Sean knew full and well what it meant to be an outcast and a stranger in a strange land. His real name was Shunkaha, which his parents wisely truncated to a more white-bread-sounding Sean. His surname was, likewise abbreviated to Swift, rather than Swiftwater. Shunkaha Swiftwater, also known as Sean Swift, was an outcast in his tribal lands as well as on campus.
Although his muscular body and facial features, as well as his deeply-tanned, natural complexion, left no doubt about his heritage, he wasn’t a full-blooded Lakota. That’s what most know as a Sioux, the proud people of the American planes. Raised in suburbia but still tethered to his roots, Sean was neither at home with the shopping mall and Facebook crowds nor with the people he had half-descended from. With only a single foot in either world, he was part of, yet apart from, both.
Nonetheless, Sean graduated from high school with honors and was in his second year of college. On campus, the fact that he was so different from everyone else made him the subject of unwanted attention and sympathy.
"Oh, your name is Shawn, as in Shawnee?" was the all-too-common question.
”No,” he’d always reply with a weary smile. “Sean, as in, my name is Sean.”
What really pissed him off was the maddening insistence from others to demonstrate how openly they accepted him. He understood and perhaps even appreciated the efforts, but making a big deal of the fact that he was Native American, in an attempt to show how ‘cool’ one was with it, actually made a huge deal out of the differences rather than just accepting them. Martin Luther King’s real dream was that a person is judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. To Sean, truer dreams had never been voiced.
One of the few exceptions to the rule was Angela. Though he kept his head down and didn’t socialize much, even living alone in his ratty, tiny house on the edge of campus, Sean truly liked Angie, or Ang, as he called her when they sometimes chatted. She never turned the spotlight on his heritage and treated him like a person, a peer. Angie had issues of her own, on campus, and bore the burden of being a strong, independent, young woman with a stunning, creative intellect and ungodly good looks.
Angie wasn’t what one would call beautiful; she was what one would call boner-inducing, pussy-drenching, or so incredibly sexy that she couldn’t walk one block from her apartment across the street from Sean’s little hovel without having to stave off a bevy of would-be suitors, all of them with crass commentary about her high, firm breasts, her shapely behind, or her pouting, ‘dick-sucking’ lips.
This is not to say that she didn’t take advantage of her sensual allure to go sexually wild. After all, college is that void between high school and adulthood where one is expected to over-indulge and experiment. Angela had a reputation for being sexually aggressive, willing to fuck on a whim, and being an easy lay. If she wanted sex, she went out and got it.
Sean had observed an endless stream of her lovers, both men and women, coming and going. The snickering whispers of sorority girls, detailing Angie’s public sexual exploits, could be heard whenever she passed by. Sean admired her for owning her sexuality. While he desired her, he convinced himself that he cherished their friendship and didn’t want to complicate things. In truth, he usually felt that she was out of his league.
Horrifically, though, his mixed heritage, making him neither Caucasian nor native, wasn’t Sean’s major issue. His hermitage also wasn’t his main problem; in fact, he enjoyed his geeky solitude. Sean was never bullied; his muscular frame and chiseled face, coupled with his proud and confident body language, gave him an aura of power that kept the want-to-be Alpha males at bay.
Sean’s main source of stigmatization was that he was a monster. His Lakota brethren shunned him because of this. Extreme care to hide his monstrous nature from polite society was necessary. Luckily, it only occurred every month or so, and he was getting better at controlling it.
His true name, Shunkaha, was a badge of shame to his tribe. Derived from the word Shung, his name meant “wolf.” His clan, the Swiftwater people, were known as the Hanhepi wi Shung, Moon Goddess Wolves. One may be familiar with the Native American, Navajo term Skinwalker. That’s exactly what Sean was, sort of.
Legends among his people spoke of select warriors, chosen by Hanhepi Wi, that could take the form of a large, powerful wolf at will. For unclear reasons, the magical warriors became shunned by the Lakota, never mentioned except in warning. To make matters even worse, Sean, not being a pure-blood, couldn’t change at will, but, on the full moon, the transformation overtook him.
