In another case the child was kidnapped at three and recovered at nine. He muttered, but could not articulate. As in the other case, he could not be enticed to wear clothes. From constantly being on all-fours the front of this child's knees and his elbows had become hardened. In the third case the father identified a son who had been carried away at the age of six, and was found four years afterward. The intellectual deterioration was not so marked. The boy understood signs, and his hearing was exceedingly acute; when directed by movements of the hands to assist the cultivators in turning out cattle, he readily comprehended what was asked of him; yet this lad, whose vulpine career was so short, could neither talk nor utter any decidedly articulate sound.
The author of the pamphlet expressed some surprise that there was no case on record in which a grown man had been found in such association. This curious collection of cases of wolf-children is attributed to Colonel Sleeman, a well-known officer, who is known to have been greatly interested in the subject, and who for a long time resided in the forests of India. A copy, now a rarity, is in the South Kensington Museum.
An interesting case of a wolf-child was reported many years ago in Chambers' Journal. In the Etwah district, near the banks of the river Jumna, a boy was captured from the wolves. After a time this child was restored to his parents, who, however, "found him very difficult to manage, for he was most fractious and troublesome--in fact, just a caged wild beast. Often during the night for hours together he would give vent to most unearthly yells and moans, destroying the rest and irritating the tempers of his neighbors and generally making night hideous. On one occasion his people chained him by the waist to a tree on the outskirts of the village. Then a rather curious incident occurred. It was a bright moonlight night, and two wolf cubs (undoubtedly those in whose companionship he had been captured), attracted by his cries while on the prowl, came to him, and were distinctly seen to gambol around him with as much familiarity and affection as if they considered him quite one of themselves. They only left him on the approach of morning, when movement and stir again arose in the village. This boy did not survive long. He never spoke, nor did a single ray of human intelligence ever shed its refining light over his debased features."Recently a writer in the Badmington Magazine, in speaking of the authenticity of wolf-children, says:--"A jemidar told me that when he was a lad he remembered going, with others, to see a wolf-child which had been netted. Some time after this, while staying at an up-country place called Shaporeooundie, in East Bengal, it was my fortune to meet an Anglo-Indian gentleman who had been in the Indian civil service for upward of thirty years, and had traveled about during most of that time; from him I learned all I wanted to know of wolf-children, for he not only knew of several cases, but had actually seen and examined, near Agra, a child which had been recovered from the wolves. The story of Romulus and Remus, which all schoolboys and the vast majority of grown people regard as a myth, appears in a different light when one studies the question of wolf-children, and ascertains how it comes to pass that boys are found living on the very best terms with such treacherous and rapacious animals as wolves, sleeping with them in their dens, sharing the raw flesh of deer and kids which the she-wolf provides, and, in fact, leading in all essentials the actual life of a wolf.
"A young she-wolf has a litter of cubs, and after a time her instinct tells her that they will require fresh food. She steals out at night in quest of prey. Soon she espies a weak place in the fence (generally constructed of thatching grass and bamboos)which encloses the compound, or 'unguah,' of a poor villager. She enters, doubtless, in the hope of securing a kid; and while prowling about inside looks into a hut where a woman and infant are soundly sleeping. In a moment she has pounced on the child, and is out of reach before its cries can attract the villagers.
Arriving safely at her den under the rocks, she drops the little one among her cubs. At this critical time the fate of the child hangs in the balance. Either it will be immediately torn to pieces and devoured, or in a most wonderful way remain in the cave unharmed. In the event of escape, the fact may be accounted for in several ways. Perhaps the cubs are already gorged when the child is thrown before them, or are being supplied with solid food before their carnivorous instinct is awakened, so they amuse themselves by simply licking the sleek, oily body (Hindoo mothers daily rub their boy babies with some native vegetable oil) of the infant, and thus it lies in the nest, by degrees getting the odor of the wolf cubs, after which the mother wolf will not molest it.
In a little time the infant begins to feel the pangs of hunger, and hearing the cubs sucking, soon follows their example. Now the adoption is complete, all fear of harm to the child from wolves has gone, and the foster-mother will guard and protect it as though it were of her own flesh and blood.
"The mode of progression of these children is on all fours--not, as a rule, on the hands and feet, but on the knees and elbows.
The reason the knees are used is to be accounted for by the fact that, owing to the great length of the human leg and thigh in proportion to the length of the arm, the knee would naturally be brought to the ground, and the instep and top of the toes would be used instead of the sole and heel of the almost inflexible foot. Why the elbow should be employed instead of the hand is less easy to understand, but probably it is better suited to give support to the head and fore-part of the body.
"Some of these poor waifs have been recovered after spending ten or more years in the fellowship of wolves, and, though wild and savage at first, have in time become tractable in some degree.
