Children of the Wolf

  Often we saw peacocks perched on viny swings. And once, when we had stopped for lunch in one of the infrequent open places in the sal, Mr. Welles said to me, “Look carefully. Over there, Mohandas.”

  I looked and saw a herd of reddish-brown deer.

  “They are Axis deer. Axis axis,” Mr. Welles said. “Or as you natives call them, chital.”

  No sooner had he named them than they sprang up and ran off, leaving dust as thick as smoke behind.

  “Chital,” I repeated to myself as the cart started up once again and the sound of the stick against the wheels hid the sound of my mouthings. “Axis deer. Axis axis.” For I was determined not to lose this gift of names. Later I would write it down in my book and so make it mine forever.

  At night we slept under the cart, the four of us, and Mr. Welles slept in the cart. We kept a fire going at all times, encircling us, not for warmth but for protection against the night creatures of the jungle. One of the carters played a narh, and each evening before we settled down he would pull haunting music from the flute, a sound that seemed as much a part of the forest as the animal calls.

  We all took turns with the fire, even Mr. Welles. He would dismount from the cart, where he slept guarding the medicine chest and the Bibles and the pamphlets about cleanliness and Christ.

  And right after the playing of the narh, before we slept for the first round of the night, Mr. Welles would fire a shot from his big gun out past the fire. I wondered briefly out loud if he were aiming at ghosts, such things being ever present in my thoughts. But Rama, who had been on one or two trips before, said no.

  “It is part of his religion, I think,” said Rama, “for he calls on his god right before he pulls the trigger.”

  “Our god,” I reminded him.

  He gave that shake of the head somewhere between yes and no, and smiled, then moved away from me to the company of the two men.

  I wrote all these things down in my book, which I kept under the drum in the cart. Once I caught Mr. Welles looking in my book. My scribblings must have puzzled him. It seemed for a moment as if he were going to ask me about them. After all, he had given me the book to improve my English writing, and my ciphers were not exactly what he had in mind. But then he did not ask, after all; he just stroked his beard and looked off into the distance at a ray of sunlight that had pierced the tight green lacings of sal.

  It took two nights and three days to get to Godamuri, and all the time Mr. Welles pointed out the jungle to me. Some things he had learned from the Santal villagers in exchange for teaching them about the god he knew: how to clap hands in such a way as to call up the red jungle fowl, or how to tell time by watching the sal leaf wither. Other things he knew from books, such as the Latin names of the forest animals. He named in three different tongues each bird and creature we saw, and once he said to me, “A man has power over his world if he can name all the things in it, Mohandas. Just that way God has control over the world He made.”

  Mr. Welles never spoke in this way to Rama. But I do not think that Rama minded. He was always in front of the cart with the men, laughing and singing as they forced their sharp blades up and through the tangles of vines.

  Two nights and three days—and not once did we talk about the reason for this particular trip, about the manush-bagha that screamed outside of Godamuri. But the nearer we got to its dwelling place, the more I could see it in the eye of my mind. By the time we had reached the outskirts of Godamuri, the manush-bagha I feared was as tall as Mr. Welles and laughed as it gnawed on Christian bones. I dreamed of it by day and night. And though I was too afraid of it to say its name aloud and so call it to me, anagrams of its name decorated the pages of my book. Sham-bangs, I called it. Or bagman-hush. A poor kind of magic.

  The men of Godamuri rushed out to greet us through the green clumps of bamboo that hid the village. They had been warned of our arrival first by Chunarem the day before, and then by a charcoal burner, an old Santal man who lived a little way into the jungle. He had seen smoke from our second night’s fire and had hurried to the village, shouting his discovery. Visitors were a rarity in Godamuri. The people of the village often went out to the regional hâts, the fairs, to sell things, but foreigners rarely came in.

  The men washed our feet, which embarrassed me, but Rama whispered that the Santals do it to all strangers. And Mr. Welles reminded us that Christ himself washed the feet of his apostles. So I submitted to the custom but, I am afraid, with rather bad grace. Besides, I am extremely ticklish on the bottoms of my feet.

  It was quite a processional back to the village itself, along the one main street of packed dirt that threaded between the adobe-and-thatch huts. Rama and the two carters, plus Chunarem and the twenty or so who had come to greet us, went along in front. I hung back near the cart. Then the bullock, suspecting the end of his journey, hurried forward for the first time, and I had to trot to keep up.

  The village women, in white saris, with brass pitchers on their hips, came out to greet us. Mr. Welles blessed them all and dismounted from the cart. He lit his pipe. The smoke encircled his head like a halo.

  At that, I fell behind the cart and entered the village last of all, following the trail of smoke from Mr. Welles’ pipe, thinking about the manush-bagha, and being very afraid.

  VIEW FROM A MACHAN

  THE OTHERS STAYED UP LATE THAT NIGHT, DRINKING RICE beer, reciting love poems, and boasting of what they would do to the ghost. Only Mr. Welles and I retired early, he to his prayers and I to a rice straw pallet on the cold floor of Chunarem’s house.

