Children of the Wolf by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page A

will go with you. It has been weeks since I have gone. My mouth aches for rice beer and the talk of men.”
    I shook my head but did not answer, only looked away from him.
    And then he knew. For a moment he said nothing, then in Bengali he spat out, “They are evil.”
    “They are children,” I answered, “even as you and I.”
    “No!” he said fiercely.
    “Look at them, Rama,” I begged. “They have arms and legs and faces and bodies like ours.”
    “Do not compare me with those—those things.”
    Things . Neither beast nor human. In a way it was true. By day they were such a sorry lot, and I think somehow they sensed it. That was why they preferred the darkness. In the direct sun they always breathed harder and sought out the shadowed corners to hide in. Fire of any kind made them whimper with fear. Even a lit match threw them into paroxysms of anxiety. I never, after that first night when they were caged, used my kerosene lamp.
    It was in the daytime that their physical differences were obvious. Their arms and hands were longer than ours, reaching almost to their knees. The nails of their fingers were worn on the inside and strangely rounded. Mr. Welles surmised that was due to all their scratching and scrabbling in the dirt.
    Their feet were peculiar as well, the big toes longer and somewhat crooked, making an angle when they stood flat-footed on the ground. Almost ape foot, Indira said, not like a proper wolf foot. And when they stood up, their feet rested wholly on the ground with no visible arch, the toes spread out to support their weight.
    They walked on hands and feet, not like a human at all. Forced upright, they teetered painfully, dropping back to all fours as soon as possible. I wrote a sketch of them in my book and tried to walk that way myself. After a minute it hurt my back and strained my thighs, yet Amala and Kamala ran quickly in this manner, scuttling across the courtyard when they played with the dogs.
    It was their faces that were the strangest of all, and the most frightening, for it was there that they seemed the most removed from humanity: eyes set in two hollows, thin, long noses ending in two wide nostrils, and the nostrils themselves able to widen and flare as easily as a dog’s. Their eyeteeth were longer and more pointed than normal.
    Rama called them ugly. “Pig ugly,” he said.
    Yet I saw a strange, perverse beauty in their faces, a look that hovered somewhere between the human and the beast.
    After the first week they ate from a plate, more in imitation of the puppies than the people. They lowered their mouths to lap at bowls placed on the ground. It appalled Cook, but they still preferred their meat raw or at least undercooked. If given a bowl of rice and vegetables and meat, they would nose out the meat and leave the rest. So Mrs. Welles insisted that, for a while at least, they be catered to, although Mr. Welles worried that a diet of near-raw meat would keep their tempers inflamed.
    “They will be dead in a week if they do not eat,” said Mrs. Welles sensibly, and so it was settled.
    Since Cook threatened, halfheartedly, to leave rather than serve meat raw (she preferred burning the food, said Indira), Mrs. Welles sighed and took on the job herself.
    “We must slowly accustom them to being human,” she explained to us all. That was at dinner, right after Krithi had found them eating and rolling in the half-picked carcass of a wood pigeon that had flown over the compound wall in the night.
    Mr. Welles saw his duty differently. He would first teach them to speak and then to be Christians. He enlisted me as his chief helper.
    “Mohandas,” he said as I stood uneasily waiting to be informed of my new duties. “Without the Word, they will remain beasts. And though the Lord loves the beasts of the fields and forests, He prefers human beings, for He made us—and not them—in His image.”
    Still I waited.
    “You will be let off all other chores and tend only to the