“Yes,” Noble answered. “You might be able to approach it, or maybe even speak to it. But what if something bad happens? There’s no telling what that werewolf might do. What if it gets spooked, or recognizes you as the one who nearly killed it out in the forest? What if it decides it would like a rematch? Are you going to fight it in the backyard, werewolf against werewolf, while Doctor Katz is still out in the garage?”

Argus silently stared out the window at the werewolf.

Noble studied Argus’s reflection in the glass. There was a streak of defiance growing within Argus, defiance against himself and against the ranger. Unchecked, it might continue to grow until something very bad happened, or someone was seriously hurt.

Noble hoped it would never come to that.

* * *

Two hours went by before Doctor Katz was finished.

After removing twenty-three pieces of buckshot, he’d taken a battery-powered metal detector from his bag and waved it back and forth over the wolf’s leg. The wand, looking like a beaver’s tail with a handle on one end, had chirped and beeped several times until the doctor had been able to narrow down where the last piece of buckshot was hidden.

“Okay, I see it,” he said, then folded back a flap of skin and removed a pie-shaped shard of metal, round on one end and sharpened to a point at the other.

The ranger and the doctor both looked at the piece for a long time.

“It looks like a quarter of a quarter,” said the ranger, at last.

“Maybe it’s a silver quarter,” the doctor added. He turned the piece over, then wiped away the blood with his thumb. “Here’s the date it was minted—1969.”

The ranger breathed a sigh of relief. Silver quarters were last made by the Royal Canadian Mint in 1968, when they were half silver and half copper. Since then, quarters have been made primarily out of nickel, and, most recently, steel. Ernie Ilson had the right idea peppering his buckshot with bits of silver; he’d just gotten the year wrong. But Ranger Brock wasn’t going to mention any of that to the doctor. Instead, he just said, “Isn’t that strange?”

“Quite,” said the doctor. “I can’t think why anyone would go to the trouble of putting a piece of silver quarter in a shotgun shell…” he looked directly at the ranger. “Can you?”

The ranger simply shrugged.

A follow-up check with the metal detector showed that the wolf was clear of buckshot, so the doctor began to clean and dress the wound.

When he was done, the wolf’s leg and hindquarter were wrapped neatly in white gauze and bandages. A few spots of blood had leaked through, but the doctor said it was normal until the wounds scabbed over.

“So she’s going to be all right?” asked the ranger.