Minnesotans have a reputation for niceness — for being courteous, reserved, and mild-mannered. Some humans in Minnesota are nearly as pro-wolf as the Red Talons without sounding as unreasonable. Others politely recommend the slaughter of 80% of the wolf population annually until our numbers match some ideal they’ve plucked from the air. While “Minnesota nice” can be a boon for social interactions, it also allows some people with extremely dangerous ambitions to look harmless and likeable. And that’s the real danger in Minnesota. Our enemies hide behind well-meaning and eloquent pawns.

The official policy of the state is to control wolf pop­ ulations to prevent them from killing livestock or straying into areas populated by humans. The state has not made any move to wipe out all wolves, and the population is growing in spite of these killings. However, Garou in the area are rightly concerned.

Humans are specifically targeting our wolf Kinfolk for extermination.

I don’t know exactly how they tell the difference, but considering even human Kinfolk can learn to recognize the signs, this isn’t unthinkable. The goal of these targeted hunts isn’t to wipe out wolves but to wipe out us. This is exactly what I meant when I first came to you with my concerns about the dwindling wolf Kinfolk population. The Wyrm is at work here, and Garou have thus far done next to nothing to fight it on this front. Here are some of the tactics local Uktena believe agents of the Wyrm are using against us:

• Culls: In years past, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) culled wolf populations to prevent them from killing livestock. These hunters are government employees, which means that although they are few in num­ ber, they have access to cutting edge equipment to get the job done. Shooting wolves from a helicopter isn’t exactly sport­ ing, but these aren’t sport hunters. They’re just doing a job.

After Summer Laughter fell to one of these culls while she was in Lupus, Garou started taking these helicopter hunts more seriously. The high-powered rifle round that took her life was made of silver. As far as the local Uktena can tell, all the bullets used in such culls are silver. They all come from a single ammunition supplier that won a government contract — a supplier that is unquestionably the enemy of Garou but one that has thus far kept its identity hidden even from the Glass Walkers.

• Traps: Farmers who lose livestock to wolves are com­ pensated for the damage by the state. The DNR dispatches a trapper to capture the offending wolves and move them to an area where they are less likely to come into conflict with humans — all carried out as humanely as possible. Something always happens to the wolves along the way, however.

Those wolves that are not Kinfolk are simply fitted with radio collars and other scientific tracking equipment. The trappers chemically sterilize or outright replace Kinfolk with non-Kinfolk wolves from other regions. In addition, the radio collars they receive are more advanced, with tiny cameras and microphones that no doubt turn them into spies for the enemy. Removing these radio collars invari­ ably kills the wolf that wears it, and the last Garou who attempted an undercover investigation of these trappers disappeared completely.

• Hunters: In the past only DNR personnel were allowed to hunt Minnesota’s wolves. This year the state announced that they would be issuing 6,000 wolf-hunting licenses for this fall and winter. The interest in these has been overwhelming, with 23,000 applicants so far — most of them local but many hailing from California, Florida, Texas, and Alaska, as well as a handful from foreign shores. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly very interested in hunting Minnesota’s wolves.

If this doesn’t have the stink of the Wyrm all over it, I don’t know what does. Who are these hunters? Their identities aren’t made public, so who can say whether this army of wolf-killers will be made up fomori, Black Spiral Dancers, or ordinary humans supplied with the same silver bullets used by DNR’s helicopter hunters? One thing is certain: it will be a bloody winter.

Yellowstone National Park is perhaps one of the only places in the world that remains virtually untouched by the Wyrm. Wolves in the area are no longer considered endan­ gered, but humans have shown little interest in hunting our Kinfolk. The greatest threat the wolf population faces is from the Wyld.

No one knows what if anything prevents the Yellowstone Spirit from leaving the magma chamber below the caldera. If some other power binds it there, what will it do if it breaks those bonds? If it chooses to remain there, what happens if something inspires it to leave its lair? How does an Incarna of Gaia’s fiery rage behave if it is not confined to an under­ ground sea of magma? I’ve heard rumors that some Garou in the area actually hope to bring forth the Yellowstone Spirit as a weapon in our war against the Wyrm. Never mind that we can’t know whether it would devour our enemies or simply consume the world in its primordial fire.

The Yellowstone Caldera itself presents a potential deadly danger to all living things within a thousand miles or more. If its dome of rock collapses into the magma chamber, the scale of the resulting eruption would dwarf anything humans as a species have ever experienced. Empowered by an unleashed Yellowstone Spirit, such an eruption could

wipe out the entire population of wolves and humans on much of the North American continent. Uktena legends claim that these eruptions are inextricably linked to the Yellowstone Spirit, although they disagree on whether the next major eruption will release the Incarna or whether releasing the spirit will cause the first such eruption in the last 640,000 years.

Finally, the Yellowstone Spirit has an often-dangerous influence on local Garou, as it grants its powerful Rage to any who sacrifice a part of themselves to it. This is probably one of the main reasons the Wyrm has never gotten a foothold here, and even the Weaver’s servants show respect for Yellowstone and do not disturb its caerns. However, this Rage enflames most Garou far beyond their capacity for self-control. Many succumb to frenzy with little provocation, and I’ve seen two incidents of Garou falling into the Thrall of the Wyrm during what was supposed to be merely ritual combat. Add to this the conflict between tribes over control of caerns, and you have a recipe for bloody and wholly unnecessary tribal war in the area. Of course, warning these Garou of the danger will likely only infuriate them, which is a losing proposition considering the degree to which they’ve allowed their Rage to rule them.

