Children of the Wolf (11 page)

The packed earth was as hard as stone, and bits of the stick kept breaking off, but still I dug, widening the tunnel entrance, and then, when I remembered it, battering at the hole through which I had seen the stars.

After an hour’s frantic shoveling I had torn away only one small section of the mound, but I would not stop, not even to go back to the
nullah
for another drink of water.

Every once in a while I called out Kamala’s name. Not that I expected an answer, but I wanted to remind myself that she was still there. Tears coursed down my cheeks, making muddy tracks. Sweat poured off my back. My hands and knees and shoulders ached. I did not care. I dug.

Suddenly one section of the mound collapsed. I dropped the stick and began to root around in the dirt with my torn hands, throwing the dirt behind me and screaming Kamala’s name.

I heard my own name in answer. Then strong arms were around me, and I looked up. Mr. Welles and Rama and the carters and several men I had never seen before were by my side.

“Mohandas, Mohandas, we have been so worried about you. And then we heard your screams. What are you doing?” Mr. Welles asked.

“It is Kamala. She is in the den,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded,

“Dig!” Mr. Welles said to the men.

They had only hands and feet, too, for they had been carrying guns, not shovels. But they dug with a fury that matched mine, and they were big men—and strong.

Within minutes the mound was destroyed, caving in toward the central den.

I saw Kamala’s feet sticking out of the heaped dirt, and I leaped into the center, throwing clods every which way. In moments I had uncovered her head and began brushing the dirt from her mouth and eyes.

Mr. Welles stepped over the fallen walls to help.

“No,” I said, pushing him away. I picked up Kamala’s body and cradled it in my arms. She was not heavy at all, and I could feel her breathing against me. “I will carry her home myself.”

We were a strange processional. Ahead of me went Mr. Welles and Rama, to hold bushes and thorns out of the way. Behind came the carters and the villagers, guns ready, for we were fairly deep into the sal and one can never tell when a tiger with her cubs might be on the path.

We walked nearly two hours, and not once did I put Kamala down or let anyone else touch her. And then we crossed the puddles where the mahseer swam along the pebbly bottom, and I knew we were close to The Home. All at once Kamala felt heavy, but still I would not let her go.

Ahead I could see the walled house. The gate was open, and there were many figures in front of it, jostling for position.

Mrs. Welles stood in front, and with her were all the children except Indira, who had been banished inside. Even Cook was there, patting little straggles of hair back into her braid.

When we got close, Mrs. Welles reached out as if to take Kamala from me, but I shook my head and walked past her into the courtyard. I marched with Kamala’s body in my arms to her little hut and set her down carefully onto the floor.

“Kamala,” I said, patting the ground beside her. “Home. We are home.”

Her eyes opened. She looked up at me, a long steady gaze, directly into my eyes.

“Mmmmmdas,” she said, then closed her eyes again. It was the last word she ever spoke.

L
IFE WENT ON AT
the home but Kamala was no longer any real part of it. She played and ate with the dogs again and adopted a particularly nasty bantam rooster as her special friend. She pounced on lizards and mice, ate dirt and pebbles after each meal, rolled in dead wood pigeons, and buried their bones near her hut. Yet she seemed, somehow, content. At night there were no more howls or moans except on the full of the moon, though she often took to prowling the compound until dawn, as restless as a jungle beast in a zoo.

Word of her got out, first through the village men, then by Dr. Singh’s recitation at a dinner party. The newspapers printed stories, mostly inaccurate, about her discovery and her life at The Home. Mr. Welles’ report to the Diocese did little to dam the rising tide of gossip. An enterprising photographer, turned down in his request for pictures, scaled the compound wall one night. Kamala bit him on the leg, and he lost his camera while making his escape. But still the papers continued to seek her out, and as a consequence of stories in the
Calcutta Statesman
and the popular London daily the
Westminster Gazette
, she received several proposals of marriage, a number of suggestions for cures (including one from a gentleman from Bombay who advocated hanging her upside down to “improve her brain faculties”), and a long letter offering her a chance to star in a film. From the Psychological Society in New York came an invitation for a tour. Mr. Welles saved the letters, but did not trouble to answer them, except one from King George V, which he had framed and hung in his study.

What happened the rest of the year I do not know firsthand, for I was sent off to school in England, to Sandhurst, Mr. Welles’ old alma mater, on a scholarship arranged by him. I was more homesick there for the smell of jasmine and sewlee than I ever could have imagined, and I was treated like some sort of strange dark animal by the boys and the masters.

