Throughout the time familiarly known as the Old West or the Wild West, there were horrors recorded by the newspapers of the time. These events, if true, were often recorded weeks or months after they happened, were frequently elaborately embroidered to boost readership and became legends that continued to be repeated. Native Americans like the Plains Apache were blamed for acts of violence out on the empty prairie where there were no spectators to tell the tales of vicious massacres. Where there were known murderers present, they were blamed even if no one saw them actually involved in a killing. The Bloody Benders of Southeastern Kansas, Doc Holliday, Billy The Kid, and John Wesley Hardin were all accused of killings that were not their handiwork-although they had plenty of killings attributed to them that they willingly admitted to. At no time were these gruesome and bloody massacres considered to be the work of supernatural entities. Only one man knew the truth.

A cold wind rattled down the deserted streets of Dodge City, blowing dead leaves and bits of debris ahead of it. Huddled against the cold he crept along the rough Boardwalk. The full moon, cold and silvery, cast shadows darker than the night itself. The streets were empty save for a stray animal or two, a cat running for cover, and an owl calling in the distance along the river. It was a chilly night signaling the end of a summer full of the sights, sounds and smells of a profitable cattle season. Fall was upon the land and headed for a cold winter if one could believe the predictions of the old timers.

The shrouded figure heard the voices of men rising and falling over games of chance in the saloons along the street. Occasionally the sound of a woman's voice rang high above the voices of the men; sometimes he heard the shrill scream of fury or astonishment when men got rough with one of the weaker sex. Off in some distant  crib, probably back in Tin Pan Alley behind the saloons, the protests of a woman in distress, undergoing the brutal handling of a drunken cowboy, could be heard. Out on the prairie a coyote's howl rent the night, startling horses safely housed in stables about town. Homeless curs slinking about the streets in search of a meal responded, barking and howling to the call of the wild. 

He paused in the shadows watching the street, listening, waiting. He was patient,seeking prey of his own, nose pricking with the scents of dead and rotting animals, dung, sweating men and spoiled food. His hearing was acute as was his night vision, both of which were needed to secure what he sought, what he needed to survive, this creature of the night. Soon he would have to move south with the rest of the lingering cowboys. Hunting was easier in a warmer climate. Here everyone stayed inside when the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder, houses tightly shuttered against the winter chill.

Suddenly he was alert. There was some slight movement in the shadows at the end of the street. He smelled the rich earthy odor of human blood and suddenly his body was tingling with anticipation. He continued to watch for the movement he'd seen out of the corner of his eye, but saw nothing. Probably the wind, he mused. He heard a sigh, then detected another slight movement and lowered his gaze to see a figure struggling to rise against the corner of a building two blocks away. He felt the change come over him and suddenly he was loping, springing along the board walks, feet barely touching the ground, running as fast as the wind toward the helpless figure.  Men looked up from card games as the dark shadow passed, setting lamps flickering in the smokey rooms, then returned to their games assuming it was a stray gust of wind. A terrified scream tore through the night bringing every man to his feet and rushing for the doors. Lanterns were snatched up and lighted, guns unholstered as men swept out into the dark night in search of the source of the scream.

One man stood taller than the others, a natural leader of men. He quickly strode to the front of the small crowd of men standing nervous and alert for a repeated scream, peering about with lanterns held high to light the ground about their feet. The tall man raised his head, listening and sniffing the air about him, seeking some clue to the direction he needed to go and to what he knew he was going to find. 

Wyatt Earp was known far and wide as a skilled lawman, a man calm under pressure, steely eyes staring down adversaries until they either backed away with downcast eyes or made the inevitable foolish move to pull a gun. His moves were cold and calculated, leaving nothing to chance and when he faced an enemy, he had already made up his mind that he would not be the one to die.

This latest threat to the people of Dodge City was something new, it was not a drunken cowboy, nor was it a cold-blooded gunman like his old friend, Doc, nor was it an angry gambler, losing at card games and desperate to win. He'd caught the scent of this creature before and never forgot what it left in its wake.  He'd never seen the thing, but he knew in deepest recesses of his soul that it was out there and that it was a creature from the depths of Hell.

The Earp family was in Iowa when the Civil War began and Wyatt was 13 years old.  When the elder Earp brothers Newton, James and Virgil left to join the Union Army, the younger boys, Wyatt, Morgan and Warren, were left to handle the farm work. At 13 Wyatt felt he was old enough to go to war with the older boys and ran away several times to enlist.  Each time his father tracked him down and brought him home.  It was evident that Wyatt was not going to grow into the type of man who could settle down and work a farm or tend a business.  Near the end of the Civil War, Wyatt's father moved his remaining family, including James who returned home severely wounded in 1863, to Southern California where Virgil would later join them.

