He stood against the weatherboards, gazing down at the sleeping child for a moment, then remembering his fear of the hunters, dropped to all fours and scampered across to the second window.

This time he could see Rowena sprawled out in the middle of the double bed.   Trying his best not to waken her, he began scraping at the window, desperately trying to force it to slide upward.   Although the window was not latched, the wolf’s clawed feet weren’t designed for gripping onto shiny surfaces, so try as he might he couldn’t get the window to budge a single millimetre.

In desperation he tried to shape-change where he was.   Although he had managed to do this on occasions while outside, he knew that usually he had to return to the bedroom first.   And as he had expected, he failed to transform.

Hearing excited barking coming from the dog yard out back of the house, he pricked up his ears in the hope of hearing whatever had set off the dogs.   But after a few moments he gave up and turned back toward the bedroom window, where he saw the face of Rowena staring out at him.

*      *      *

Rowena stood by the end of the bed, staring out in terror at the large black shape, which stood peering in at her through the bedroom window.   As she watched the wolf began frantically leaping up off the ground, scratching and pressing at the window with its front paws.

*      *      *

“Let me in!   Let me in!” Ernie tried to call out to his wife.   But in wolf form his vocal cords were not able to manage human speech. So all Rowena heard was a series of throaty snarls, as the wolf jumped up against the window, making the glass rattle precariously in its frame.

*      *      *

“Ernie!   Ernie!” cried Rowena, backing deeper into the bedroom, not daring to look away from the leaping wolf, not wanting to be caught alone in the room with the creature.   “Ernie, where are you?” she pleaded, unsure whether she had articulated the words, or merely thought them.

*      *      *

The black wolf heard Rowena calling his human name, even as he heard the hunters around the front of the house.   At first he thought that somehow she had recognised him as her husband.   Then seeing her look of terror, he realised that she was calling to his two-legged self, Ernie, to rescue her from his four-legged self, the black wolf.

Not wanting to frighten Rowena any more than she already was, he turned away and started off toward the chain-link fence a dozen metres away from the farmhouse.   But then, catching sight of Weird Warren leading the leg-weary hunters around the side of the house, the wolf stopped in his tracks.   He looked toward the empty paddock beyond the fence, wondering whether he could make it to the start of the forest, over a quarter of a kilometre away, before the hunters gunned him down.

Eyes shining with fear the black wolf turned to face Warren again, then turned back toward the farmhouse.   After a second’s hesitation, he sprinted forward, and, using his powerful back legs like springs, leapt straight through the bedroom window.

The window shattered with a report like a shotgun blast, showering the double bed with shards of glass and causing Rowena to shriek and faint.

“Get out of the way, you bloody freak!” shouted Sam Hart.   He raced past Warren Horne at the sound of breaking glass around the side of the house.

Des Hutchinson followed suite and the two men arrived at the bedroom window together….

Instead of the black wolf though, they found the naked figure of Ernie Singleton kneeling over his wife, Rowena, who lay unconscious on the bedroom floor.

“What happened here?” asked Des Hutchinson.

“She fainted when she saw the black wolf,” replied Ernie truthfully.

“Luckily I was here to frighten him away.”

“Where did he go?” demanded Sam Hart.

“Back out through the window,” said Ernie.   He pointed to the paddock behind them.

The two men looked round in surprise.   They had expected to corner the wolf inside the house.   But the few moments it had taken to force their way past Warren could just have given the wolf enough time to reverse direction and race across the empty paddock without them seeing him.

“Here we go again!” said Sam Hart as the tired hunters straggled off once more.

They crossed the chain-link fence and were almost at the start of the forest before realising that they had lost all trace of the wolf’s paw prints.

*      *      *

As the hunting party slowly disappeared from sight, with Weird Warren happily chanting, “Black wolf!   Black wolf!” Ernie stood by the window, ignoring the broken glass, which cut into his naked feet.   His heart raced as he watched the retreating men, wondering whether they would give up when they failed in the wolf hunt tonight?   Or whether they would be out again tomorrow night and every night after that.   ‘Until eventually they kill me!’ he thought as he turned away to start to attend to Rowena.

THE END