travelling Wine Seller

He took his hatchet, counted eight of the spokes in one of the front wheels, and knocked out the ninth. Then the barrel stopped leaking, and towards morning he arrived in Malles. In the course of the day, he learned that a doctor had been called out to a woman who was reputed to be a witch. One of her legs had been shattered. The case seemed strange to the doctor, and when he asked her about it, she told him that the previous evening she had been with some friends at the witches' meeting place in Malletes. To entertain them, she had made a hole in a spruce tree while uttering a spell, and from the tree trunk new wine flowed - the wine that had run out of the pedlar's barrel. She had been drinking merrily with her friends when she had suddenly been hit by a hatchet. The pedlar had done the right thing, because the witch had been seriously injured when he hacked out the ninth spoke of the wheel. (Malles) 

Based on Zingerle, Ignaz Vinzenz, Sagen aus Tirol, 2nd edition, Innsbruck 1891, no. 791, p.408.