was an animagus, now that I would believe. He was skilled enough and arrogant enough to try it, although I don’t know why he would’ve felt the need to be unregistered. Unless, of course, he had attempted the transformation before he was seventeen, which is the earliest you are allowed to perform the spell." No one says anything. "Now, that would be even harder to believe, but then I remember those silly nicknames of yours. Moony and Padfoot, I thought I had understood—Sirius is the Dog Star, after all. But Wormtail and Prongs I was always more unsure about. But if Peter were a rat with a tail that looked like a worm, well I can see how a couple of schoolboys would have eagerly decided on that as his nickname. But Prongs? I assumed an inside joke no one knew about... but James was an animal that had prongs, wasn’t he?"