As wolves reclaim territory they haven’t dominated in a century, ever-superstitions humans inevitably worry over their flocks, herds, and children, and that creates conflicts. Wherever humans have taken to culling wolf populations for any reason, there is a risk that our pureblooded Kinfolk will be specifically targeted by the enemy, so we should remain wary. After consulting with the lupus who live in wolf territory, as well as with those Glass Walkers adept at following money trails, it does not appear that the Spanish wolf hunters are Wyrm-inspired. If they were originally initiated by servants of the enemy, any Wyrm influence they bear is a mere echo undetectable even by our sharpest Wyrm-sniffers. The money for hunting licenses pays for park patrols and maintenance. In fact, the recent decline of sales of these licenses due to the real estate crisis, which has hit Spain and Portugal particularly hard, is probably a greater threat to the wolves of the Iberian Peninsula than the hunters themselves.

The Wyrm cannot be ignorant of the resurgence of Iberian wolves, but for some reason it has chosen to concentrate on the heavy-handed gambits that are all too

familiar to Garou, at least on the Iberian Peninsula. The recent economic struggles and scandals in these two coun­ tries, although largely outside the scope of this report, are probably not accidents. They may seem like mere human problems to Iberian lupus, but something deeper is surely at work. Unfortunately, history has taught us that humans are only environmentally conscious when their civilizations are stable. When uncertainty grows as it has in Spain and Portugal, cuts to conservation funding cannot be too far off, and that can lead to acts of desperation like selling protected land to refill government coffers.

The Garou of the outback face threats on a number of fronts:

• Dwindling Kinfolk: The dingoes appear to have unlimited capacity to breed and spread, and there is no immediate danger that they will be wiped out. However, interbreeding with domesticated dogs has reduced the population of pure dingoes to only 30% of its size a century ago. While the Red Talons often blame the depletion of our stock of breeding Kinfolk on human measures, the threat of thinning dingo blood is a much more serious one. Half-dingoes don’t bear Gaia’s touch: they are never Garou and cannot be Kinfolk.

• Wyrm Predation: Mining companies, some of them known Pentex subsidiaries, have identified several

uranium deposits in the region and are actively lobbying governments to open up mines. We all know that creations of the Wyrm often spring up out of radioactive waste. So far, humans in the area have resisted requests to tap these dangerous resources, but the servants of the Wyrm can be patient and convincing.

The Ethiopian wolf is on the verge of extinction. Deforestation, attacks by humans, and rabies outbreaks have almost wiped out our wolf Kinfolk. Human biologists interested in preserving the remaining population are making plans to capture the remaining wolves and create a captive breeding program. While this may benefit our Kinfolk in the long term, in the short term (anything less than a century) it will be little different for the Garou than if those Kinfolk died out.

Nor are the wolves our only Kinfolk who are vulnerable to disease. HIV will not kill a werewolf nor even produce noteworthy symptoms, but we can still be carriers and our Kinfolk are no less vulnerable to it than other mortals. Given the proliferation of this disease in the human population of Ethiopia, even our human breeding stock is in peril.

Skirmishes with the Fera have likewise reduced the number of Garou and human Kinfolk. The caerns the Garou hold in Ethiopia are very powerful and so make tempting targets for anyone who can benefit from them. The Fera are simply the most numerous and obvious, but other supernatural beings have come sniffing around our caerns.

The wolf populations of Central Asia are reasonably stable. They aren’t protected by law, but the humans in the region have bigger concerns than the likes of our wolf Kinfolk.

The Shadow Lords and Red Talons waste some of their energy growling at each other at the borders of their terri­ tories. This seldom escalates into open violence between the tribes, but a migration forced by ecological disaster, for example, could turn idle threats into bloody, large scale action. If this happens, the Garou of other tribes are likely to get dragged into it. No one trusts the Shadow Lords, but they’re a lot less stingy with their resources than the Red Talons have been.

The region is rife with Wyrm activity. The long history of pollution, weapons testing, and ecological catastrophe has made it as fertile a feeding ground for Banes as it is an infertile place for crops. The Wyrm gains the largest part of its power from the misery of the humans who live here. Yet humans are far too numerous to simply cull those likely to be seduced or ensnared into the ranks of the fomori, and wholesale slaughter of the population would only increase that suffering and so increase the Wyrm’s power. Besides which, these nations have nuclear weapons from the time they were part of the Soviet Union, so further destabilizing the region could make matters much, much worse.

This region is a war zone. In the nearly total absence of humans and servants of the Weaver, the children of Gaia and the creations of the Wyrm battle fiercely to contain or spread the damage the disaster caused. The Garou who patrol the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone do so at great peril. Even those werewolves who have not yet engaged with the enemy can be marked by merest proximity. I have met several of what the local Garou describe as “spontaneous metis” — werewolves born metis even though both parents were not werewolves.

In spite of dire government warnings and severe criminal penalties for illegal activities in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the poaching of game, illegal logging, and metal salvage have been problems within the region. Intruders evade human police and infiltrate the perimeter to remove potentially contaminated materials, especially in Prypiat. The records of human authorities note that an average of 300 violations of the area take place annually. The Garou of Chernobyl know the problem is much larger than that, for they often encounter nests of fomori that clearly were once human.

Prolonged exposure to radiation has put the Garou of the zone at risk of being corrupted by the Wyrm far beyond the curse of spontaneous metis. Some of the deformities of local metis bear a worrying resemblance to those of the Black Spiral Dancers. I also witnessed no fewer than three Garou using Gifts in battle that have more in common with fomori powers than to anything taught by Gaia’s spirits. Because everyone and everything in the Chernobyl Exclu­ sion Zone carries the smell of the Wyrm to some degree or another, it is almost impossible for me to say how deep this taint has become. While I have no doubt that they are valiantly fighting against the Wyrm, I fear that in another decade or two the Chernobyl Garou will ultimately suffer a fate similar to that of the White Howlers.