  I did everything not to think about the coming morning: sums in my head, the words of hymns, a litany of my chores at The Home, starting with emptying the kitchen garbage and ending with cleaning the compound. I even spoke the names of all the children, their family names and their pet names and the cruel nicknames they each hated as well. But it was no use. All I could think of was the ghost, and, thinking of this, I fell into a troubled sleep.

  Rama shook me awake.

  “Come,” he said. “It is time.”

  We helped with the breakfast—woman’s work at The Home—and then, packing another meal on our backs, we met Mr. Welles at the door of the cowshed. He was rubbing his hands together and looking pleased.

  “They have built us a machan as I requested,” he said. “We will watch this so-called ghost from there.”

  Though I had never been up on a machan, still I knew all about them. What boy of my age did not? The machan would be high above the place that the manush-bagha inhabited. And unlike tigers, ghosts do not climb trees. Yet I did not think it would be high enough, even then, for me to feel safe.

  We went out boldly, Mr. Welles, Rama, and I, for it was our duty to show a good face to the Santals, who are but silly, frightened villagers. Chunarem was most reluctant to come, but Mr. Welles insisted that he had to show us the way. The rest of the Santals, even the ones who had boasted so loudly the night before, stayed behind. It was enough, they said, that they had built the machan. That had exhausted their courage. They did not want to return and further anger the ghost. This time we did not take the bullock and the cart, but our own carters came; they believed themselves well under the protection of Mr. Welles and his god.

  Chunarem led us less than three miles from the village. His people pick a sal leaf and watch it turn brittle and in this way measure distances. It is not terribly accurate. Mr. Welles greatly preferred his pocket watch, and I agree. But the three miles Chunarem promised were foreshortened by the sal leaf. We went into the forest proper, past thick brakes of rattan and bamboo.

  At last we came to a small clearing dominated by an ancient mohua tree, and Chunarem signaled us to stop. It was in that tree, its trunk crisscrossed with the marks of many bear claws, that the machan had been built at a height of fifteen feet. Mr. Welles rested his smoothbore against the tree and nodded silently, looking around. To one side of the clearing, near a stand of blackthorn, was a large termite mound. In that mound, acc
ording to the trembling Chunarem, lived the manush-bagha. It came out only at dusk and had been seen many times. He had seen it himself. Twice.

  Though it was midmorning, still I feared going close to the mound, but on a sign from Mr. Welles, I joined him and Rama at its foot. Even with my heart beating wildly and tremors sliding up and down the insides of my legs, I did not dare disobey his direct command.

  “Tell me what you see, Rama,” Mr. Welles said.

  Rama shrugged. “A white ant mound,” he said. Then he smiled. It was a perfectly good answer, and he knew it, though he used no more words than were necessary.

  “And you, Mohandas?”

  Let loose by his command, my tongue clattered away. “A temple of dirt, sir, with a hollow door leading down,” I said. Then, seeing the remains of a smaller, similar mound nearby, obviously destroyed by last year’s rains, its secret, twisting passageways laid open to the sky, I added, “A central mound that is perhaps surrounded by smaller mounds that are like hallways between rooms.”

  “Good, keen observation. You should do likewise, Rama,” Mr. Welles said.

  Rama was not shamed by this. He smiled more broadly and shrugged, as if to say he had seen the same and not thought it worth mentioning.

  Mr. Welles continued. “Do either of you think a ghost could—or would—inhabit such a place?”

  Chunarem answered quickly, “But it does, sahib. I have seen it.”

  “You have seen something,” agreed Mr. Welles. Then he turned and looked directly at me. “Mohandas?”

  My wide-open eyes were my only answer.

  “Never mind,” said Mr. Welles. “We will see at dusk what this ghost of Godamuri really is.”

  “You will shoot it, sahib?” asked Chunarem, gesturing toward the smoothbore leaning against the fig tree. “You will kill it?”

  Mr. Welles pulled out his pipe, lit it, and laughed. “If it is a ghost,” he said, “then I doubt a gun could kill it, for it is not alive. But anything else will fall to my shot.”

  “But it is a ghost,” Chunarem argued.

  Mr. Welles laughed again and pointed at the ground around the mound with his walking stick. “A ghost with wolf feet,” he said, “is no ghost that I recognize. But certainly one I might shoot.” He reached out and patted Chunarem on the shoulder. “Do not worry. By tonight this ghost will be explained.”

  I did not understand that exchange at all, but was thankful at last when we were allowed to leave the mound and make our way to the other side of the clearing, under the mantle of the fig. There we spread a cloth and ate our luncheon in silence. I kept my back against the tree, having checked it first for snakes.

  Frequently Mr. Welles stood up and walked back to look around the clearing, poking at things with a stick and leaving a trail of pipe smoke to mark his passage. Chunarem began a long, pointless story about a village festival, which Rama and the carters seemed to enjoy. I drew pictures in my book of Mr. Welles’ smoke as it hovered over the mound. In the drawing the smoke looked like a ghost. I surrounded the picture with a border of crosses.

  Above us in a tree a colony of tangurs, their tails curved above their backs like question marks, scolded and warned of intruders. Then at last, wearying of their inattentive audience, they moved off, leaping from branch to branch until they disappeared into the jungle canopy.

