The people in the sheriff’s office paid little attention to the brown and gray K-9 that walked into the men’s locker room to change at the end of his shift. The wolf started, however, by lifting his leg to use the urinal, and then he stood on his hind legs to pull the lever with his paws. The department had provided a platform on which he could stand to put his back end over a toilet for more complicated needs, as he felt embarrassed by having a partner use a plastic bag to pick up after him outdoors. Dolph Varg was one of the best drug and explosives sniffers in the world, and it took him less than a minute to master a new scent. He didn’t need to be rewarded with treats either but, as his job was literally moonlighting, he could work only three days a month. The department made full use of his time accordingly, and paid him quite well for it.

 

“Thanks for finding that trace of fentanyl on my uniform, Dolph,” Deputy Smith told the young man who emerged from the locker room in street clothing a while later. “That’s not something I wanted to bring home with me after we searched that drug house.”

 

“Fentanyl’s odorless to humans, and difficult even for canids to detect,” Dolph reminded him. “I’m a fast learner, though.”

 

“I wish we could persuade your fiancée Louve to come work here as well.”

 

“She moonlights in cancer detection at a local clinic. Many forms of cancer cause biochemical changes in the human body that she can detect long before they generate any obvious symptoms, so the doctors usually catch them in Stage I. She also moonlights at a veterinary clinic for similar purposes.”

 

“I’m surprised the two of you never got into hiking, given the amount of time you spend in the woods when you’re moonlighting but not on duty.”

 

“Louve and I are hearing-impaired and smell-impaired for roughly twenty-seven days a month, at least by our standards, and we simply cannot appreciate the forest for what it is really like. It’s sort of like going to an art gallery and knowing a painting has vibrant and subtle colors, but being able to see only in grayscale. That’s why we do our best to spend time in the woods during those three days a month when even the faintest smells and noises have endless stories to tell.”

 

“Dolph,” Sheriff Martin then said, “we have a problem. Two hikers disappeared in the woods last week, and we found what was left of them. They were killed execution-style as shown by the bullet holes in their skulls, but something ate every last piece of flesh. We had to identify them from dental records, and they were witnesses who were to testify against a drug gang.”

 

“You may think this is crazy,” the sheriff continued, “but you are yourself living proof that some legends are based on reality. Keasik here is an Algonquin medicine man, and he told me his suspicion.”

 

“There is a creature of darkness in our legends, a creature of pure malice and insatiable hunger that dines on human flesh,” the medicine man explained. “It is shaped like a man but has the back hooves and head of a stag, and claws for hands. We call it the Wendigo, and it is quite likely that the drug gang is using it to dispose of evidence. It doesn’t attack the drug dealers because they bring it food, so they have a perfect synergistic arrangement with each other.”

 

“We know how hard it is to track a man in the woods, even with the aid of dogs,” Sheriff Martin continued. “I was wondering, and I’ve no right to ask either of you to take the risk, if you and Louve can handle this problem next month.”

 

Dolph looked at the pictures of the deceased witnesses. “Pete and Sue were our classmates in college, and good friends of ours. Louve and I played a mixed doubles tennis game with them and they did their best even though humans don’t stand much of a chance in any kind of game with us that involves balls or flying discs. We don’t have our full reflexes in human form, but they’re still faster than normal. In any event, neither of us likes drug dealers in general and we sure as heck don’t like somebody who murders our friends.”

 

~ * ~

 

“The drug gang did this to Sue and Pete?” Louve Wulf repeated when Dolph showed her the pictures he had gotten from the sheriff. The young woman had auburn hair, and she worked most of the time at an engineering firm. Her employer, like Dolph’s, was more than amenable to rearrangement of her schedule to moonlight for roughly three days a month.

 

“That’s right, and then they fed our friends to a Wendigo,” Dolph confirmed while he showed her some artwork of the creature in question.

 

“Some people may call that a monster,” Louve replied. “I call it venison. Let’s go into those woods a few minutes before the Change, and present the bad guys with what they think is a helpless young couple in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

 

~ * ~

 

Dolph and Louve had to wait almost a month to put their plan into effect, of course, and then they hiked into the woods where the sheriff’s department believed the drug gang ran its operations. Sure enough, there were two all-terrain vehicles in a clearing, with packages of what they suspected were drugs. They also made out several men with automatic rifles slung over their backs, and prominent gang tattoos on their faces.

