The first subject, Hunter A, was a thirty-six-year-old male with a career in law enforcement, whose wife had recently been disemboweled by a lycanthrope. After demonstrating his firearms accuracy so as to establish a baseline for comparison, he commenced the search for his target.[4]
Lycanthrope A was discovered consuming the corpse of a small child in a dead-end urban alley. Hunter A positioned himself at the mouth of the alley, approximately thirty meters from the target, while the investigator observed from the other side of the cross-street, concealed behind a newspaper dispenser. Video data shows that Hunter A’s shots exhibited 64% less accuracy than in the baseline demonstration: he had previously declared his intention to aim for the head[5], but of the six shots he fired, two flew wide to the left, three flew wide to the right, and one struck Lycanthrope A in the shoulder. Hunter A attempted to fire a seventh shot, but suffered a gun malfunction, and then was struck to the ground by the charging lycanthrope. It is notable, however, that the lycanthrope fled rather than engage in further confrontation.
Retrieval and examination of the pistol shows that the seventh round did not chamber correctly, owing to the separation of the silver point from its copper case. The decrease in accuracy may arise from multiple causes, including fear-induced operator error. It may be presumed, however, that the difficulty of casting high-quality silver bullets introduces a degree of variability which will decrease performance under field conditions, even where malfunction does not occur.
The escape of Lycanthrope A unfortunately precluded the possibility of forensic examination. Six spent bullets, however—one bloodstained—were recovered from the test location; this indicates that the shot which struck the target’s shoulder passed through the tissue and out the other side. The investigator observed a distinct limp and other indications of pain as the lycanthrope fled (the video camera by this time was recording the pavement), which suggests a genuine injury to the target.
The difficulty of casting silver bullets to the exacting specifications of modern firearms suggests that archaic weapons might prove more efficacious, when the variables of performance are weighed against those of manufacture. The investigator therefore secured the assistance of a professional silversmith, who produced twelve balls suitable for use in an eighteenth-century musket.
Hunter B was a twenty-two-year-old female with experience in American Revolutionary War re-enactment, whose boyfriend vanished during a camping trip in the mountains. As with Hunter A, she demonstrated her skill with a replica period weapon before beginning her search. In this instance, the investigator remained at camp, inside an SUV with the engine running and pointed toward the road.
Video data for this trial is non-continuous, due to the problems of wireless transmission in mountainous terrain. On the third night Hunter B observed her target, Lycanthrope B, drinking water from a stream. Unfortunately, she made her observation from a hillside well beyond the range of a musket, and by the time she moved closer, Lycanthrope B had vanished. Subject and investigator therefore returned to that area the following month, and this time Hunter B met with success on the first night. She found her target howling at the moon on a bare hilltop, and the yelping end of the howl indicates that her first shot struck home, though it is not possible from the recording to determine where Lycanthrope B was wounded. The target fled, however, before Hunter B could reload her musket. No limp was discernible on this occasion, which may indicate that the lesser muzzle velocity of an archaic firearm caused the projectile to penetrate less deeply than in Trial 1. Upon returning to the hilltop in daylight, Hunter B found little sign of blood, which corroborates this speculation.
The trial could not be continued on the following night due to the disappearance of Hunter B.
The investigator pursued one further solution to the difficulty of silver bullets, in the form of 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.
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.
4
For a full account of each subject’s background, involvement in the anti-lycanthrope community, and predatory efforts, see the author’s monograph Under the Full Moon: An Urban Safari Into the Biology of Lycanthropes, in preparation.
5
While it may lie beyond the scope of this study to make tactical evaluations of lycanthrope-hunting techniques, the investigator believes it is generally more advisable to aim for the center mass, for reasons illustrated by Hunter A’s results.
6
Initially this subject was disqualified from the trial on the basis of evidence that he was merely seeking revenge against the non-lycanthropic leader of a rival gang. The alternative candidate for the fourth trial, however, revoked her permission and abandoned her hunt at the same time that new evidence came to light, supporting Hunter D’s claim regarding his target. (It is regrettable that this new evidence took the form of an entire gang of lycanthropes.)
7
This analysis is based on slow-motion playback of the video recording. The investigator failed to directly observe anything of value either during the confrontation or after, as safety considerations required immediate departure from the trial location.