  Long before the sun started down, we climbed the rope ladder on the blind side of the mohua tree up to the machan. I pulled the ladder up after us. Chunarem recited the Pujas before going back to the village, rather thankful to quit the place, and our two carters went with him to feed the bullock. It was just the three of us in the tree. Mr. Welles put his pipe away and cocked his gun. We waited.

  Almost an hour went by. Shadows began to creep into the clearing. A slight breeze stirred the leaves. We did not move, not even to slap away the mosquitoes. I was lulled into a half sleep by the cicada hum and the infrequent low call of the green fruit pigeons as they settled down for the night.

  Then, all of a sudden, out of the main entrance to the mound, which was partially hidden by a plum bush, came a full-grown wolf, its ears back, head up, sniffing. It was soon followed by another, and then a third close on its heels. They came drawn out together in a graceful motion, sniffing in unison. After them came two small cubs. They were all a kind of indistinct gray-brown, with white stomachs and the sloping hindquarters of a jackal. The first wolf turned, and the others half lay down before her, wagging their tails, cowed by her great pale yellow eyes.

  And then the ghost emerged.

  Hand and foot, it was like a human being, just as Chunarem had said. Its enormous head was covered with hair as alive as a nest of snakes, and a sharp, pointed light-brown muzzle of a face peered out of the nest. It looked around once, twice, then ran on all fours with a quick, crablike gait and lay down next to the mother wolf.

  The manush-bagha was clearly not itself a wolf, for it had a covering of that horrible hair only from its head to halfway down its body. It had no tail, and its legs were long with jointed knees. It ran more like a scuffling squirrel than with the long, eager lopings of a wolf. Once it raised its head up toward the machan, and I held my breath in fear that it would notice me. I could see its bright eyes. They were dark, piercing, and inhuman.

  Suddenly a second ghost, exactly like the first, only much smaller, came out of the hole. It rubbed against the mother wolf and against the other ghost, then it reached out for the wolf’s ear with one grubby paw.

  “Shoot!” croaked Rama.

  Mr. Welles raised the gun, then lowered it slowly and shook his head.

  I looked down to see what it was he saw.

  At Rama’s voice, the wolves and the manush-baghas had disappeared into the ever-darkening forest. The clearing was full of shadows and nothing more.

  We climbed down from the machan and, without speaking, returned to Godamuri. I looked only at the path beneath my feet the entire way, afraid and yet strangely thankful that we had not shot the ghosts, but more thankful still that we arrived safely in that ugly little village alive enough to drink cup after cup of their famous rice beer and to beat the drums that marked the meeting of the missionary and the manush-bagha.

  CATCHING A GHOST

  IN THE MORNING MY head felt swollen, and throat ached, and I swore that I would never again drink rice beer. I remembered little of the night, but Mr. Welles greeted me with the same stern courtesy he always gave to Rama, not the gentler inviting tones he normally used with me. It was as if he placed me in a different category now that I had gone out carousing with the village men. I did not like it and wondered if I had said or done something foolish in his hearing, but surely Rama would have commented on it.

  It was only after I splashed water on my face that I recalled our mission for the day. We were to capture the manush-baghas, bringing one or both back.

  The plan, as Mr. Welles had explained it, was quite simple.

  “We will take my twenty-bore, our camp kit, the great winding sheets the Santals called gelaps, and my field glasses,” he said. “The carters will each have a rifle, and you boys each a shovel. The village men will accompany us and beat the bushes, raising a shout from afar. They are too terrified, poor heathen, to come closer.” He looked straight at Rama. “We must show them how brave a Christian can be.”

  Rama could not meet his eyes, and I recalled Rama’s frightened shout.

  But whether or not Rama was still frightened, I was infected with fear as great as or greater than that of any heathen. My body was rashed with it. I shuffled my feet.

  Rama looked over and smiled for the first time that day, as if my fear excused his.

  “We will be brave, sir,” he said, placing an elbow expertly in my ribs.

  I coughed. “Unlike the Santals, sir,” I added.

  “Good boys,” Mr. Welles said.

  At first Rama and I walked with the beaters, tramping so loudly through the bushes that the noise drove both animals and fear before us. The sa
kwa sounded every so often, and at each horn blow we raised a shout anew.

  Several small hares started at our feet. I pretended my fear was fastened to the shoulder of one particular hare whose left ear was splashed with white. As it dashed into the undergrowth, I could almost feel my terror disappear with it.

  But then an older man, speaking to Chunarem, who was reluctantly with us, said, “I have faced unarmed the charge of a tiger and lived. I would do that again rather than face this ghost.”

  At his words the hare loosed my fear, and it bounded back to me, seeming to stay in my throat. I could hardly swallow. So I went back from the line of beaters to walk by Mr. Welles’ side, comforted by his presence and the big twenty-bore gun he carried.

  Up ahead of us the scattered line of men kept walking between the trees. Their white loincloths were stray patches of light in the shadowy jungle. It was like some kind of ritual dance, with the sakwa accompaniment. I was both part of it and apart from it, concentrating on my own steps. The three miles that day were every bit as long as the withering leaf foretold, yet we came at last to the clearing.