After a few seconds two more gunshots followed in quick succession.

Looking round he saw Terry Blewett and the grey-haired figure of Mel Forbes loping through the forest in the direction of the gunshots.

His heart pounding from nervous excitement, Bear set off after the two men.   Not wanting to be late and possibly cost a fellow cop his life, Bear easily raced past Mel and Terry, ignoring his own danger from potential head-on collisions with trees or oncoming bullets.

*      *      *

Ernie Singleton had had a tiring day on his sheep station on the outskirts of Merridale.   Normally he could have looked forward to a good night’s sleep, but his senses told him that tonight would be the first night of his transformations that month.   Ernie’s transformations had started around seventeen months ago, in February 1983, only days after his twenty-first birthday.   Since early February his body had been wracked by aches so severe that he was hardly able to move out of bed.   He had hobbled round the house for weeks, until the night of the twenty-third of February, when he had finally discovered the reason for all his agony: it was his body adjusting itself for a strange metamorphoses that he would go through two or three nights each month:

Ernie Singleton was a werewolf!

He suspected that he had inherited the werewolf taint from his father, Gregory.   All his life, Ernie had heard rumours of a large, black wolf roaming the countryside around Merridale and Glen Hartwell.   So he assumed that his father had also been a werewolf, the original black wolf.   But Gregory had been killed in a farming accident in July 1980, so Ernie was unable to question him about how his taint had originated.

Usually Ernie had no idea when that month’s first shape-shift would occur, until it did.   But sometimes he would wake up in the morning, mysteriously knowing that that night he would transform into the black wolf for the first time that month.   As had happened that morning.

Ernie ate a hearty tea, and then took a long soak in a hot tub, before heading to bed.   Although it was mid winter, he left the bedroom window wide open.   He also slept naked, so that he would not be trapped in his oversized pyjamas in wolf form.