"Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions."

-Dalai Lama

My mother's name was Yuki. She was a beautiful woman, but she was also a wolf. She always told me that she met my father, Sohei - only just a human - in grade school, when she attacked him as a wolf for making her angry, and they were inseparable ever since. I never believed her.

My parents were always so gentle and patient with each other, it was hard to believe even Uncle Ame's stories about how rambunctious she used to be as a child. Not that I ever see Uncle Ame anymore.

After grandmother, Nana Hana's death when I was nine, my parents never spoke to him again. My mother was angry Uncle Ame never came to the funeral, or even stopped by to visit the grave months after it happened. This made my mother angry, but in a way, I could understand his actions. Some people just dealt with grief differently than others. My mother and Uncle Ame never really understood each other.

When I turned eleven, on the anniversary of Nana Hana's death actually, my mother died as well. My father was very sad, and cried nonstop for days. I could tell she had been getting more and more sick every day, but my father was convinced she died of a broken heart. Ever since Nana died, my mother was never the same, and things never patched up with Uncle Ame like they usually did, which probably contributed to the problem.

A few nights after the burial, I remember my father had come into my bedroom and wrapped his arms around me and we cried together. I remember him telling me that it was ok, and that my mother was now with Nana, and that they were both not really dead, but still alive in our hearts.

But things weren't ok.

Much to my father's dismay, my Uncle Ame didn't show up for my mother's 'funeral' either. I say 'funeral' because it wasn't much of one.

We went over to Nana's old property in the countryland and dug a deep hole in the earth where my mother grew up. We couldn't invite anyone else over or give her a proper burial because when my mother died, her body looked like a wolf and never changed back into a human.

I heard stories from my parents and Uncle Ame when I was younger about how 'werewolves' and wolves alike were shunned from society. Apparently, my grandfather (married to Nana Hana) was a wolf as well, and knew firsthand that people like us weren't welcome, and that if people ever found out about our true nature, things would never be the same.

I wished I could have met him. Or that Uncle Ame would start coming around more again.

I remember the day after my father and I buried my mother, I marched straight into the woods - then ran in wolf form - until I got so far in I knew nobody from the farmlands would hear, and I howled so long for my uncle to come get me. I probably howled like a maniac, until my eyes felt like they were about to pop out and I was coughing up blood. I just wanted someone to be there, someone who knew what I was going through.

My father was probably the best dad in the entire world, but we just could never connect on certain levels, and I knew it was because he was only a human and I was something more. I think he never understood me, almost similar to the ways that Uncle Ame and my mother never understood each other.

A week after my mother's burial, my father and I went back to our home in the city and I quickly found a job working at a weaving factory. It was boring work, but certain things required small fingers, such that I had at age eleven. More than half of my wages went to my father, but the rest I kept in a savings jar, hidden in a loose floorboard in my bedroom.

At first I wasn't sure what I would use the money for, but my steady growing anger I had felt since my mother's burial drew me to my conclusion: I would use it to get out of Japan.

It wasn't that I didn't love my home country - I did - but that I needed to find something that I couldn't find here. I already knew the story in Japan: people would never accept a wolf human. But there had to be a place, somewhere out there in the big world, where they did. And I was determined to find it.

I began by doing research on my days off, starting of course with my Nana's book collections. After going through and picking apart each book about wolves and finding nothing particularly useful for my own cause, I went to the city library and looked through the animal section. Day after day I would go to the library, pull numerous books off the shelves and sit and read them.

After nearly a year went by with me not really finding anything useful, I began to branch out to other sections, but still not finding anything useful. I was at a loss for where to even begin.

The most helpful advice I received was from a librarian, who noticed my interest in animal books and was always trying to give me advice about what books I should try out next. I think she thought I wanted to become a veterinarian, or work at a zoo like my Nana.

"You know," she whispered to me one day, "I heard you can learn a lot about animals by reading books about different indigenous cultures. A lot of natives have very close ties with animals, and it might give you a different view on your studies."

I nodded vigorously and asked her to please show me where I could find these books.

I finally found a clue to what I was looking for.
After years of research and saving up money, I was finally ready to begin my journey.

