Sirius, James, Remus and Peter were best friends and played together all the time. Sirius and James were especially good friends, they did everything together!  Sirius, James and Peter hated Snape and made up a nickname for him- Snivellus and as they got older, James started to fancy Lily. James and Sirius were top in all their classes and some of the cleverest in the year. Although everything was great and he had lots of friends, Sirius could hardly fail to notice that something odd was happening with Remus. Every month, on a full moon, he would leave the dorm at night with a teacher. He made up lots of excuses for this, but James, Sirius and Peter figured out the truth-Remus was a Werewolf. Remus thought that they wouldn’t want to be friends with him when they found out that he was a werewolf, but they did. Remus told them that every full moon, he would go into the shrieking shack and transform into a wolf where he couldn’t hurt anyone, so James, Sirius and Peter decided to become animagnuses, so they could keep Remus company as animals! Finally, in their 5th year they achieved it and could each turn into a different animal at will. James was a stag, Sirius a huge dog and Peter a rat. Every month they would sneak down to the shrieking shack under James’s invisibility cloak and sometimes come out and explore the grounds and the forbidden forest. This meant that they found out more about Hogwarts's grounds than probably any other student ever! They gave themselves nicknames, based on the animals they became. Remus was Moony, Peter was Wormtail, Sirius was padfoot and James was Prongs. They made a map called the marauders map based on everything that they had found exploring. It had all of Hogwarts’s secret passageways on it and showed where everyone in the school was at any time! They signed it with their nicknames and made it so you could only see it if you knew the password- I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

 One day, Sirius decided to play a prank on Snape. He told Snape how to get into the shrieking shack from the whomping willow. Of course Snape tried it and if he and if he had reached the shrieking shack, he would have met a fully grown werewolf, which would have probably killed him. Luckily, James did something amazing and surprising- he saved Snape's life! He went down the tunnel to the shrieking shack and brought Snape back before he could get hurt, but Snape had glimpsed Remus and knew that he was a werewolf from that day on.