Steam off the back. Heat like a furnace. Then the pelt.
Three seconds building heat, one second dumping it through the skin, repeating. The steam is that fourth second.
The four-second burn and flush
Metabolism · Cutaneous flushPlate · LCAN · The four-second burn and flush · theoretical reconstruction
Four seconds of cutaneous flush: heat dumped through the skin as the engine comes up, then the keratin shafts begin. Steam off the back is evaporative waste from a metabolism that has nowhere else to put the surplus.
A four-to-six-hour transformation at this metabolic intensity should cook the organism. The solution is a four-second oscillator — inside the range of known biological clocks, adjacent to respiratory and locomotor pattern generators. For three seconds the Burn phase: systemic vascular pressure and muscular work dump heat into the blood. On the fourth second the Flush: cutaneous beds briefly reopen, a sheet of heat leaves through skin, and the cycle repeats.
It is not millisecond pulse-width modulation. It is a coarse, brutal, survivable duty cycle. The steam in the folklore is not atmosphere. It is the Flush made visible on a cold night.
Ch. 6.1
Werewolves in Theory