WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT THIS BOOK
ON OCTOBER 9, 1920, the reverend J. A. L. Singh, an Indian missionary and rector of The Orphanage in Midnapore India, led a party of hunters into the sal jungle. Their express purpose was to discover what was haunting the Santal village of Godamuri, for the Reverend Mr. Singh, known as a mighty hunter, had been asked by one of the village leaders, a man named Chunarem, to help.
The Singh party found two children in a wolf’s den that was carved out of a white ant mound. Along with the children, they discovered a mother wolf and her cubs. They shot the large wolf, sold off the cubs, and the Reverend Mr. Singh brought the two children back with him after they had been almost starved to death by the superstitious and frightened villagers.
Amala and Kamala, as they were named, lived very much like animals at first, eating raw meat, swallowing gravel, gnawing bones. They ran on all fours and refused to wear clothing. The most-startling part of the story was that their eyes apparently glowed with blue lights in the dark.
A year later, on September 21, 1921, Amala died. Kamala lived on at the Singh orphanage another eight years, dying on November 14, 1929. I have, for the sake of the novel, telescoped Kamala’s progress. In reality she did not start to walk upright for two and a half years or to speak for three. She did not have the semblance of a regular vocabulary until 1924, and even as late as 1926 that vocabulary consisted of only thirty words.
For purposes of contrast and characterization, I have turned the Reverend Mr. Singh into a British minister and given him a British wife, and made up a whole cast of fictional orphans as well. Mohandas Jinnah did not exist in The Orphanage, nor did Rama, Preeti, Indira, Veda, or Krithi. But the wolf-girls did, and my descriptions of them and what they did come from the Reverend Mr. Singh’s own diary, published in a book entitled Wolf-Children and Feral Man (Harper and Brothers, 1939, 1941, 1942). Further information about them I gleaned from Charles Maclean’s brilliant book The Wolf-Children (Hill and Wang, 1978), and newspaper accounts of the time. My information about India’s folk-life and its jungle life came from innumerable books on folklore and wildlife, though I want to cite especially Robert McClung’s Rajpur, Last of the Bengal Tigers (Morrow, 1982). I also had the invaluable help of Dr. Krithivasan Ramamritham, who read my book in manuscript.
The Reverend Mr. Singh’s remarkable diary, with its accompanying photographs of the wolf-children, caused a great deal of controversy in the scientific communities from the day it was published. It was championed by such experts as child psychologist Arnold Gesell and called a complete hoax by others. But for the purposes of this novel, I have assumed that the diary is totally and unassailably accurate. Whether Singh exaggerated or not, I do not care, for, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I dwell in possibility.”
—J.Y.
A Note from the Author
I HAVE LONG BEEN in love with the story of the Midnapore wolf girls. They were supposedly discovered by a minister in India in the 1920s when he shot a mother wolf at the entrance to her den. A lot of the historical record (which I wrote about with my daughter, Heidi Stemple, in our book The Wolf Girls: An Unsolved Mystery from History) was simply made up by the minister to raise money for his orphanage. It was further sensationalized by the press at the time, and then it was leeched onto by professors who wanted to make something of children growing up with wolves—feral children.
But the book I wrote became about more than just a (only slightly possible) true story. It’s about a young orphan who learns from the wolf girl Amala, rather than the other way around. Without words, Amala has little memory of her past life and cannot tell anyone about it. But how she lives in the orphanage after her capture is what convinces young Mohandas that he is a storyteller—for he has the words.
Yes, Mohandas speaks in a combination of his own voice and mine, too.
Jane Yolen
A Personal History by Jane Yolen
I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!
We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.
When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.
I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book, Owl Moon—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.
And I am still writing.
I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in Newsweek close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.
The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called Once Upon a Time.
These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including Not All Princesses Dress in Pink and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like Wild Wings and Color Me a Rhyme.
And I am still writing.
Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!
Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.
And yes—I am still writing.
At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.
Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, wh
en I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)
Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.
Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book Owl Moon in 2011.
Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.
Visiting Andrew Lang’s gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by Jane Yolen
Cover design by Gabriel Guma
978-1-4804-2333-6
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Jane Yolen, Children of the Wolf
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