Editing New Ways Old Grudges Werewolf Thomas Background (section)

==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.