Could this ragged girl with brindled lugs have spoken like we do she would have called herself a wolf, but she ot speak, although she howls because she is lonely -- yet "howl" is not the right word for it, since she is young enough to make the he pups do, bubbling, delicious, like that of a panful of fat on the fire. Sometimes the sharp ears of her foster kindred hear her across the irreparable gulf of absehey answer her from faraine forest and the bald mountain rim. Their terpoint crosses and criss-crosses the night sky; they are trying to talk to her but they ot do so because she does not uand their language even if she knows how to use it for she is not a wolf herself, although suckled by wolves.
Her panting tongue hangs out; her red lips are thid fresh. Her legs are long, lean and muscular. Her elbows, hands and knees are thickly callused because she always runs on all fours. She never walks; she trots allops. Her pace is not our pace.
Two-legs looks, fs sniffs. Her long nose is always a-quivering, sifting every st it meets. With this useful tool, she lengthily iigates everything she glimpses. She et so much more of the world than we through the fine, hairy sensitive filters of her nostrils that her poor eyesight does not trouble her. Her nose is sharper by night than our eyes are by day so it is the night she prefers, when the cool reflected light of the moon does not make her eyes smart and draws out the various fragrances from the woodland where she wanders when she . But the wolves keep well away from the peasants shotguns, now, and she will no longer find them there.
Wide shoulders, long arms and she sleeps suctly curled into a ball as if she were cradling her spine iail. Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and bee part of it, although it does . Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the tinuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
When they found her in the wolfs den beside the bullet-riddled corpse of her foster mother, she was no more than a little brown scrap so snarled in her own brown hair they did not at first think she was a child but a cub; she s her would-be saviours with her spiky es until they tied her up by force. She spent the first days amongst us crouched stock-still, staring at the whitewashed wall of her cell in the vent to which they took her. The nuns poured water over her, poked her with sticks to rouse her. Then she might snatch bread from their hands and race with it into a er to mumble it with her back towards them; it was a great day among the novices when she learo sit up on her hind legs and beg for a crust.
They found, if she were treated with a little kindness, she was not intractable. She learnise her own dish; then, to drink from a cup. They found that she could quite easily be taught a few, simple tricks but she did not feel the cold and it took a long time to wheedle a shift over her head to cover up her bold nakedness. Yet she always seemed wild, impatient of restraint, capricious in temper; wheher Superior tried to teach her to give thanks for her recovery from the wolves, she arched her back, pawed the floor, retreated to a far er of the chapel, crouched, trembled, urinated, defecated -- reverted entirely, it would seem, to her natural state. Therefore, without a qualm, this nine