Wild Hound

You touch a willing quadrupedal beast, infusing the beast with nature's power. The beast transforms into a Dire Wolf for the duration of the spell.

The transformed beast is friendly to you and your companions. In combat, the transformed beast shares your initiative count, but it takes its turn immediately after yours. The transformed beast obeys any verbal commands that you issue to it (no action required by you), but the commands must be spoken in druidic. The transformed beast understands your commands even if it cannot understand druidic. When you are transformed by Wild Shape, you can issue the commands telepathically. If you don't issue any commands to the transformed beast, then it defends itself from hostile creatures, but otherwise takes no actions.

When the spell ends or the transformed beast drops to 0 hit points, it reverts to its normal form. When reverting to the beast's normal form, it returns to the number of hit points it had before being transformed. However, if the beast reverts as a result of dropping to 0 hit points, half of any excess damage (rounded down) carries over to the beast's normal form and the spell ends. For example, if it takes 10 damage as a transformed beast and has only 1 hit point left, it reverts and takes 4 damage. As long as the excess damage doesn’t reduce the beast's normal form to 0 hit points, it isn't knocked unconscious.

At higher levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, the transformed beast's maximum hit points increases by 6 for each slot level above 2nd and the transformed beast's Bite attack does an additional 1d6 damage for each slot level above 2nd.