"Hinata," my father said to me a few days before I was to leave. I never told him what I was doing, but he could guess. I sat him down and was trying to come up with a way to tell him I was leaving without breaking his heart, but I was failing miserably.

"Father," I responded, trying to stop the tears that were already pouring down my cheeks.

"Don't cry Hinata," he said, smiling sadly. "I know what you have to do."

"I promise I'll write."

"I'll be expecting a letter every month."

When I left a few days later, on the eve of my eighteenth birthday, I felt nothing but excitement. I hugged and kissed my father goodbye, and he seemed as equally excited, as if the air was charged with some sort of electricity. He told me my mother would be proud, and I could almost feel her and Nana standing there beside my father, kissing my cheeks goodbye as well.

Before I boarded the train that would take me to the boat, my father tucked a roll of yen in my purse and told me if I didn't find what I was looking for, I could always call his house a home.

I began my search in China, interviewing monks about the Zodiac, traveling across the country and meeting with different peoples and wild animals, trying to find more clues. After finding nothing, I ran over to India, interviewing Hindu's and their close relations to animals, as well as the animals themselves. I've traveled to Nepal, to Thailand, to Korea, studying and living with the Natives and mountain animals, running from one place to the next, trying to find somebody who knew something about 'werewolves' or 'shapeshifters'.

But in any place I went, the people either didn't know, refused to tell me anything they knew, or thought such things were curses, results of witchcraft. Either way, it did not contribute to what I was trying to find - someplace that accepted shapeshifters and loved them just the same.

It wasn't until I made my way over to the middle east and Europe when I began to find real clues that might point me in a direction.

"Africa," they told me, "Africa is full of witchdoctors and the like."

"The Americas! The Americas is the place you wanna go if you're looking for strange creatures."

Over my travels I've learned to go where the people were crying 'witch' at the most. Even if those places didn't have anything useful, they seemed to just know more than anybody else I've encountered, even if they refused to tell me what they knew, or knew very little.

Over the going on three years of my travels, I've learned that my Uncle Ame and I might be the only werewolves of the Japanese branch, but we were certainly not the last of the shapeshifters out there. There seem to be a handful here and there, scattered few and far between, although none seemed to want to be found, and were very good and blending in, and that's about as close as I've ever gotten during those years.

After staying in Spain for about a month and finding nothing there either, I decided to make my way down south, to check out the rumours about Africa, mostly because it was closest. Then, if worse came to worse, I would use the last of my savings to travel to the Americas.

As it turned out, Africa, although largely indigenous (at least at the time I visited it in my twenties), did not have any more 'shapeshifters' than the rest of the world.

I spent a little over a year traveling the totality of the continent, and although I found some tribes attributing their origins to animals, or 'animal like people', many of these 'people' today seemed to be long gone. It wasn't until about the end of my tour when I finally followed some leads to an old man, living in a hut on the outskirts of a particular village, shunned for practicing 'bad magic'.

After a few days of staying with the man, he just so happened to come right out and ask me if I was a 'shapeshifter'. Shocked too much to respond, he quickly told me his older brother was a 'shapeshifter' also. A lion, from what I could guess. Nobody knew how this happened, being as their parents and himself did not have any lion in them at all, nor could they remember it in stories of their family tree.

Apparently, his brother was found out one day by the rest of the villagers, and he was chased away into the desert. To this day, he has no idea how his brother was faring, but still wished him the best of luck and prayed for him everyday.

In my selfishness, I wanted to stay with him longer. There was something about being with that old man that felt like home to me, but he told me I must leave within the next few days. Or bad things would happen.

Whenever something bad happened in the village, he was blamed for it, and so he was watched always with a very suspicious eye. If he was seen with a petite, young Japanese woman - or worse, an ancient Japanese wolf hunting for him - suspicions would be raised again. Not that I could blame them.

With his warnings and his blessings, I decided that it was best for the both of us if I just left. I tried to stay with him though. I tried telling him he could come live with my father and I in Japan, and that we could be a family. But he refused.

