Children of the Wolf (4 page)

Rama returned at last, one section of cloth trailing behind him, and dumped the wrappings on the ground at Mr. Welles’ feet. He smiled broadly but said nothing.

Mr. Welles gathered up one sheet and threw it over the monkey ball, obscuring the four. Rama leaped into the tiny pit and secured the wrapping. Then Mr. Welles leaned over and, aided by the two carters, lifted the trembling bundle out of the mound.

By this time the villagers had gathered enough courage to approach the wolf den, chattering like children at a
hât
, laughing and shoving until Mr. Welles stopped them.

“Hush!” he said. “Do not frighten the poor little things with your foolishness.”

“But,
sahib
,” said Chunarem, “they have already given us many weeks of fright. Now it is our turn.”

The other men cheered at his words, but Mr. Welles gave them such a look that they quieted at once.

Still, brave as their words were, the villagers did not want to touch the squirming bundle. Rama and I, with Mr. Welles’ help, undid the wrapping carefully and slipped out first one and then the other of the cubs, tying each up in an individual
gelap
. Apart, they were as like puppies as anything else.

I was the one who prized apart the two wolf-children, which is how I knew, before anyone else, that they were both girls, thin and knobby and wild. The little one was so small that my hand could slip around her upper arm, and still one could see space where my finger touched my thumb.

“It is all right,” I crooned to them, using the same low tones I adopted with the baby animals at The Home.

The smaller one relaxed. But long after I had gotten the larger one tied up, with the help of Mr. Welles, she glared fiercely around and snarled at us, her captors. Only when she looked at me, I imagined a kind of recognition, orphan to orphan, as we were both afraid and alone in an alien world.

T
HE TRIP BACK TO
Godamuri was a strange processional. Each carter carried one of the wolf-girls, wrapped securely in a
gelap
, over his shoulder like a sack of rice. The Santals traded back and forth with the wolf cubs, which they had freed from the sheets. The cubs were no longer afraid of the men and licked their hands and faces with eager pink tongues. Indeed, the cubs seemed to have forgotten what had happened to their mother. Rama petted each cub in turn, laughing loudly, but I noticed he was careful to keep his back to the wolf-children, as if ignoring them restored his former courage completely.

Mr. Welles walked by himself, smoking his pipe, lost in thought.

Every once in a while one of the villagers would hang back and examine the captives, bravely poking with the butt of a bamboo spear at the restrained bodies. The wolf-children let out no more than a few snarls at the treatment, though once the smaller one snapped at the carter’s hand. Then she suddenly lapsed into a comalike sleep from which no amount of poking seemed to waken her.

At last I could stand no more.

“Such brave men!” I shouted as one Santal pushed the bamboo into the backside of the larger wolf-child. “And where were you, so brave, when they were unbound and in their den?”

He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “But that was when we thought they were
manush-baghas
,” he said.

Another added, “Now we know they are
bhuts
, spirits of children who died before initiation. They are outcasts who must wander the forest and prey on mortals. But they can be killed, and that is what we shall do when we return to Godamuri.”

“No!” I screamed, and pushed at the man who spoke, trying to wound him with my fists and feet.

Arms came around me, and the smell of smoke enveloped me, causing me to cough.

“No, indeed,” Mr. Welles’ voice said from above my head. “The boy is right. These are not evil spirits of yours. They are a miracle sent to test
me
. You shall see—I will tame these little devils, and they will become human again. Will that not prove to you that Christ is the one God?”

The Santals backed away from him, trying to understand what he was saying. He continued to hold me and calm me with a waterfall of words, all the while standing us between the villagers and the carters, who held their prey.

And so we returned to Godamuri with only Mr. Welles’ words between the wolf-children and disaster. His intuition told him that it would be too dangerous to remain in the village overnight should the men celebrate the capture of the
bhuts
with too much rice beer. Ordinarily the Santals are a harmless people, gentle and not easily angered, but fear makes a man do peculiar things.

“We will return to The Home at once,” Mr. Welles advised us. Then he bargained for two cages with Chunarem, paying with a sack of tobacco and several bags of rice, even though he knew the villagers would get a good price at a
hât
for the cubs, and so he really owed them nothing.