 

Louve and Dolph then took off their clothes, for they would soon not fit them and would only constrain their movement. They would not be naked for long, though, for they could already see the glow of the moonrise. They put their clothing into bags with handles they could hold with their mouths, for they would soon have no other way to carry them and they wanted to leave no evidence that they had been there. Then they put a large dog dish on the ground, and filled it with water for future use.

 

“I’ll go to the clearing to handle the drug dealers,” Dolph said.

 

“I’ll wait here, and I can already smell deer,” Louve replied. Her sense of smell was far from its full strength, but it was always far better than an ordinary human’s. “Be careful, Dolph, those druggies have guns.”

 

“I will be,” he promised while he turned to walk down the path that led to the clearing where the drug dealers had parked their cars.

 

~ * ~

 

Dolph walked into the clearing with no effort whatsoever to conceal himself, and he put pictures of Sue and Pete onto the hood of one of the vehicles while he held a cell phone in his other hand. “Who in Hell are you?” one of the drug dealers asked with profanity. “If you’re a nudist who strayed away from your camp or whatever, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

 

“Pete and Sue were my friends, and I don’t like what you did to them. I have to give you an opportunity to surrender to the law. Put your weapons on the ground, and lie face down while I call the sheriff’s department to report where we are and that I have you in custody.” He looked at the silvery glow on the horizon and added, “I’d say you have less than a minute to comply.”

 

The gang members laughed hysterically, and one finally responded by drawing a pistol. “I’ll put a bullet in your head right now, and then I’ll feed you to the Wendigo. They’ll have to identify you from dental records, same as they had to identify your friends.”

 

“I hoped you’d say that,” Dolph replied while the full moon appeared on the horizon. His timing had been perfect.

 

~ * ~

 

Louve meanwhile heard some rustling in the trees, and she looked straight into the monster’s eyes. It had the body of a very large man, claws for hands, and the head of a stag whose mouth contained sharp and jagged teeth suitable for tearing flesh rather than foliage. “There isn’t much meat on you,” the Wendigo said while it assessed Louve’s slender body, “but I’ll make do. It was nice of you to take your clothes off for my convenience.”

 

“I took them off for mine,” she corrected, “for they won’t fit me in a few moments. I don’t like what you and your friends did to those hikers, and neither does my fiancé. You may call yourself the Wendigo, but Dolph and I call you venison.”

 

“My men will make short work of your boyfriend,” the Wendigo replied while screams erupted from the moonlit clearing a hundred yards away. “How many boyfriends do you have?” it then demanded, for the screams came from more than one man. A pistol cracked twice, and Louve felt a moment of fear because, contrary to legend, bullets did not need to be made from silver to hurt people like her and Dolph. Then, however, the last man screamed like a damned soul while his pistol went silent.

 

“Dolph isn’t the one who made those noises,” Louve confirmed while the full moon appeared from behind the nearby trees. “As for you, the forest is not a safe place for things with antlers at this time of month.”

 

“I’ll rip you apart right now,” the Wendigo said while his claws seized the young woman’s arms, and that was when the Change took place. Louve’s hands and feet turned into paws, and her arms and legs shortened while her mouth elongated into a muzzle. Her ears flattened back against her neck, and a tail appeared behind her. Her reddish fur now resembled her hair, and she twisted to break the Wendigo’s grip.

 

The monster lunged at the wolf to grapple and bite, but its experience had been entirely with killing and eating humans. Louve was now much lighter than a human at eighty pounds, but her reflexes were enormously faster. She knew that Dolph had relied on his own canid reflexes to take out the drug dealers and he had another advantage over ordinary K-9s. He knew what a gun was, and also how to dodge and jink quickly enough to throw off a shooter’s aim. He had practiced that against paintball-armed adversaries at the sheriff’s office.

