Wolf! Wolf!

Blared a headline in the Los Angeles Mirror: "WOLF BOY" REARED BY ANIMALS BOLTS RAW MEAT, SNARLS, BITES. Said the Indianapolis Star: SNARLING "WOLF BOY" FOUND IN INDIA. All over the U.S. last week, newspapers printed such sensational headlines over wire service stories from New Delhi, describing in wide-eyed fascination the discovery of a "nine-year-old 'wolf boy' " with clawlike hands and a double set of upper-jaw incisors "who walks on all fours, wolfs down raw meat and laps water like an animal . . . There was some speculation the boy might have been reared by jackals, but [the attending doctor] said jackals often devour their young, while she-wolves are known to have strong maternal instincts." In the hospital at Lucknow, India, where the boy was being treated, reported A.P., the wolf boy "cringes from the light . . . snarls," and has "tried to bite attendants." The wire services and the dozens of papers that ran the story (including the New York Herald Tribune and the Baltimore Sun) left out one detail about the "wolf boy," which every editor should have known: the story was a complete (and tragic) hoax, the same kind of hoax that crops up every year or so.*

Ever since Romulus and Remus, folklore full of children reared by wild animals has been passed on and diligently reported. In the manner of Kipling's fictional "wolf-suckled, snake-taught, elephant-advised" Mowgli, Ireland has produced a sheep boy, Africa a baboon boy who devoured 89 prickly pears in one sitting. Seven years ago, newsmen seriously reported that a gazelle boy, was found running, at 50 m.p.h., stark naked across the Syrian desert. (The giveaway clue: he was obviously accustomed to wearing clothes since his arms and face were tanned, but his body was white.)

Last week's "wolf boy" followed the familiar pattern of his ancestors. A mentally retarded child, who apparently had been partially paralyzed by a birth injury, he was found abandoned in a third-class railway coach in Lucknow. Doctors at the hospital where he was taken discovered he had two sets of upper incisors, hastily jumped to a series of unwarranted, nonmedical conclusions. The English-language Lucknow National Herald (est. circ. 10,000) heard about it, carried the first story reporting that the boy "seems to have been taken away to the jungle by jackals when just a small child." A Reuters correspondent at New Delhi, 300 miles away, long-distanced the hospital, put the story on its world wire with some added information: "Medical authorities propose taking him to Lucknow zoo to watch his reaction to the presence of female wolves." A.P. and U.P. filed their own "wolf boy" stories, though no one from the wire services had actually seen the wolf boy. Meanwhile, at the government hospital, the doctor-superintendent (and source of the stories) was reveling in the publicity. Amidst a swelling tide of local protest, the sick, deformed child was put in a ward where spectators saw an attendant on hand to poke him and make him howl and moan. Admission charge: 1 anna (1 1/3-c-).

* Another phony story that periodically turns up in papers: a rich traveler carrying a large sum of money stops for the night at a poor farmhouse in a back-country part of Europe, and the greedy farmer and his wife murder and rob him. Then they discover that the man is their son who went to the U.S. years ago and returned to buy them a big house for their old age.

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