Summary

The people in Izbuc, a village in the Romanian Carpathian mountains (Transylvania), think that their fellow villager Gratian Florea is a werewolf. According to an old custom, when a child is born, the midwifes call upon the spirits, to make the child hard working, beautiful, loveable or wise. It is said that when Gratian was born, the umbilical cord broke only after the midwife called forth the werewolf. This crucial moment was to influence his whole life.