Anu, said Alexander, consider this:
When I was a boy it was reported in the palace that the guards had found
two children in the woods who had been reared by wolves.
My school companions and I went to see the children.
The two children were twins, but fourteen years old.
The guards kept them in a wooden cage as they were dangerous. The children
would bite any human, as desperate wolves do.
I was shocked to see the two children in the cage.
In my naivety, I had expected them to have been somehow transformed physically
into wolves, I had expected to see two wolves – but they were human.
They looked just like any other children of their age. Except that they crawled
on all fours and they moved on all fours. They glared at us and parted their
lips like wolves might bare their fangs.
They behaved exactly like wolves.
They could not talk and they cried like wolves.
When offered cooked food they refused to eat but devoured raw meat thrown
to them.
My friends and I were shocked.
We could see that the two children in the cage were human – but
we could not understand why they acted and behaved like wolves.
Here were we, young Macedonians, being trained to be proud and to be cultured
like the Greeks, but those creatures in the cage were not even aware that
they were human.
A few weeks later the guards learned they were the same children who
had been abandoned as babies fourteen years before by their mother who had
at that time no means to support them. I asked to be present during the first
meeting between the mother and the two children.
The woman cried on seeing her children – but the two children had no
idea who the woman was. Out of desperation, the woman crawled into the cage,
pleading and whispering the loving words as only a mother can – but
only to be attacked by her two children. She had to be rescued by the guards.
They discovered she had been savagely bitten in the neck by one of the creatures
in the cage. The mother died two days later.
The two children were subsequently kept in a large enclosure. They were offered meat and food but the creatures refused to eat. Within six months the two creatures died.
This incident haunted me for a long while, Anu.
I asked myself for a long time after, what the implications of those wolf
children were. I asked my teachers; I asked my friends.
I understood much later that the concepts we have of ourselves as being of
a particular group of the human race, as belonging to a certain country and
a certain religion and systems of belief were all but put into us.