by Barry Lopez
Rousseau wrote of the wolf child of Hesse, who turned up in 1344. Nine animal children—sheep children, bear children, cow children, and pig children—were classified Homo ferus by Linnaeus in 1758. He and others described nearly forty such children before the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century there came a stream of reports of wolf children from India, and of baboon children, gazelle children, and monkey children from Africa.
WOLF GIRL
Although stories of wolf children in America are rare, there is a story told in Texas about a wolf girl who grew up on Devil’s River, north of present-day Del Rio. The girl was, according to the story, born in May 1835 at the confluence of Dry Creek and Devil’s River. The mother, Mollie Pertul Dent, died in childbirth and the father, John Dent, was killed in a thunderstorm at a ranch miles distant, where he had ridden for help. The child was never found, and the presumption was that she had been eaten by wolves near the Dents’ isolated cabin.
In 1845, a boy living at San Felipe Springs (Del Rio) reported seeing “a creature, with long hair covering its features, that looked like a naked girl” attacking a herd of goats with several wolves. Similar reports were made by others during the ensuing year and Apache stories told of a child’s footprints having been found a number of times among those wolves in that country, and so a hunt was organized.
On the third day of the hunt the girl was cornered in a canyon. A wolf with her was driven off and finally shot when it attacked the party. The girl was bound and taken to the nearest ranch, where she was loosed and closed up in a room.
That evening a large number of wolves, apparently attracted by the girl’s loud, mournful, and incessant howling, came around the ranch, the domestic stock panicked, and in the melée the girl escaped.
She was not seen again for seven years. In 1852 a surveying crew exploring a new route to El Paso saw her on a sand bar on the Rio Grande, far above its confluence with Devil’s River. She was with two pups. After that, she was never seen again.
That is the story they tell.
These children were collectively referred to as wolf children because they were thought to have been raised by wild animals and because they behaved, in the eyes of human observers, like wild wolves. They hated to wear clothing, they had a penchant for raw meat, sought darkness during the day and roamed, instead, at night. They howled, ripped the flesh of those who tried to care for them, peeled back their lips to indicate displeasure, panted when they were hot, and ran around on all fours. It required only the barest stretch of the imagination, if such a child was found in the woods where there were wolves, to believe that the child had been raised by them.
Let me return to Jean Grenier, the disturbed child whose sentence was commuted. There is another, apparently factual, side to werewolfry that can be examined and that is the belief in lycanthropy as a pathological condition of melancholia and delirium, which has nothing to do with spells, the Devil, or eating human flesh. The idea has had some support among psychologists, but no case of lycanthropy can be clearly isolated from hysteria and superstition. Jean Grenier may have been such a victim. A man named Pierre de Lancre, who visited Grenier a year before he died, reported that he was lean and gaunt, that his hands were deformed, his nails like claws, and that he ran with great agility on all fours and ate rotten meat.
Had he turned up two hundred years later, Jean Grenier might have had a different fate. Had he in fact fallen into the hands of a gifted French teacher named Jean Itard—as did Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron—Grenier might have left us an explanation of others like him.
In the 1950s at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago, psychologists were treating nineteen children like Grenier. Some of them built dens in the corners of their rooms into which they crawled to eat the raw food they preferred. One of them, a girl, attacked one of the staff repeatedly, and so savagely that the woman required medical attention twelve times in as many months. The children licked salt for hours at a time and loped about the corridors at night, apparently with some pleasure. These, however, were not children rescued from the woods. They all came from middle-class homes in America. They were severely autistic.
The notion of the wolf child, a child actually raised by wolves, is a widespread belief. Because the wolf children described by various writers were all probably autistic or schizophrenic, suffering either congenital or psychological problems or both, the issue of whether authentic wolf-raised children ever existed seems a hopeless, not to say pointless, inquiry.
That people believed such things happened is undeniable, however, and it is not hard to see how such an idea took hold. Wolves likely did steal small babies occasionally, especially in India where they were left untended in the fields. But whatever ill they might have believed of wolves, most people also believed they were devoted and affectionate parents. It was quite plausible that wolves would care for children. Most cultures were aware that some animals, goats for example, nursed human infants, just as humans nursed young animals—puppies often—when the mother died.
Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron.
Victor of Aveyron, the most famous of all feral children, was humanely treated for years by the physician and speech therapist Jean Itard. Itard must have been a man of enormous energy and patience, and tremendous kindness. His success with Victor, who demonstrated most of the symptoms of so-called wolf children, was limited. The boy never learned to speak and he was confused by his sexual desires. He died at the age of forty. Itard’s care of the boy, and his request of the French government that such children should not be abandoned in future as hopeless cases, is one of the most touching episodes in the literature of human care.