The little captives, now smelling of stale urine and sweat, lay unbound inside the locked cages. We lifted the cages onto the cart. Our bullock strained to pull the load and would have balked, but I tickled him under the chin, which reminded him of home, and as though he suddenly smelled the luxury of his own shed ahead, he went all the rest of the way through the jungle contentedly.

We saw nothing in the jungle larger than a langur on the road home, though the jungle itself seemed darker. The tight lacings of the sal canopy let in little light, and there were continual distant rumblings of thunder, though the rains were long past.

I tried to feed the bigger wolf-girl cow’s milk from a spoon whenever we stopped. When she turned her head away, I asked Mr. Welles to let me use his handkerchief. He offered it with a puzzled look on his face, but asked no questions. I tore the handkerchief up and rolled the smaller portions into wicks, which I dipped into the cup of milk. When a wick was soaking wet, I put one end into the wolf-girl’s mouth, letting the other end remain in the cup. She began sucking on the wet wick as if it were a teat, and so she took nourishment eagerly, though she would not look straight at me while she did it.

The little one, though, refused to eat, and I worried about that. She was so thin already that her ribs were like the vaultings of a cathedral I had seen in one of Mr. Welles’ books. And her breathing was labored. But each time I offered her a wick, her lips pulled back from her teeth, and she growled at me like a wolf. I kept talking to her gently through the bars of her cage, and I tried to get her to eat. Twice I left a cup of milk with the wick in it overnight, but both mornings the milk was spilled out and the floor of the cage was covered with flies.

They slept most of the day but lay awake and alert at night. When we took turns at the watch, Rama would not go near the cart, preferring to sit by the fire, but I could not keep away from the cages, checking them frequently to see that everything was all right.

Each time I looked, the larger wolf-girl stared back at me, her round eyes shining with a peculiar blue glare. Only in the jungle had I ever seen such eyes, the eyes of the beasts peering from the underbrush. I said nothing of it to the others, though I wrote it down in my book.

And so we returned after two nights and three days to The Home, disheveled and quite dirty ourselves. We were relieved to get back to civilization.

When we started to unload the cart in the courtyard, Mrs. Welles and the children ran out, making a wide, ragged circle around the cages.

Krithi stared thoughtfully at the wolf-girls and put his finger in his mouth, a sure sign that he was unhappy. Veda, after one quick glance, ran to the sanctuary of Mrs. Welles’ skirts. She was followed by the other littler ones, though Preeti, in her own peculiar manner, turned sideways once to look at them. But Indira watched it all with a kind of pleased expression on her face.

Mr. Welles helped supervise the unloading of the cages, then turned to his wife.

“These poor mites were what those heathen mistook for ghosts,” he said. “Cleaned up, with good, sensible haircuts, they will be indistinguishable from our other children. One seems about three years old, the other nine or ten. We will eventually get them to tell us all about their lives with the wolves, God is good, my dear. I shall have something very special to report about His work and ours to the bishop now.” He smiled in a self-satisfied way.

But Mrs. Welles shook the little ones from her skirts and ran over and knelt before the cages, shielding what was inside from our eyes.

“They are girls, David, girls. And the biggest must be nearing puberty. How could you expose them in this manner? How could you cage them in this inhuman way? Quick, Veda, Indira.” She gave orders in a quiet voice that brooked no arguments. “Find me clothing that will fit these two. A shift will do for each. And some cloth for diapers until they can be taught rudimentary manners. Poor things.” She stood up, holding her skirts out as curtains, guarding them. “A miracle, Mr. Welles? It will be a miracle if they have not been violated, running around the forest without a stitch of clothing on. We must send for the doctor.”

As Indira and Veda returned with the cotton shifts, I saw Rama smile behind his hand at the two carters. And it came to me suddenly that he had certainly noticed that the wolf-children were girls before now, just as I had, though there seemed something sly and mocking and knowing in his look.

Krithi, Preeti, and the little ones were bustled off by Cook to do their chores and studies, laughing and glancing back over their shoulders at Veda and Indira, who circled the cages warily. They held the clothing in their hands, not quite sure what to do with it, fearing they might be savaged at any minute by the wolf-girls in the cages.

