the graves are often so shallow that the
bodies are scarcely covered. The low-caste men, whose duty it is to
bury stray corpses, do not expend more labour over their task than
they can help.

Jackals generally travel in companies at night, and they utter a most
peculiar and rather attractive sharp cry in chorus, which they are
commonly said to repeat after exact intervals of time. But solitary
jackals are often to be met with. In the mountainous district somewhat
farther away wolves are still found, and they do a little damage
amongst the flocks of the villages. Some two or three hundred persons
are carried off yearly by wolves in British India. The majority of
these victims are very young children who have strayed away a little
from their parent's hut.

There is a widespread belief in rural India that wolves, instead of
devouring these babies, occasionally bring them up amongst their own
young ones. It has been questioned whether these stories of
"wolf-boys" have any foundation in fact. A schoolmaster, whose
evidence was reliable, told me that he had actually seen a boy of this
description brought to a mission in North India by people who had
found him in the jungle. They led him by a string, as if he had been a
wild animal. The Mission accepted the charge, and the boy proved quiet
and docile; but he never learnt to speak, nor, in fact, was it
possible to teach him anything. He did not join the other boys in
their games. When he went to church he sat there quietly, but without
any apparent understanding of what it meant. He learnt, however, to
smoke, and made signs to indicate that a cigarette would be
acceptable; and if one was given him he gave a kind of salute by way
of acknowledgment, which shows that his mind was not quite a blank. He
seemed to be about ten years old when the people brought him, but
whether he was still alive the schoolmaster did not know.

Even in this case there was no direct evidence to connect the boy with
wolves. But the natives have so many stories of the kind that it would
seem likely that there is some truth in them. It is not inconceivable
that the young wolves might welcome the arrival of the strange child
as a new playmate, and that if its life was spared at the first the
wolf-boy would, through his human nature, gain a sort of ascendancy
over his foster-parents, and they would eventually fear to hurt him,
after the fashion of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's _Jungle Book_.

The Asiatic