Raised By Wolves

This article was first published October 10, 2024, at fieldethos.com.

The hunters fanned out, each man mindful of his rifle’s muzzle. They had tracked the beast through the sweaty jungle to the mouth of a yawning cave where they could hear their prey within, gnawing a broken bone. When a breath of wind betrayed the hunters’ scent, the beast stirred and then stilled. As one, the hunters braced themselves for the inevitable flush of fang and claw. Each man considered his courage and beseeched his gods, and then bore down on his sights. And out of the cave crawled a matted and mud caked six year old boy, snarling and snapping just like the wolf the hunters believed him to be.

All good stories are embellished, of course. But even embellished stories grow from a germ of truth, as is the case with Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Kipling’s character Mowgli grew from that germ-ridden six year old boy raised by wolves, and truth, in this instance, truly is stranger than fiction.

The hunters that discovered the boy didn’t know what to do with him. They couldn’t, in good conscience, leave him there in the jungle, but they weren’t about to take him home to raise, either. So they washed their hands of him at the district magistrate’s office who in turn promptly passed him off to the Secundra Orphanage in Agra, India, where the missionaries that ran the orphanage were at a loss themselves. They gave him a name, Dina Sanichar, and tried their best to make him human. In the Hindi language, Sanichar has two meanings. It means to be poverty stricken and under the influence of ominous stars. No one would argue that point. But it also means Saturday, making it the perfect name for young Dina, as he was left on the orphanage’s doorstep on the last day of the week.

Sanichar wasn’t the only of India’s lost children. Poverty and famine were so rampant in 19th century India that there was a whole pack of children abandoned by their families, left to be either eaten or, in Dina’s case, adopted by wolves. If the reports of the orphanage’s superintendent are to be believed, there were two other boys and a girl who had been raised by wolves at the Secundra Orphanage alone.

Dina didn’t respond favorably to the missionaries’ efforts. They could neither teach nor beat the feral tendencies out of the boy. Sanichar moved about on all fours and had trouble standing on his own two feet. He never learned to speak but communicated through whines and growls instead. And then there was his appetite. The boy preferred raw meat to cooked, often rejecting prepared food entirely, and he gnawed on bones to keep his teeth sharp. In essence, he behaved like a child raised by wolves. 

Poor Dina Sanichar spent his short life trying and failing to adapt to life as a human being. He lived in constant fear and frustration and remained seriously impaired until the day he died. His cause of death, though, was quintessentially human. A dedicated smoker, Saturday died of tuberculosis at the age of 34, a merciful end to a miserable life.