New Ways Old Grudges Werewolf Thomas Background

Background

Pup Life

There was no moon in the sky when this werewolf was born, since he was born at high noon in the middle of summer on a roadside in Montana. His pregnant mother had just narrowly avoided being hit by a car and the stress caused her to go into labor. Four pups emerged on that scorching Montana afternoon - the pup who would one day become Thomas, a brother and two sisters. He sometimes explains his dark skin and fur as the sun cooking him that color - and sometimes because the sun challenged the moon for him when he was born. Born at the time of the joker's moon if not under the empty night sky it should have been in, his sense of humor is bone-dry and vicious - something suited for life in the hard, rural badlands.

But that's now, with more years on him. Then, it was all about hunting mice and rolling around in the grass with his brother and sisters, nipping ears and chewing on paws. Their mother was always there, and their father usually - or so he seemed to be. Their den in a shallow cave in a hillside by the river was isolated, warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Occasionally, the big things that floated by in the river threw things towards where they lived, so he took to hiding in the bushes when he saw them and stayed there until they were well out of sight. One of his sisters was hit by something once and whimpered about it for a while. That led to his first encounter with a wolf outside the family - where his father was jet-black just like him and his mother mostly black with some white patches, this wolf was almost bone-colored with a spattering of grey. And he was big - bigger than the pup's father. The pup whimpered and sniffed the stranger wolf very carefully, not understanding what they were communicating to one another. Then the other wolf went away.

When he got a little bigger, he started roaming with the rest of his family - instead of mice in a cave, now he started trying to creep up on small birds and rabbits. Once in a while he even caught one, although most of the time they spotted him coming and got away. One day they were really far from home, the farthest he had ever been up to that point, when they came to what he later found out was a boundary fence. On the other side of it were huge animals - much bigger than him, or his mother, or his father, or even the big wolf he remembered. They had horns, ate grass, and made a noise that, to the young wolf, sounded like, "Eat me." His mother kept him from trying to get under the fence, but the idea was in his head. It was and is one of the first ideas he can remember having.

As time went on, he realized there were a lot of these things all over the place - not so many near their home, but lots farther out. Fences and mooing animals - and other creatures that made loud noises and had sticks that made louder noises. His mother, brother and sisters were terrified - the wolf that would be Thomas was scared, but not so scared as to run in a blind panic at the sound. He ran and hid and watched, and when the animal with the stick left he came back and sniffed around. Eventually he started leaving the den at night while the others slept, creeping away from the pile of snoozing wolves to go sneaking around the fences and looking for ways in. He remembers being able to do this a lot of times without any problems, then there was the time he was not so careful about the light.

He knew how the sun and the moon worked - one was hot, the other wasn't, one made the world light, the other made it dark. What he didn't know was that the animals on two legs could make their own little suns, ones that would light up when he didn't expect it. He knew the two-legged animals lived in big stumps that were strangely shaped and smooth, but they never spent the night in the smaller stumps that had the animal noises coming out of them. He also knew that the noises some of the animals made in there also sounded like "eat me". He was about to get through a door and into a chicken coop when the world went light like in mid-day and loud noises came from inside the big stump. He didn't know what it was, and this time complete survival instinct took over. He took off through the hole in the fence as thunder crashed behind him and something zipped past his ears like angry bees. He later felt like he had run all the way to the river without taking a breath.

He waited for a while, hoping the animal would forget. But just to be safe, he tried a different territory, one where the fence was a little lower. He waited for nightfall and a lucky break happened - one of the fat birds that didn't fly came out of its den, and got too close to the fence. A great leap in, a startled squawk, and a great leap out, and he tore off across the prairie with the dying chicken in his mouth, feebly fighting to save itself. He got in trouble later - his father found feathers on him that didn't come from a normal bird and attacked him. He didn't understand why at the time, although he realized much later - trying to dissuade an errant pup from getting himself killed stealing from ranchers.

It didn't take, though. He just got sneakier about it, and after another near-death experience with what he later found out were twelve-gauge shotguns he didn't take direct routes back to their den, always going to a river and jumping in, then swimming for a while and jumping back out to go home. Not only would it confuse anything following him, it washed off feathers and smells.

First Change

Then there was the incident on the big farm. He had gone from jumping fences and stealing chickens to breaking and entering, creeping into barns and sneaking around farm equipment sheds. He didn't know what any of it was or what it did (although he once got a nasty gash on his back from a pair of shears he knocked off a shelf), but the fact it was there fascinated him, and that he was breaking some kind of rule being there was more fascinating. Eventually decided to try his hand at getting into Big Bill Paulsen's second barn. Bill was a successful farmer and rancher, but wolf-who-would-be-Tom had noticed that one of his barns never seemed to open. He had taken to creeping around at dawn and dusk because a black wolf stood out at noon, but long shadows hid him - the man always came out of and went back into one barn, and only very rarely did he do anything with the other barn. Plus some nights there were lots more men there, and noises that sounded like wolves' growls. He resolved to investigate.

Getting past the guard wasn't too difficult - he found a low spot in the fence, jumped it, and circled around behind the barn. Evidently there wasn't much fear of being found out. The closer he got the more noise he heard - by the time he was right up against the door, he was sure he could open it without being noticed. He was right - and then he found out why. Must have been fifty men crowded around a cinder block pit ten feet deep with two bull mastiff crossbreeds tearing strips out of each other's faces in the middle. Bill's barn had equipment all right - chains, prods, choker sticks, all stuff you might conceivably find on a ranch. Or next to a dogfighter's arena. Tom was almost ready to spit and leave when one dog howled and collapsed. The place erupted - the half that bet on the other dog yelling for their winnings, while the other half insulted their mothers. That wasn't even the worst of it - the worst was when Big Bill Paulsen, massively strong from years on the farm, got one of the choker sticks, somehow managed to reach down and pick up the downed dog by its neck, and draped the stick across his harvester - hanging the dog on the end of it like a hundred-pound pinata. Then everything went black.

To this day nobody knows exactly what went on in Bill Paulsen's barn - the authorities and most of the survivors eventually settled on, "Some dumbass brought coydogs and they went berserk." How Bill Paulsen had wound up nearly crucified on his own harvester was never satisfactorily explained, although the general agreement seemed to have been "somebody found out he fixed a match and didn't like it". Tom, meanwhile, had somehow managed to get the crippled dog to the next farmhouse - five miles away over broken ground. After leaving the dog on their porch and scratching at the door himself, he took off for the hills and left the farmer to call the authorities. To this day he is one of the few werewolves who doesn't mind dogs - or at least he'll defend dogs that are good and strong and work hard, instead of heinously inbred pocket pooches.