But the case of the rehabilitation of two Indian feral children, Amala and Kamala, presents us with something different. It is the only modern record which offers evidence of a direct link between wolves and wild children.
The Reverend J. A. L. Singh first saw Amala and Kamala about dusk on a Saturday, October 9, 1920, outside the village of Godamuri, seventy-five miles southwest of Calcutta. He flushed three grown wolves from the base of an ant mound and inside, monkeyballed together in fear, he found two wolf cubs and two young girls. A few weeks later their den was excavated. Two of the three adult wolves present escaped. The third was shot. The two wolf cubs with the girls were sold in the market in Godamuri. Amala and Kamala (as they were later named) were placed in a cage in which they were unable to stand up and left in the care of a man who subsequently abandoned them. Singh returned five days later to find the girls lying in their own excrement, starving and thirsty. They were barely strong enough to suck water from the end of his handkerchief. After a seven-day journey wedged in the bottom of a bullock cart, they arrived at Singh’s orphanage on November 4.
Amala died a year later, at about two and a half. Kamala, who was about eight when she was found, lived to be about seventeen. She died on November 14, 1929, at the orphanage, of uremic poisoning.
Amala and Kamala behaved in the manner of the severely autistic children described above, biting and howling, eating raw meat, preferring darkness, insensitive to heat and cold, keen of ear and nose, poor of eye. Like Victor of Aveyron they had difficulty with language. The thing that distinguishes them from other so-called feral children is that Amala never walked upright and it was years before Kamala did. This could have been, as one psychologist suggests, a regression to infant crawling behavior caused by the traumatic effect of the first two weeks after the children were taken from the wolf den.
Saint Ailbe, a sixth-century Irish bishop, was born the son of a slave girl. Shortly after his birth he was taken out and deposited in the wilderness by order of his mother’s owner. A wolf took compassion on him and cared for him until a huntsman found him. Years later, when he was Bishop of Emily, a gray wolf pursued by hunters ran into his house and laid her head on his lap.
“I will protect thee, old mother,” said the bishop, drawing his cloak around the old wolf. “When I wa
s little and young and feeble, thou didst nourish and cherish and protect me, and now that thou art old and gray and weak, shall I not render the same love and care to thee? None shall injure thee. Come every day with thy little ones to my table, and thou and thine shall share my crusts.”
The diary kept by the Singhs and a book written in praise of their work by a physician reveal that the Singhs were primarily concerned with civilizing Kamala by seeing to it that she wore clothing, ate with utensils, and attended regular religious services. They seemed less concerned with discovering her as a person.
The Singhs divided Kamala’s actions into two categories: “wolf” and “human.” They judged her progress by how many wolf ways disappeared and how many human habits were inculcated. It was the Singhs’ orientation that Kamala had come to them as a bad creature and that she had to be turned into a good creature. Making a creature of God out of a creature of the Devil, in fact, is a note struck often in the diary. For all their kindness, there are elements of real barbarism in the Singhs’ treatment. They shaved Kamala’s head because they didn’t like her to look “dirty.” They bound her up so tightly in a loincloth in an effort to make her cover her genitals that she could not get it off to relieve herself.
There is a revealing conceit in the Singhs’ diary. Mrs. Singh gave Kamala a backrub every morning and when Kamala responded by nuzzling her, she would note in the diary that Kamala was beginning to show “human affection.” The first conceit, that such a demonstration of affection is uniquely human, is of course silly. The subtler conceit is that it was Mrs. Singh’s decision to give Kamala the rubdown. Wolves in captivity routinely solicit scratching and other tactile attention from human beings.
Amala and Kamala could have been severely disturbed children, abandoned by their parents, who stumbled on the wolf den as a place of refuge. Such children, in fact, do show an uncommon fondness for animals, particularly dogs. (Singh says he saw the girls at the wolf den some days before he took them out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were living there.)
There is no way to verify this story, although many scientists of the time believed Singh.
Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.
Mythic roots—the benevolent wolf mother, with Romulus and Remus
The sense that there has to be a strong tradition of the benevolent wolf in literature, in art, or in folklore is a modern wish that must go wanting, for such a figure simply does not exist. There are benevolent wolves, and wolves that befriend those who treat them ill in literature, but not wolves who nurture, from whom people draw sustenance as perhaps Romulus and Remus did prior to their founding Rome.
But I think, somehow, that looking for the wolf-mother is the stage we are at now in history. If we go back to the time of Lycaon and follow the development of the wolf image through the Dark and Middle Ages to the present, the overriding impression is that of a sinister creature. But in the twentieth century, whether out of guilt or because we have reached such a level of civilization as to allow us the thought, we are looking for a new wolf. We seem eager to be corrected, to know how wrong our ideas about wolves have been, how complex the creature really is, how ultimately unfathomable. What we are looking for, I think, is a way to return mystery to animals, and distance and selfhood, and thereby dignity. To quote Beston again, we want to feel that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the web of life …”
Almost like errant children, we seem to want forgiveness from wolves. And I think that takes great courage.
