People always joke about the Marauders thinking a stray dog is really Sirius but imagine that the Marauders are exploring the Forbidden Forest and they split up and all of a sudden, a deer comes over and nudges Sirius. And he’s just like, “Oh, hey, mate.” And the deer just nudges him again. And they finally decide to head back to the castle but the deer is having none of it so they literally have to drag him out of the forest. Only they’re panicking because he’s not changing back and come on James, this isn’t funny, you know we can’t get caught. And so they start to worry that something is wrong and he can’t change back. And so they smuggle him back into the castle. And by smuggle I mean, they throw the Invisibility Cloak over him but since he’s a deer, it doesn’t really cover much. And that’s the story of how Professor McGonagall looks up and sees three boys shoving a headless deer past her doorway and she promptly decides that it’s not her problem.
So they get the deer to the common room and it’s only then that they begin to speculate that maybe this deer isn’t James after all. But the deer just keeps doing really vague things that could be James. And they spend the rest of the afternoon having to decide if this really is James and if it is, if he’s messing with them or if something’s wrong, and if he’s not, did they just kidnap a deer?