"If my brother ever comes back," he told me, in his own dialect I had been learning. "If he ever does, I want him to know that I was waiting for him here this whole time, and that I always accepted him."

As I left his hut the next day, I changed into a wolf for him, something that he told me he had always wanted to see again since his brother left the village when he was just a boy. Slowly, I nuzzled his chest, allowing his calloused hands to run through my fur before I licked them quickly, then departed. I always wanted to come back to visit, but never got the chance to.

Perhaps in the afterlife, I though, all 'shapeshifters' would get to meet each other, and then I'd finally get to feel a sense of community, a sense of family - the thing that I had been longing for. Perhaps, I thought, there was no place for me here in this world, and I, like so many other shapeshifters, had to choose either to live as a wolf like my Uncle Ame and hide my human nature, or choose to live as a human like my mother and grandfather and hide my wolf nature.

At that point I remember I was so close to using my money to return home, maybe use the last of it to buy myself a home in the farmlands like my Nana did, on the edge of the forest, stuck in limbo between the wild and civilization for the rest of my life.

I don't know what made me go on the boat to South America.

Maybe it was the fact that I found a good deal working as a cleaning lady aboard a large passenger ship, or maybe it was because I heard the Americas were so large, that I thought there was bound to be somebody who knew something, even if I only found nothing at the end. But I think it was because there was a part of me that just wasn't ready to give up yet. I would rather search and not find, than to not have searched at all.

Living for a month in Spain seemed to prove quite useful, as the majority of South American's spoke Spanish. Although the dialect was different in different parts, I could always find someone who spoke the main language, like it was for me in Africa.

It wasn't until I began my run northwards when I finally found some leads somewhere within the jungles of southern Mexico.

"An old witch," they said, "she lives at the top of the mountain."

"If you're looking for strange sightings, they say there's the Mountain Witch over yonder."

"They said if your mean to the Witch, she'll sick wild animals on you."

"One time, a little boy I knew saw the Mountain Witch and threw some stones at her. The next day, he was mauled by a jaguar."

Although I had since become disillusioned with the idea of witches (none of them seemed so eager to speak with me), I thought I might give it a try anyway.

The trek up the mountain side might have taken a full day on foot, but on paw it only took most of one evening.

The sun was setting by the time I made it to the top, and first saw a little old cottage house with a stone fence around it. I took human form and made it the rest of the way there.

I walked through the gate and knocked on the door. I didn't think anybody heard me, so I creaked open the door, which was unlocked.

Immediately I heard shouts. I couldn't recognize the dialect, but as I looked around, I noticed them coming from a little old woman who was rushing to her cupboard. She pulled out a handmade broom, and began to come at me with it, still shouting all the while.

Finally, I recognized the word "perro", and I had a feeling I knew what she must mean.

"I'm not a dog, I'm a person!" I said in Spanish, hoping that even if the old woman didn't speak it, she would at least have know that an animal couldn't speak.

The woman put her broom down, but her angry face still stuck.

She waved to the door, and said something along the lines of 'put your dog outside' in broken Spanish.

"I don't have a dog," I responded.

The woman turned to look at me, at first with a disbelieving face, then understanding. Slowly she walked up to me, and placed her hands on my arms, then my face. The light glaze over her charcoal black eyes told me she was blind.

The woman gave me a toothless grin, one that couldn't have been more welcoming. She indicated that I should sit down, and ran outside for a moment. After taking a seat on an old wicker chair, I looked around the room and saw old trinkets and many hand woven things, with china and old pottery lining the walls and cabinets.

Then a loud sound, a deep, guttural growling came from outside. From the old woman? To this day I never knew from where it came, all I knew was that it was loud enough to shake the walls, and make the dishes and pots hanging on the walls clatter noisily together, along with the glass cabinets housing the china. Was she being mauled by an animal?

I got up to go check on her, but as soon as I stood up, she came running back in, just as happy and excited as ever, and made tea for the both of us, insisting I sat back down.

We sat and chatted together for what seemed like hours, and I couldn't help but soak in all the information.