Having a foot in the mundane world, however, also meant that not only was he an incomplete Native American, but he was also an incomplete Skinwalker. Shunkaha didn’t shape-shift into a quadruped dire wolf; his transformation was only partial, turning him into a B-movie werewolf. As if the normal rigors of puberty weren't enough, that’s when the curse manifested itself. The curse of his people, a monstrosity to be hunted and destroyed by civilized folk, was his fate.
On most full moons, he could control it. One exception to maintaining control was a full moon on Halloween. As most know, and Sean knew all too well, the folklore about the veil between the material world and the spirit world being permeable on the harvest moon was true. Not only does this phenomenon allow spirits, the dead, and demons to traverse the barriers between realms, but powers of magic and the supernatural are amplified several hundred times over during Hallow’s evening.
When the transformation from social outcast to werewolf overtook him, Sean was still humanoid, although black and brown fur covered his muscular legs, most of his groin and buttocks, his back, and part of his chest. His skin became a reddish black, shiny and menacing. His face morphed into a dog-like nose over slavering, dark lips that framed vicious, canine teeth. The young man’s ears grew to sharply tapering, devilish points and the nails on his hands and feet grew into steely claws.
Shunkaha’s mind remained mostly intact, even to the point of being able to speak somewhat, although his voice was more akin to guttural growls. However, his psyche took on a more primitive, feral mien. His base instincts to hunt his prey, to breed, and to rend his enemies nearly overpowered him in his humanoid-animal form. For Halloween, all of this was perfect, especially on campus.
The festive season around Halloween allowed him to change form without drawing unwanted attention in the form of fear, terror, or would-be werewolf hunters playing Lone Ranger with a silver bullet. Silver didn’t affect him much, but bullets surely would. Sean could painlessly transform and run amok on campus, howling, chasing his prey for sport, and sometimes even getting laid while in quasi-wolf form.
Being on campus meant college students partying it up. Slutty costumes, barely covering lithe coeds, were the rule, not the exception. All sorts of gore and horror were also on display. He fit right in. Although he was an outcast in two cultures, Sean enjoyed his wolf form. It was liberating, bringing peace and balance to his soul and letting him embrace his nature-oriented heritage. Sean found a sort of solace in his transformation; the half-man and half-wolf configuration was the perfect symbol of his human form, neither white nor native.
Night fell on a hallmark Halloween. Not only was the moon full, but it was a brilliant, blood-harvest moon. Having gorged himself on meat in the form of bacon double cheeseburgers, so his primal instincts to feed would be subdued, Sean exited his tiny, rented home and darted into the sparse woods behind it. Other students and the fringe folk that haunts every campus were engaged in various bits of revelry in the woods.
Ignoring their lasciviousness and gluttony, Sean found a quiet locale off the beaten paths. As soon as the moon’s rays, the blessings of Hanhepi wi, shone upon him, he felt his transformation begin. Unlike the horrible depictions in cheesy movies, Shunkaha’s transformation was quick and painless.
Having learned the hard and costly way to not wear shoes, his bare feet rippled and remolded themselves into lupine-inspired claws. His legs melted into muscular, hairy haunches as his chest reorganized itself into a hair-covered torso with gleaming black muscles in the forefront. Screaming in delight as his mouth tapered slightly, fangs growing, his vocal cords reconstituted into animal fury, his human wail becoming a warbling howl that triggered the frightened barking of the neighborhood dogs.
His clawed hands hefted his mighty cock; thick and long, it transformed along with him, taking on a nonhuman girth and impressiveness. Sean felt the rutting desire of nature coursing through him. He both knew and felt that he was more agile, stronger, and invulnerable than mere mortals, his senses keen and heightened.
Along with those physical alterations, the hot warmth of his primal, sexual urges consumed him. In his werewolf form, he was a horny wolf, ready to run amok on campus. The need to feel the hot, warm flesh of a willing mate consumed his animal soul, the sexual impulses filling his werewolf body with lusty fire.
