Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman Read Free Book Online

south, Father and I passed Costello’s Saloon and Shooting Gallery, quiet at this time in the morning, and turned in to the little alleyway that led to Dr. Scott’s barn.
    Freddy posed a familiar question. Why did I think he and my mother were so interested in instances of the feral-child phenomenon? They previously journeyed, just a few years before, to France, in order to investigate the home ground of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, 1731’s Wild Girl of Songi, as well as that of Victor of Aveyron, the celebrated wild boy of 1800.
    Freddy felt himself fascinated to the degree that he bought at high expense a few tooth relics dating from the Songi girl, which had fallen out of her mouth when she left the forest and began to eat a European diet. Eighteenth-century thinkers worried over the question of whether wild children could be said to have a soul. They seemed to exist in a no-man’s-land, neither rational being nor instinctual animal.
    I knew, or thought I knew, why such bizarre creatures fascinated my parents. Freddy occupied himself as an independent natural scientist—independent, that is, not associated with any university or institute. The question roiling the world was, of course, Darwin’s idea of natural selection. His book threw a monkey wrench into everyone’s works.
    Freddy became an instant proponent.
    The wild child is a blank slate. He (or she) is perfect for investigations of whether our physical inheritance influences us more than do the circumstances of our raising, or whether it might be the other way around. Nature or nurture? Can a proper, caring environment make a silk purse of a sow’s ear, in other words, or must that ear remain what its nature made it, the auricular flap of a swine?
    Freddy and Anna Maria always hoped to acquire a feral child of their own, which they planned to include in their household, somewhat like King George I’s keeping a court pet, Peter the Wild Boy.
    Or perhaps it was more than that. My father saw himself turningscience on its head with his research. He collected people. The naturalist John Burroughs studied beetles. Darwin himself did barnacles. Friedrich-August-Heinrich Delegate, on the other hand, would be satisfied with nothing less than the hominid in whole.
    He collected within his net Tu-Li and the Zuni berdache, both of them specimens prized for their exotic bearing, from whom he hoped to learn the secrets of the self. And those two were not the first, only the most recent.
    My mother had a more personal interest in the affair, seeking a surrogate replacement for my late sister, a treasured daughter lost in toddlerhood.
    “They’re always fakes,” Freddy said as we approached the barn at the end of the little alley. “Any wild child we have ever been presented with has always proved out totally bogus. This one here, for example. We will walk in and catch the girl reading her Bible.”
    He swung open the door to the barn, failing to knock, perhaps as a strategy of surprise.
    But rather I was the one surprised, for upon entering to the balcony gallery of the place we found Dr. Scott waiting as if he expected us.
    “The Messieurs Delegate,
père et fils,
” he said, opening his arms to embrace my father. Freddy headed him off with a hearty handshake.
    My father had evidently made an appointment with Scott. He constantly put me off my guard in this fashion, showing himself to be a step ahead, working in secretive ways.
    “We are sorry to be late,” Freddy said. “We were held up by a killing in town.”
    “Poor Hank Monk,” Dr. Scott said, bowing his head for a full half second before brightening again. Monk, he indicated, had been a Savage Girl enthusiast.
    With Scott was a welcoming committee of sorts, made up of two remarkable-looking individuals, one whom the doctor introduced as Jake Woodworth—an ancient, entirely white-haired mountain man dressed head to foot in elkskin—the other a round-bodied woman of middle years whom he called the