work_shirt_

had the feeling if he went to his knees on the verge like he wanted to, he’d never get up again.
He reached the sanctuary of his air-conditioned office and slumped down into his chair, still panting. He waited with his eyes closed for his heart to stop pounding, while the sweat cooled and dried in the gust of metallic-flavored air from the vent over his chair. He tried to summon up laughter at himself, a grown man, for finding a flattened piece of cardboard so frightening, but the laughter wouldn’t come.
Instead other memories of those days as a Boy Scout returned, of the year he’d spent at camp where he’d learned those meager tracking skills. One of the coun­selors had a grandfather who was—or so the boy claimed—a full Cherokee medicine man. He’d per­suaded the old man to make a visit to the camp. George had found himself impressed against his will, as had the rest of the Scouts; the old man still wore his hair in two long, iron-gray braids and a bone necklace under his plain work-shirt. He had a dignity and self-possession that kept all of the rowdy adolescents in awe of him and silent when he spoke.
He’d condescended to tell stories at their campfire several times. Most of them were tales of what his life had been like as a boy on the reservation at the turn of the century—but once or twice he’d told them bits of odd Indian lore, not all of it Cherokee.
Like the shape-changers. George didn’t remember what he’d called them, but he did recall what had started the story. One of the boys had seen I Was A Teen-age Werewolf before he’d come to camp, and he was regaling all of them with a vivid description