the hairless pink young emerged from the pouch, she tried not to feel anything as the dogs snapped them up one by one.
CARA
“Y OU MEAN you didn’t confront her?”
Cara was in her royal purple robe—her “wrapper,” as she insisted on calling it, as if they were at a country manor in the Cotswolds entertaining Lord and Lady Muckbright instead of in a tract house in suburban Connecticut—and she’d paused with a forkful of mushroom omelet halfway to her mouth. She was on her third cup of coffee and wearing her combative look.
“Confront her? I barely had time to recognize she was human.” He was at the sink, scrubbing the omelet pan, and he paused to look bitterly out into the gray vacancy of the yard. “What did you expect me to do, chase her down? Make a citizen’s arrest? What?”
The sound of Cara buttering her toast—she might have been flaying the flesh from a bone—set his teeth on edge. “I don’t know,” she said, “but we can’t just have strangers lurking around any time they feel like it, can we? I mean, there are
laws
—”
“The way you talk you’d think I invited her. You think I like mental cases peeping in the window so I can’t even have a moment’s peace in my own house? On a Saturday morning, no less?”
“So do something.”
“What? You tell me.”
“Call the police, why don’t you? That should be obvious, shouldn’t it? And that’s another thing—”
“I thought she was a bear.”
“A bear? What, are you out of your mind? Are you drunk or something? A bear? I’ve never heard anything so asinine.”
That was when the telephone rang. It was Ben Ober, his voice scraping through the wires like a set of hard chitinous claws scrabbling against the side of the house. “Julian?” he shouted. “Julian?”
Julian reassured him. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s me. I’m here.”
“Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Listen, she’s out in my yard right now, out behind the shed with a, I don’t know, some kind of wolf it looks like, and that Afghan nobody seems to know who’s the owner of—”
“Who?” he said, but even as he said it he knew. “Who’re you talking about?”
“The dog woman.” There was a pause, and Julian could hear him breathing into the mouthpiece as if he were deep underwater. “She seems to be—I think she’s killing something out there.”
THE WOLF CHILDREN OF MAYURBHANJ
I T WAS HIGH SUMMER , just before the rains set in, and the bush had shriveled back under the sun till you could see up the skirts of the sal trees, and all that had been hidden was revealed. People began to talk of a disturbing presence in the jungle outside of the tiny village of Godamuri in Mayurbhanj district, of a
bhut
, or spirit, sent to punish them for their refusal to honor the authority of the maharaja. This thing had been twice seen in the company of a wolf, a vague pale slash of movement in the incrassating twilight, and it was no wolf itself, of that the eyewitnesses were certain. Then came the rumor that there were two of them, quick, nasty, bloodless things of the night, and that their eyes flamed with an infernal heat that incinerated anyone who looked into them, and panic gripped thecountryside. Mothers kept their children close, fires burned in the night. Then, finally, came the news that these things were concrete and actual and no mere figments of the imagination: their den—the demons’ den itself—had been found in an abandoned termitarium in the dense jungle seven miles south of the village.
The rumors reached the Reverend J. A. L. Singh, of the Anglican mission and orphanage at Midnapore, and in September, after the monsoon clouds had peeled back from the skies and the rivers had receded, he made the long journey to Godamuri by bullock cart. One of his converts, a Kora tribesman by the name of Chunarem, who was prominent in the area, led him to the site. There, the Reverend, an astute and observant man and an amateur hunter
CARA
“Y OU MEAN you didn’t confront her?”
Cara was in her royal purple robe—her “wrapper,” as she insisted on calling it, as if they were at a country manor in the Cotswolds entertaining Lord and Lady Muckbright instead of in a tract house in suburban Connecticut—and she’d paused with a forkful of mushroom omelet halfway to her mouth. She was on her third cup of coffee and wearing her combative look.
“Confront her? I barely had time to recognize she was human.” He was at the sink, scrubbing the omelet pan, and he paused to look bitterly out into the gray vacancy of the yard. “What did you expect me to do, chase her down? Make a citizen’s arrest? What?”
The sound of Cara buttering her toast—she might have been flaying the flesh from a bone—set his teeth on edge. “I don’t know,” she said, “but we can’t just have strangers lurking around any time they feel like it, can we? I mean, there are
laws
—”
“The way you talk you’d think I invited her. You think I like mental cases peeping in the window so I can’t even have a moment’s peace in my own house? On a Saturday morning, no less?”
“So do something.”
“What? You tell me.”
“Call the police, why don’t you? That should be obvious, shouldn’t it? And that’s another thing—”
“I thought she was a bear.”
“A bear? What, are you out of your mind? Are you drunk or something? A bear? I’ve never heard anything so asinine.”
That was when the telephone rang. It was Ben Ober, his voice scraping through the wires like a set of hard chitinous claws scrabbling against the side of the house. “Julian?” he shouted. “Julian?”
Julian reassured him. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s me. I’m here.”
“Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Listen, she’s out in my yard right now, out behind the shed with a, I don’t know, some kind of wolf it looks like, and that Afghan nobody seems to know who’s the owner of—”
“Who?” he said, but even as he said it he knew. “Who’re you talking about?”
“The dog woman.” There was a pause, and Julian could hear him breathing into the mouthpiece as if he were deep underwater. “She seems to be—I think she’s killing something out there.”
THE WOLF CHILDREN OF MAYURBHANJ
I T WAS HIGH SUMMER , just before the rains set in, and the bush had shriveled back under the sun till you could see up the skirts of the sal trees, and all that had been hidden was revealed. People began to talk of a disturbing presence in the jungle outside of the tiny village of Godamuri in Mayurbhanj district, of a
bhut
, or spirit, sent to punish them for their refusal to honor the authority of the maharaja. This thing had been twice seen in the company of a wolf, a vague pale slash of movement in the incrassating twilight, and it was no wolf itself, of that the eyewitnesses were certain. Then came the rumor that there were two of them, quick, nasty, bloodless things of the night, and that their eyes flamed with an infernal heat that incinerated anyone who looked into them, and panic gripped thecountryside. Mothers kept their children close, fires burned in the night. Then, finally, came the news that these things were concrete and actual and no mere figments of the imagination: their den—the demons’ den itself—had been found in an abandoned termitarium in the dense jungle seven miles south of the village.
The rumors reached the Reverend J. A. L. Singh, of the Anglican mission and orphanage at Midnapore, and in September, after the monsoon clouds had peeled back from the skies and the rivers had receded, he made the long journey to Godamuri by bullock cart. One of his converts, a Kora tribesman by the name of Chunarem, who was prominent in the area, led him to the site. There, the Reverend, an astute and observant man and an amateur hunter
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