T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

He stood looking down at her, gripping his drink, feeling awkward and foolish in his own house. He was thinking of Seymour (or “See More,” because as a pup he was always running off after things in the distance), picturing him now for the first time in how many years? Something passed through him then, a pang of regret carried in his blood, in his neurons: Seymour. He’d almost succeeded in forgetting him. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

She smiled. She was leaning back against the wall now, cradling her knees in the net of her interwoven fingers. “I’ve been training myself. My senses, I mean.” She paused, still smiling up at him. “Did you know that when the Ninemile wolves came down into Montana from Alberta they were following scent trails laid down years before? Think about it. All that weather, the seasons, trees falling and decaying. Can you imagine that?”

“Cara’s allergic,” he said. “I mean, that’s why we had to get rid of him. Seymour. His name was Seymour.”

There was a long braying burst of laughter from Ben Ober, who had an arm round the husband’s shoulder and was painting something in the air with a stiffened forefinger. Cara stood just beyond him, with the La Portes, her face glowing as if it had been basted. Celia La Porte looked from him to the girl and back again, then arched her eyebrows wittily and raised her long-stemmed glass of viognier, as if toasting him. All three of them burst into laughter. Julian turned his back.

“You didn’t take him to the pound — did you?” The girl’s eyes went flat. “Because that’s a death sentence, I hope you realize that.”

“Cara found a home for him.”

They both looked to Cara then, her shining face, her anchorwoman’s hair. “I’m sure,” the girl said.

“No, really. She did.”

The girl shrugged, looked away from him. “It doesn’t matter,” she said with a flare of anger, “dogs are just slaves anyway.”

Kamala and Amala

The Reverend Singh had wanted to return to the site the following afternoon and excavate the den, convinced that these furtive night creatures were in fact human children, children abducted from their cradles and living under the dominion of beasts — unbaptized and unsaved, their eternal souls at risk — but urgent business called him away to the south. When he returned, late in the evening, ten days later, he sat over a dinner of cooked vegetables, rice and dal, and listened as Chunarem told him of the wolf bitch that had haunted the village two years back after her pups had been removed from a den in the forest and sold for a few annas apiece at the Khuar market. She could be seen as dusk fell, her dugs swollen and glistening with extruded milk, her eyes shining with an unearthly blue light against the backdrop of the forest. People threw stones, but she never flinched. Everywhere she left diggings in the earth for farmers to step into on their way out to the fields, attempting, some said, to memorialize that den that had been robbed — or to avenge it. And she howled all night from the fringes of the village, howled so that it seemed she was inside the walls of every hut simultaneously, crooning her sorrow into the ears of each sleeping villager. The village dogs kept hard by, and those that didn’t were found in the morning, their throats torn out. “It was she,” the Reverend exclaimed, setting down his plate as the candles guttered and moths beat at the netting. “She was the abductress — it’s as plain as morning.”

A few days later he got up a party that included several railway men and returned to the termite mound, bent on rescue. In place of the rifle he carried a stout cudgel cut from a mahua branch, and he’d thought to bring a weighted net along as well. The sun hung overhead. All was still. And then the hired beaters started in, the noise of them racketing through the trees, coming closer and closer until they converged on the site, driving hares and bandicoots and the occasional gaur before them. The railway men tensed in the machan, their rifles trained on the entrance to the burrow, while Reverend Singh stood by with a party of diggers to effect the rescue when the time came. It was unlikely that the wolves would have been abroad in daylight, and so it was no surprise to the Reverend that no large animal was seen to run before the beaters and seek the shelter of the den. “Very well,” he said, giving the signal. “I am satisfied. Commence the digging.”

As soon as the blades of the first shovels struck the mound, a protracted snarling could be heard emanating from the depths of the burrow. After a few minutes of the tribesmen’s digging, the she-wolf sprang out at them, ears flattened to her head, teeth flashing. One of the diggers went for her with his spear just as the railway men opened fire from the machan and turned her, snapping, on her own wounds; a moment later she lay stretched out dead in the dust of the laterite clay. In a trice the burrow was uncovered, and there they were, the spirits made flesh, huddled in a defensive posture with the two wolf cubs, snarling and panicked, scrabbling at the clay with their broken nails to dig themselves deeper. The tribesmen dropped their shovels and ran, panicked themselves, even as the Reverend Singh eased himself down into the hole and tried to separate child from wolf.

The larger of the wolf children, her hair a feral cap that masked her features, came at him biting and scratching, and finally he had no recourse but to throw the net over the pullulating bodies and restrain each of the creatures separately in one of the long, winding gelaps the local tribesmen use for winter wear. On inspection it was determined that the children were females, aged approximately three and six, of native stock, and apparently, judging from the dissimilarity of their features, unrelated. And this puzzled the Reverend, so far as he was concerned with the she-wolf’s motives and behavior — she’d abducted the children on separate occasions, perhaps even from separate locales, and over the course of some time. Was this the bereaved bitch Chunarem had reported? Was she acting out of revenge? Or merely trying, in her own unknowable way, to replace what had been taken from her and ease the burden of her heart?

In any case, he had the children confined to a pen so that he could observe them, before caging them in the back of the bullock cart for the trip to Midnapore and the orphanage, where he planned to baptize and civilize them. He spent three full days studying them and taking notes in a leatherbound book he kept always at his side. He saw that they persisted in going on all fours, as if they didn’t know any other way, and fled from the sunlight as if it were an instrument of torture. They thrust forward to lap water like the beasts of the forest and took nothing in their mouths but bits of twig and stone. At night they came to life and stalked the enclosure with shining eyes like the bhuts half the villagers still believed them to be. They did not know any of the languages of the human species, but communicated with each other — and with their sibling wolves — with a series of grunts, snarls and whimpers. When the moon rose, they sat on their haunches and howled.

It was Mrs. Singh who named them, some weeks later. They were pitiful, filthy, soiled with their own urine and excrement, undernourished and undersized. They had to be caged to keep them from harming the other children, and Mrs. Singh, though it broke her heart to do it, ordered them put in restraints so that the filth and the animal smell could be washed from them, even as their heads were shaved to defeat the ticks and fleas they’d inherited from the only mother they’d ever known. “They need delicate names,” Mrs. Singh told her husband, “names to reflect the beauty and propriety they will grow into.” She named the younger sister Amala, after a bright yellow flower native to Bengal, and she named the elder Kamala, after the lotus that blossoms deep in the jungle pools.