It may be reasonable to expect most people to dismiss the notion of a nurturing wolf as a naive person’s referent, but that doesn’t seem wise to me. When, from the prisons of our cities, we look out to wilderness, when we reach intellectually for such abstractions as the privilege of leading a life free from nonsensical conventions, or one without guilt or subterfuge—in short, a life of integrity—I think we can turn to wolves. We do sense in them courage, stamina, and a straightforwardness of living; we do sense that they are somehow correct in the universe and we are somehow still at odds with it.
As our sense of sharing the planet with other creatures grows—and perhaps that is ultimately the goal of natural history—the deep contemplation of wolves may be seen as part of an attempt to nurture the humbler belief that there is more to the world than mankind. In that sense, the wolf-mother is just now upon us, in a role a quantum leap removed from Romulus and Remus.
Thirteen
IMAGES FROM A CHILDHOOD
ONE FALL AFTERNOON A few years ago I stopped in at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York to see a special exhibition of children’s literature. There were some early collections of Aesop and the animal fables of Jean de la Fontaine. And copies of the medieval epic Reynard the Fox, in which Isengrim the Wolf plays such a major role. But there was one thing I especially wanted to see: a presentation manuscript of Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, a collection of fairy tales published in France in 1697, containing the first written version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” It was sitting on a stanchion, protected in a Plexiglas cube, not just something of value but palpable evidence of one of the better known villains of children’s literature.
It is curious to find the wolf as a character in children’s literature, for all wolves in literature are the creations of adult minds, that is, of adult fears, adult fantasies, adult allegories, and adult perversions. So the tendency to look on animal stories as simplistic is misleading. The wolf of Aesopian fable has changed little in twenty-five hundred years, but he is not just an unchanging symbol of bad behavior. He stands in the child’s mind for something very real. It is Aesop’s wolf, not Science’s wolf—a base, not very intelligent creature, of ravenous appetite, gullible, impudent, and morally corrupt—that generations of schoolchildren are most familiar with. And it was through the fables of Aesop, Avianus, Babrius, and Phaedrus that many children of other centuries first encountered a moral universe beguiling in its simplicity and seemingly rich in worldly wisdom. Some children weaned on fable never inquired deeper into the animals than the stories led them, and so went through life believing the wolf evil, the fox sly, the bee industrious, and the ass foolish.
As adults, too, we often lump the wolves of all children’s literature together. But the wolf of fable is really rather different from the wolf of the fairy tale. In fables—short, didactic, usually plotless aphorisms—the wolf’s poor nature is ascribed to his having been born a wolf and it is possible to feel some sympathy for his predicament. Wolves are not hated in fables, the emotions elicited from the reader are not strong, the wolf is not hell-driven and malicious. He is not a complex beast at all. The wolf of fairy tale and folktale is a much fuller character, capable of diabolical evil and also, occasionally, of warmth and unflinching devotion. If the wolf of fable represents the perceptions of the conscious mind, the wolf of fairy tale represents the unconscious and becomes, as so frequently of late in analyses of “Little Red Riding Hood,” a vehicle for sustaining the fantasies of the sexual unconscious.
The fable draws its morals and aphorisms from the easily observed world of nature, which is one reason its morals seem so apt. Fairy tales, oh the other hand, proceed from abstractions and engage us at a deeper level. The fable is abrupt and cynical; the fairy tale is kinder, I think. It ministers to our anxious impulses and soothes us, despite occasional psychological darkness.
The wolf of fable and literature, then, should not be taken solely for the entertainment he affords to children. From Aesop to the novels of Jack London
, he has laid claim to a far greater part of our imagination.
Now the hungry lion roars,
And the wolf behowls the moon.
A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT’S DREAM v.1.379
You may as well use question with the wolf.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE iv.1.73
They have scared away two of my best sheep,
which I fear the wolf will sooner find
than the master.
A WINTER’S TALE iii.3.67
Since all is well, keep it so: wake not a sleeping wolf.
2 HENRY iv i.2.174
If thou wert the wolf, thy greediness
would afflict thee, and oft thou
shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner.
TIMON OF ATHENS iv.3.337
He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health,
a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.—
KING LEAR iii.6.20
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy.
MACBETH iv.1.22
’Tis like the howling of Irish wolves
against the moon.
AS YOU LIKE IT v.2.162
They will eat like wolves and fight like devils.