The move and Virgil's return opened a new chapter in Wyatt's life.  At 16 he began working with his brother as a teamster and was soon given a route of his own hauling supplies to rail heads where he learned the art of gambling, an occupation he would return to again and again in his adult life.  It was also during this time that he began to hear strange stories whispered about the cooking fires of the railroad employees.

He automatically dismissed many of the barely understood stories of the Chinese workers as being foolish superstition.  These Chinamen with their strange singsong language and foreign habits were viewed with suspicion by most of the white workers who ridiculed and feared them. To Wyatt, they were an interesting group of people and he watched them in their quaint clothes adhering to their customs and rituals in spite of strange surroundings.  He didn't understand a lot of what they said in their broken English, but he thought he got the gist of it.  The stories were pretty wild and seemed to be associated with men disappearing in the night.  Foremen assumed these men had run off, tired of the hard work and long hours, but Wyatt detected fear in their eyes as they huddled around the cooking fires at night talking among themselves.

Many of the white workers were Irish immigrants; Wyatt initially discounted their wild stories, too.  As a nondrinker himself, Wyatt viewed their drunkenness with distaste and suspicion. The Irish were a rough and violent group of men made more so by consumption of large quantities of alcohol.  They were a loud and boisterous counterpart to the quieter Chinese, but they, too, seemed afraid. 

In and out of the camps at varied intervals, it took Wyatt several months to make a connection between the stories the Chinese were telling and those of the Irish.  All of the tales involved the disappearance of men in the night, men dismissed by foremen as lazy runaways.  On one trip Wyatt found himself stranded by a broken wagon wheel that forced him to spend the night at one of the more isolated camps.  After sharing dinner with the foreman, Wyatt wandered about the camp in search of a good cup of coffee.

He found several likely sources and sat to sip at the proffered coffee and listen in to campfire conversations.  At one site, the conversation centered around home and distant family until a distant coyote caused the men to look around them and make the sign of the cross.  Wyatt questioned them asking why a coyote's howl had them all so frightened.  Every eye swiveled to look at him and one man began to tell him their story.

As near as the men could figure one or more of their original group had disappeared each month around the time of a full moon.  At first the men did not make that connection, but just accepted a man had wandered off or run away.  But as the months passed and the rail work progressed and men kept disappearing in the night, they begin to get suspicious of darker forces at work.  One of the men thought he saw a wolf silhouetted against the evening sky, another reported a large cat and still another thought he'd seen a giant bear. Soon they began to notice that disappearances coincided with a full moon and the distant howl of an animal.  They had made attempts to report the incidents and requested an investigation but each time were rebuffed and told to get back to work.

His interest piqued, Wyatt made an attempt to follow up by checking with other groups in the camp.  He heard the same stories every time.  The animal sightings varied, but the stories were basically the same.  Counting the months and number of groups, noting the names of those believed to be missing, the number that had disappeared was staggering. He continued to make inquiries at each railroad camp and found that there were more similar stories of men going missing.  In a few cases where there were temporary towns that had sprung up, women of the night had also disappeared.  Seeking to make sense of what he heard Wyatt began to speculate about what was going on; he approached people he knew to be in law enforcement and asked them if they had heard of gangs kidnapping people into slavery.  It appeared the people disappearing were of so little consequence that no one cared.

As he moved in and out of the railroad camps Wyatt continued to listen and watch his surroundings.  On several occasions he would spend the night in a camp keeping watch to see if he could detect something out of the ordinary that would account for the disappearances.  It was on a soft spring night in 1868 that he finally caught sight of something that left his heart pounding with something akin to fear, a feeling he was largely unaccustomed to.

He had stepped out away from the campfires to look at the full moon and wide expanse of stars across the night sky.  A faint breeze from the south signaled the beginning of spring and brought a strange scent with it.  Wyatt dropped to the ground, stilled his breathing and kept absolutely still, sniffing the air and surveying the barely discernible horizon for signs of movement.

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye off to his left.  Slowly swiveling his head and then his body, he watched and waited for movement to occur.  The scent grew stronger and the hair on the back of neck stood up.  Then he heard the breathing, similar to a low anticipatory growl.  He eased his gun out of its holster and raised it slowly moving it left to right watching for any slight movement.  When it happened it was so fast it caught him unawares; firing his gun was purely a reflex gained through countless hours of practice.  The creature - for that's the only way he could think of it - was gone as quickly as it had come.  He was sure, however, that he had hit it.

The next morning he was up with the first rays of the sun searching for any sign that what he'd experienced in the night was real and not some bizarre dream.  He found  large prints resembling those of a wolf; he also found traces of what he believed to be blood, confirming that he had hit the beast.  Little did he know that his reflexive shot in the dark would torment him for many years to come.