II. Vocabulary in Context

TEXT: WOLF-CHILDREN OF INDIA

In the year 1920, in an isolated part of India, a missionary named J.A.L. Singh was visiting some isolated villages. One of the inhabitantscomplained to him of an evil spirit, a "man-ghost" that was living nearby with a family of wolves. The villagers were very frightened of this creature. Singh asked to see it, so they took him to the place late one afternoon. In the half-light of evening he saw a group of wolves emerging one by one from their "home," a hole in a mound of earth. Singh counted three adult wolves and two young cubs. Then he saw the "man-ghost," which did indeed have the body of a small human, but whose head "was a big ball of something covering the shoulders," as he later wrote in his journal. Immediately after it came another, smaller version of the same kind of creature. Singh immediately realized that these two beings were human children, even though they acted exactly like the wolves, looking around to the right and left before coming out of the hole and walking on all fours.

The two "man-ghosts" turned out to be two little girls, one around one and a half and the other about eight years of age. Mr. Singh took the children home with him to the city of Midnapore, where he directed an orphanage. He and his wife named the younger “Amala” and the elder “Kamala”.

At first the girls could not stand up at all. They moved around mostly on their elbows and knees, the only food they would eat was raw meat and raw milk. They repeatedly tried to escape, and they bit any of the other children who tried to stop them.

They had very sharpened senses, as wolves and some other animals do. They could see perfectly well on the darkest night when humans could see nothing. They also had very sharp hearing. They seemed insensitive to heat or cold.

Coming to the orphanage was a traumatic experience for the little girls, but a worse one followed about a year later. They both became very ill, and Amala died. At first Kamala did not appear to understand what had happened, but eventually she seemed to comprehend that her "sister" was gone, and a single drop of water fell from each eye. They were the only tears she ever shed. Afterwards she seemed to be very lonely, and she began to keep company with the animals of the orphanage. She seemed in danger of going crazy from loneliness, but still she wanted nothing to do with humans.

As the years passed a "man-ghost" very gradually began to behave in a more human way, taking food with her hand instead of with her teeth, drinking from a glass, bathing herself. Kamala seemed to be intelligent, and the adults who observed her concluded that her odd behavior was the result not of stupidity, but of growing up with the wolves instead of with human models of behavior. Within three years she no longer wanted to go outside at night; indeed, she came to fear the night and preferred to be inside. At around the same time she first stood up on her two legs, but it took about three more years for her to learn to walk, and she never was able to run upright like a human child. Over the years she began to understand language more and more. By 1926 she could carry on a very limited conversation with a vocabulary of about three dozen words.

As Kamala took on more human habits, it was observed that her ability to see in the dark, her keen hearing and sense of smell, and her insensitivity to heat and cold left her. She began to like her blanket at night, and insisted on wearing clothes, especially red ones. She would eat and drink only from her plate and glass.

Unfortunately, her health began to fail almost exactly nine years from the date of her capture. On November 14, 1929, she passed away. By this time she must have been around seventeen years old, though in terms of human development she behaved more like a child of about two and a half.

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