Free Running With the Pack by Ekaterina Sedia Page B

shot. Silver beads were obtained from a craft store, and placed in a shotgun cartridge in lieu of the customary lead shot. The firearm in this instance was a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun.
    Hunter C was a fifty-seven-year-old male with over forty years of hunting experience. His six-year-old son had been fatally mauled the previous summer on Hunter C’s ranch. The subject declined to undergo a formal demonstration of his marksmanship, despite explanations of its value for research, but did feed the investigator a dinner cooked from a pheasant he brought down with his shotgun.
    Data from this trial consists solely of the investigator’s notes, as Hunter C likewise declined use of the head-mounted camera or other video-recording equipment. On the first night of the full moon he staked a female sheep in the open ground twenty meters beyond his barn, having first cut the animal with a knife, so the scent of its blood would draw the predator. He then waited inside the open barn door, with the investigator behind a hay bale. This having produced no results, on the second night he cut the ewe’s throat and staked a lamb next to her, declaring that the greater quantity and the cries of the lamb would be more effective.
    Methods of luring lycanthropes are outside the scope of this study, but on that night Lycanthrope C appeared. Hunter C immediately left the concealment of the barn and began walking toward his target, firing as he went. Lycanthrope C was observed to flinch slightly at each shot, and the investigator believes the subject’s aim was good, but the small quantities of silver seemed to do little more than irritate the target. Hunter C continued approaching even after running out of ammunition, dry-firing and shouting with incoherent grief, and subsequently fell victim to the lycanthrope.
    The lamb was unharmed.
    Trial 4: argent blade
    The investigator next obtained a silver-plated bowie knife. While the lesser hardness of pure silver (as compared to carbon steel or stainless steel) would ordinarily render it unsuitable for use in a bladed weapon, the antipathetic nature of silver is hypothesized to counterbalance this deficiency.
    Hunter D was a twenty-two-year-old male gang member who had lost his younger brother to a lycanthrope. [6] Although it was not possible to obtain quantitative data regarding his proficiency with the weapon, as with Hunters A and B, other informants corroborated his statement that he was the victor in four previous knife fights.
    In this instance the hunt was organized as a planned encounter between Hunter D and Lycanthrope D. The investigator was therefore able to position a stationary camera on a fire escape above the agreed-upon location, in lieu of the head-mounted camera Hunter D could not wear. The ideal nature of this setup, unfortunately, was compromised when friends of Hunter D refused to allow the investigator to monitor events from a safe distance via the computer. This field trial was therefore observed at close range, with notes recorded afterward.
    This ultimately proved to be only a minor limitation. Measured from the moment the combatants approached each other to the moment when Hunter D’s body struck the ground, the confrontation lasted for 3.6 seconds. Hunter D thrust the knife into Lycanthrope D’s side, approximately in the location where the spleen would be located in a fully human body, whereupon Lycanthrope D tore Hunter D’s head from his body. [7] While the silver does appear to have wounded the target satisfactorily—Lycanthrope D was heard to howl in pain when it removed the blade—the necessity of close approach renders this method inadvisable.
    Trial 5: AgNO3
    This particular trial was suggested by Hunter E, a forty-one-year-old female with over a decade’s experience as a zookeeper. The investigator observed her on a message board suggesting that lycanthropes might be hunted with tranquilizer guns. Although the efficacy of sedatives and paralytics in