The old woman, who told me to call her Mama Itzel, apparently grew up in a tribe of shapeshifters, and many of them were still around. Her people were descent from an ancient Native Mesoamerican tribe, and they used to be worshiped like gods, or so she told me. They were prized for their strength and their hunting abilities, and they were often asked to help fight in many wars, being hired out as mercenaries of sorts.

Unfortunately, as was the fate of almost all shapeshifters, they were treated as cursed and shunned. Many were persecuted because of what they were, but a few banded together with their mates and cubs, and sought refuge in the mountains, where a small tribe of shapeshifters still live today. They were either forgotten about or regarded as myths, but currently live in peace.

As for Mama Itzel herself, she was always so curious as to the way humans lived, and wanted to get closer and closer to them, until she found herself a human mate. The only thing she regretted was not telling him the truth as to what she was. They found it hard to conceive, but when she was forty she finally found herself with child.

She told me the whole village at the base of the mountains rejoiced and attributed it to her mate's hard work ethic, that the gods smiled down on them.

When it was time for delivery, both her husband and the midwife were shocked to find a baby jaguar come out instead of a human baby.

When this was found out about her by the village, she was accused of using black magic, and being a witch to aid her fertility, and she was banished to the mountains, to where she managed to escape with her son, and thereby dubbed, the Mountain Witch.

When I asked why she never moved back with her tribe, she said although they would forgive her and accept her back, she never wanted a human to come looking for her, and then stumble upon the rest of her people. It wouldn't end well for them.

Also, she was still so in love with human culture, that she found herself still wanting to live like one, even if they never accepted her.

I never knew what to make of that.

As for her husband, she never saw him again.

I didn't know what to think of that either.

Then, sometime amidst the conversation, tea, laughter and tears, two giant jaguars managed to appear, and tumbled their way through the doorway, splintering it and causing one beam to double down on itself..

I was so frightened I nearly wet myself, ready to move into a defensive position, but Mama Itzel merely shook her fists at them.

"I told you boys to start using the doors with two hands! You're all gonna tear my house apart one day!"

I sat astonished as the two jaguars shifted back into their human form, giving her a somewhat ashamed look.

"Oh come on Doña Itzel! We were worried about you!"

"Yeah, you don't usually call us in the middle of the night!"

I later learned what they said, but in the moment couldn't understand their native language.

I simply stood, watching them all interact, Mama Itzel seeming to be some sort of a grandmother figure for them, until I was finally introduced in Spanish.

"Hinata! These are my two grandchildren Kele and Ki."

I stood awkwardly, not sure if I should bow or shake hands.

"What is she Doña Itzel?"

"She's not like one of us, is she?"

For some reason, I began to feel them start to get territorial, and so I did what my conscience told me to do: change into a wolf.

From that moment on, Kele and Ki began to regard me as a part of the family.

I spent a few days with Mama Itzel and her grandchildren, and I helped them rebuild her doorframe, cook them meals, work in her garden, and learn their language and culture. It was nice that even though we weren't the same species, we all still understood each other on a deeper level, something that I never, ever felt with my father, or even with other animals.

After a little under a week, we departed from Mama Itzel, with promises of visiting again soon. She smothered me with hugs and kisses, something that reminded me of what my Nana Hana would always do, and we left.

When we arrived at the tribe, Kele and Ki first took me to visit the chief, Bada. I was nervous, and I did all the things that my companions told me to do and say. But quickly I learned not to fear him. He came up to me in human form, and gave me a giant hug, telling me that if Itzel said I was apart of the tribe now, then I would become Itzel's first granddaughter.

The rest of the tribe was quick to accept me as well, and I fit in with all of the women and men. I quickly learned the language, and Bada's tribe became my tribe; my home and family where I belonged.

After a while, I fell in love with a werejaguar named Bu, and he became my mate and I love him fiercely. I don't forget to write a letter to my father every month, making a trek out to the village and visiting Mama Itzel along the way as well. I still miss him dearly. I tried to get him to come live with me in Bada's tribe, I told him that he would be welcomed and treated with honor, but my father would always refuse.

"Maybe I'll come visit," he would write. "But my home is with humans. I'm only happy that you, my daughter, found your own way home.

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

-Emerson