When I came home briefly for a holiday, paid for by the Diocesan Council because my grades had been the highest in my form, Kamala was dead of a parasite picked up from one of the pigeons she had eaten. She had been buried next to Amala under a large banyan tree in the church cemetery. I put flowers on her grave, flowers that I picked deep in the sal. I wrapped their stems with a bright red string. Only I really mourned her; the others scarcely seemed to notice she was gone.

Then I returned to England, where I stayed until my schooling was complete.

I became a writer, a lover of words, and took a first in the study of languages at Oxford. But until this book I never once wrote about Kamala, for over the years I learned that what is true and what is real are sometimes difficult to distinguish and that memory blurs the line even more. Still, I lived with the wolf-girl in a time and in a place that is the stuff of memory and of dream, and because I had the words to tell of it I—at least—have never forgotten.

O
N OCTOBER 9, 1920
, the reverend J. A. L. Singh, an Indian missionary and rector of The Orphanage in Midnapore India, led a party of hunters into the sal jungle. Their express purpose was to discover what was haunting the Santal village of Godamuri, for the Reverend Mr. Singh, known as a mighty hunter, had been asked by one of the village leaders, a man named Chunarem, to help.

The Singh party found two children in a wolf’s den that was carved out of a white ant mound. Along with the children, they discovered a mother wolf and her cubs. They shot the large wolf, sold off the cubs, and the Reverend Mr. Singh brought the two children back with him after they had been almost starved to death by the superstitious and frightened villagers.

Amala and Kamala, as they were named, lived very much like animals at first, eating raw meat, swallowing gravel, gnawing bones. They ran on all fours and refused to wear clothing. The most-startling part of the story was that their eyes apparently glowed with blue lights in the dark.

A year later, on September 21, 1921, Amala died. Kamala lived on at the Singh orphanage another eight years, dying on November 14, 1929. I have, for the sake of the novel, telescoped Kamala’s progress. In reality she did not start to walk upright for two and a half years or to speak for three. She did not have the semblance of a regular vocabulary until 1924, and even as late as 1926 that vocabulary consisted of only thirty words.

For purposes of contrast and characterization, I have turned the Reverend Mr. Singh into a British minister and given him a British wife, and made up a whole cast of fictional orphans as well. Mohandas Jinnah did not exist in The Orphanage, nor did Rama, Preeti, Indira, Veda, or Krithi. But the wolf-girls did, and my descriptions of them and what they did come from the Reverend Mr. Singh’s own diary, published in a book entitled
Wolf-Children and Feral Man
(Harper and Brothers, 1939, 1941, 1942). Further information about them I gleaned from Charles Maclean’s brilliant book
The Wolf-Children
(Hill and Wang, 1978), and newspaper accounts of the time. My information about India’s folk-life and its jungle life came from innumerable books on folklore and wildlife, though I want to cite especially Robert McClung’s
Rajpur, Last of the Bengal Tigers
(Morrow, 1982). I also had the invaluable help of Dr. Krithivasan Ramamritham, who read my book in manuscript.

The Reverend Mr. Singh’s remarkable diary, with its accompanying photographs of the wolf-children, caused a great deal of controversy in the scientific communities from the day it was published. It was championed by such experts as child psychologist Arnold Gesell and called a complete hoax by others. But for the purposes of this novel, I have assumed that the diary is totally and unassailably accurate. Whether Singh exaggerated or not, I do not care, for, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I dwell in possibility.”

—
J.Y.

I
HAVE LONG BEEN
in love with the story of the Midnapore wolf girls. They were supposedly discovered by a minister in India in the 1920s when he shot a mother wolf at the entrance to her den. A lot of the historical record (which I wrote about with my daughter, Heidi Stemple, in our book
The Wolf Girls: An Unsolved Mystery from History
) was simply made up by the minister to raise money for his orphanage. It was further sensationalized by the press at the time, and then it was leeched onto by professors who wanted to make something of children growing up with wolves—feral children.

But the book I wrote became about more than just a (only slightly possible) true story. It’s about a young orphan who learns from the wolf girl Amala, rather than the other way around. Without words, Amala has little memory of her past life and cannot tell anyone about it. But how she lives in the orphanage after her capture is what convinces young Mohandas that he is a storyteller—for
he
has the words.

Yes, Mohandas speaks in a combination of his own voice and mine, too.

Jane Yolen

I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book,
Owl Moon
—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

And I am still writing.

I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in
Newsweek
close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are
Owl Moon
,
The Devil’s Arithmetic
, and
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?
My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called
Once Upon a Time
.

These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including
Not All Princesses Dress in Pink
and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like
Wild Wings
and
Color Me a Rhyme.

And I am still writing.

Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!