 

The Wendigo, while armed with teeth and claws, was nonetheless a cervid that lacked depth perception and could only estimate the range to its target. The result was that Louve dodged easily between the grasping claws, and her mouth was on the Wendigo’s throat an instant later. A wolf’s bite force is close to four hundred pounds per square inch so most of the Wendigo’s throat was missing an instant later. The severed blood vessels sprayed Louve’s face to elicit the emergence of a long and broad tongue. Fresh warm blood is to a wolf what any number of dinner bells are to a person.

 

A somewhat larger brown and gray wolf approached a few moments later. Neither wolf’s vocal system could produce human words properly, but they had learned to approximate them. “Pork?” Louve asked Dolph. She didn’t really mean pork, but the meat in question tastes purportedly like it.

 

“I’ll stick with venison,” he replied while he went over to the Wendigo. He and Louve opened the monster’s body and started with the parts that human hunters remove and discard, for these are nutritious and also digestible with acid that is roughly ten times as strong as that in human stomachs. When they could hold no more, they went over to the dog dish to wash down their meal.

 

“Leftovers?” Dolph then queried. The hunters they knew had freezers for venison, but they did not have a big enough freezer for the remnants of what they had just killed.

 

“We can’t very well take it to a deer processor,” Louve replied, for deer season had yet to open. While the state’s game laws regulated muzzleloader, bow, and rifle seasons, they said absolutely nothing about tooth season. A pair of talking wolves dragging a partially-eaten anthropomorphic cervid to a butcher was still likely to make the local papers, though, and Dolph and Louve preferred their privacy. “Food should not, however, go to waste.”

 

“I agree,” Dolph said, and then he and Louve began to sing. The long warbling “aroooos” meant effectively “chow down,” and they soon attracted a pack of ordinary wolves that did exactly that. The howls also attracted a flock of ravens, for these intelligent corvids know quite well that wolves find or make carrion and also can’t be bothered to pick the bones entirely clean; that is what beaks are for. Dolph and Louve recognized three of the birds, which recognized them in turn. They had met under similar circumstances in the past, although it had involved an ordinary deer. The Wendigo was soon just a skeleton, and a few wolves and a couple of dozen ravens then went over to the clearing to try the “pork.”

 

Then Dolph and Louve picked up their clothing bags in their jaws, and walked over to the clearing where the drug dealers had parked their vehicles. “I smell all sorts of bad stuff on those pallets,” Louve said while she indicated the bags of white powder.

 

“It’s fentanyl and some other illegal drugs as well,” Dolph confirmed while he picked up the cell phone he had dropped during the Change, and managed to get it into his clothing bag. “It’s odorless to humans and only a few K-9s are trained to detect it. Don’t get any closer because it takes only a couple of milligrams to kill a person, and I have no idea of what the lethal dose is for a wolf. The dealers are clean themselves; I smelled them a while ago to make sure. I wouldn’t have called for wolves and ravens to eat something that might hurt them.”

 

“Let’s get away from that stuff, Dolph, and let the sheriff know where to come to get it. He’ll probably want his people in protective suits, which we don’t have.”

 

~ * ~

 

“Louve and I took care of the problem, Sheriff Martin,” Dolph reported the next day. “The Wendigo and the drug dealers will never harm anybody again. I can lead some deputies back there to collect all the drugs, weapons, and money.”

 

“There’s no doubt that you killed those gang members in self-defense, but there could still be legal problems. You and your fiancée ate the evidence!”

 

“I hadn’t thought of evidence,” Dolph admitted, “but it might be for the best. Do you really want to tell the District Attorney that a drug gang partnered with a Wendigo to dispose of witnesses, and then bring a pair of werewolves into the story? As matters stand, some bad actors died in the woods and then Mother Nature did the rest. My tooth marks on their bones were pre-mortem and those of the wolves that finally disposed of them were post-mortem, but I doubt anybody can tell the difference. One of them got off two pistol shots, and the shell casings are still there, so he tried unsuccessfully to defend himself against the wolf or wolves in question.”

 

“You are right, Dolph. I’ll record the cause of death as ‘killed by animals,’ which is literally true for you at this time of month, and send deputies out to the scene to confiscate their drugs, money, and weapons. That poison will never reach our streets thanks to you and Louve. Then I’ll record the case as closed.”