Mr. and Mrs. Welles stood apart, watching them.

Suddenly I was ashamed, ashamed for all of us, For Rama and his smirking manhood. For Mr. Welles and his ugly little miracle. For Mrs. Welles and her need for clean, concealing clothes. For Indira and Veda and the rest, who had not welcomed these new children into The Home.

But most of all I was ashamed that the little wolf-girls, who had done no one any harm and who had been living out their lives as uncomplaining and unthinking as the animals in the jungle, should have been brought here to be civilized against their wills. And I, who had also been abandoned at The Home, had been powerless to stop it.

B
ECAUSE THEY WERE GIRLS
and had to be bathed, I saw no more of them that day. But Indira told us about it later, and what a feast she had in the telling. She waited until we were all done with supper and had our free time outdoors. Then she began.

“They smell, you know.”

The little ones nodded.

I thought it stupid to reply, keeping to myself the fact that any of us, similarly treated, would smell as bad.

“And their bodies were so dirty,” she reported. “Layers upon layers. Mrs. Welles said they would have to be soaked for days to get it all off. And they scratch as if they were dogs.”

“Fleas,” whispered Veda.

“Fleas,” the little ones responded.

Of course we all know that many of the villagers have fleas. And lice. We do not. The English do not allow it.

“And did they like the bath?” asked Krithi, his finger hovering near his mouth.

“Like it? They loathed it,” replied Indira with a wicked-sounding laugh. “In the end we had to throw buckets of water over them while Mrs. Welles held first one and then the other. She never did get them clean, though she herself was quite soaked.”

The idea of Mrs. Welles being wet made us all laugh with Indira. Actually, we all liked Mrs. Welles, the little ones often quarreling over whose turn it was to sit in her lap during evening stories. But to think of her dripping—her hair, usually so tidy and pinned, plastered down over her ears with water—was really funny. I joined the laughter.

Indira pantomimed it well, and our laughter further encouraged her. She grabbed Rama around the waist, pretending she was washing him. He screamed in a high-pitched voice, half words, half howls.

“Oh, no! A-woooooo!” he cried.

That started us all laughing again.

Suddenly Indira let Rama go. “But you should have seen the scars,” she said.

“Scars,” Veda whispered.

“Scars,” Preeti echoed.

“What scars?” I asked.

Indira turned to me and said, “When some of the dirt was removed, we could see their bodies were covered with scars. And scratches. And scabs. It was quite horrible.” She shuddered.

Veda nodded and whispered, “And their knees. Tell about their knees.”

Eagerly we all turned to Indira.

“Their knees—and their hands and elbows, too—have these heavy pads of flesh on them.”

“Calluses,” I said.

“Horrible,” Indira added.

We were silent at the thought. Then I said, in the most sensible and calming voice I could manage, “From running on all fours, of course. That’s what those calluses are. From running on hands and knees. Nothing more.”

“On all fours!” Indira’s voice was full of scorn. “Like an animal!”

Rama smiled. “They think they are wolves,” he said in Bengali. He got down on his hands and knees and made playful, growling passes at Veda. Indira shoved Veda aside and got down on her own hands and knees, growling back at him.

“Actually,” I began, remembering that first night when they had disappeared into the sal, “they can run very fast that way. Faster than a man can run upright.” But no one heard me. They were all too busy laughing at Rama and Indira, who were playing at being wolves.

I stopped talking and went over to the garden wall, staring at the wall and at the lantana bushes without really seeing them. But the sound of Rama’s play snarls and Indira’s shrieking laughter followed me.

That night at our prayers Mr. Welles spoke very forcefully to us.

“My children,” he said, “our little miracles have been cleaned up and are safe within the compound walls, but they are, as yet, unused to the company of human beings. This is to be expected. Therefore tonight—and for the next few nights if needed—they will sleep outside in the courtyard with the dogs. Do not disturb them. Do not frighten them. Treat them with Christian kindness. Soon they will reward us with tales of the jungle and stories of wonders such as mankind rarely beholds.”