FERAL CHILD

FERAL CHILD

On April 4, 1958 at 2:15 a.m., a ten-year old male child was nearly struck by Ralph Sansabot along Route 66 in New Mexico. Sansabot claimed lineage with the Algonquin Tribe of Mesa Rondo, though no such tribe can be found in any history of the area. The Navajo and Hopi were familiar with Sansabot and believed him to be a grave robber, an accusation they could not prove, and an alcoholic, which police arrest records for drunk and disorderly can verify. The child that Sansabot brought to the American Indian Museum in Santa Fe was naked and covered in dirt and could not speak any language. Aware of his own notoriety, Sansabot had captured the child to prove he had not been drinking when he saw him. He was eager to relate the details of the encounter and the Santa Fe Boca of April 9th carries an interview with him on page 4 next to the classifieds, but the following quotes are from the sheriff's interrogation conducted by officer Cabezavirga.

"What it was, well, he bolted acrost the road quick as you like, and his bare butt flashed up in my headlights. I won this '49 Buick, I did that in a card game. With a flush, that's why I don't have no pink slip. Nobodies talkin' about any stolen cars, are they? I'm telling you my heart went out to this bare assed brat way out there in the desert right that minute, short a time as I saw him. Something about him. I rubbed my eyes, you'd a done it too, and I put on the brakes. Now, this Buick has a visor right over the windshield which is a wonderful thing for the desert, I am a lucky man and I know it. Goin' East or West I will be sitting pretty. But, I'm gonna tell you how lucky I truly am. My Buick, you hear me, my Buick fair and square, well, it has this spotlight and I caught him in it and he froze up just like a wild animal and I just plucked him up, which I never could have done after how fast I seen him run. He must of scared himself with that close call and was just sitting there, on his haunches, that's the way it was, scratching his ear with his left foot, anyhow, he was til the light caught him and he was froze. No, he never put up a fight, well just look at him, you can count every rib, he must of figured his time for running around like that was about up. Raised by coyotes, that's my guess. Lord have mercy, them poor pups eat puke til they get their real teeth. Rather be raised by bees myself, or a stripper, that'd be nice...B.S., a fish."

This is the last feral child to be reported in the United States.

He misses fur and excreting in the open. He does not miss hunger, cold, ticks, fleas, nips, trying to keep up with long legged brethren. Or, carrion. And worms. Berries were good. Water was good. Sunning on a rock. The red and yellow rocks were good to lie on after the sun went down because they were still warm. He did not have the right body to sleep with the pack. With their thick pelts, they could sleep in mesquite. They had scars everywhere on their bodies. Black cicatrix on their long snouts, and tattered ears. Social intercourse involved many harmless snaps, but they drew blood on him. And without fangs to bare he slid down to lowest member of the pack and spent much time in submissive greetings, baring his throat or genitals. He was worthless to sleep with; his shape did not fit with theirs. Winters were the hardest. Cold and snow came to the high desert. The hair on the pack grew long and thick, they looked well fed even though they were eating mice and fighting over the occasional hare. They put their plush tails over their noses and slept comfortably while he ran around in small circles and shivered. Feet and hands were the worst, he pushed them into horse dung, but it was too rare a treat. They rang with the cold. No one saw him, the pack was color blind, but in winter his nose and ears and even his tan cheeks were scorched red by cold. He learned techniques to get his circulation moving. One way was to basically throw a tantrum without the yells. He would lie prone on the ground beating it with fists and heels. This worked better than running around. The lesson is to flex your muscles with as little deep breathing as possible. The pack, of course, when covered in snow was like bread in a kiln, toasty and warm. He had to wander until he found bare ground. However, winters always moved the pack closer to human settlements and/or the highways. In either case, there was bare ground to be found and he learned how to shoplift carelessly spilled warmth from around gas stations and diners, or intoxicate himself on epileptic fits thrown on the plowed tarmac. Like Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, true cold and misery redeemed him with the cliquish pack. He was the only one who could exploit varmint-proof garbage cans. He was a toothless, furless bag of bones when it came time to curl up together, but his clawless hands were a skeleton key for the odd puzzles guarding the dumps. It was the best food he had ever tasted. There were donuts, sugar and fat and salt, cheese of a sort, soft drinks, potato chips and fries- more salt and fat and sugar-and pounds of barely rotted meat. Winters even turned lucky. He could gorge inside fence or cabinet without having the food torn from his grasp, all the while throwing booty out for the rest, who actually fawned on him a bit.

He does not really remember any of this; these things move through him under dreams making him twitch and yip while asleep, and when they wake him, the covers are pulled in around him, making a cozy hollow around his form.

Summer time was the time of thirst and bugs. Most creeks dried up, they moved nearer to the streams and rivers, which had become thin ribbons cutting through wide banks of cracked, brick hard clay. However, summer brought the great migration of tourists, or to the coyotes, the manna of road kill. They battled the buzzards for dead deer, sheep, horses, rabbits, dogs, cats, rats, and succulent refuse. In fact, the pack had become dependent on human beings a dozen generations before and lived easier lives for it, oblivious to their loss of dignity.

He was always brushing up against his own species, but with the coyotes as his culture, they remained a deafeningly load, blindingly bright confusion. He could never divine the purpose to anything they did. He did not project himself among them and figure from there what he would do with a house or a restaurant or a filling station. And yet, he was lonely among the coyotes, and unlike all other creatures, barred from an evolution of form into maturity. While pups changed into coyotes, he remained hairless, clawless, toothless, deaf, blind, and without a nose. His body was closer to a newborn than anything else in the pack.

The deeper canyons could cache summer while winter whistled and groaned on the plains above. The pack would descend from the pinion-studded mesas into arroyos and gorges where streams meandered lazily between broad sandy banks. It could be very still, a shadow might drape half the gorge, the red walls were reflected in the green water, trout coasted among green stones, shiny blue and red dragonflies patrolled the air. From the mesas he could see for miles across red rock canyons, buzzards and hawks hanging above. The pack, of course, was colorblind. He was the lone member who did not have the animal genius of brain. That organ never worked in such perfect unanimity that he did not sense it and could, like other beasts, exist totally unaware of himself in an imageless waking state that is as pure as dreamless sleep. His only true companions were the puppies whose pleasures still extended to curiosity. When the older members of the pack were not spurred by instincts, they relinquished their lives to the guardianship of their senses and left their bodies to do its digestion. Only the plump puppies pushed their noses into every thing, chasing birds and butterflies and harassing snakes. By adolescence, their senses had been trained into sentries. He could never match their keenness, but perception is more communal than competitive, and the tendrils reaching from his senses found no place to root. And it was because he had heard no answering echoes from these perceptions that he had already left the company of sheep and deer and joined the coyotes whose senses seemed riveted to a world he shared.

He had first nursed on sheep, butting into their udders like a lamb. Sheep are used to submitting to people, and he was accepted without controversy. He nursed in the corrals at night when the shepherds were asleep in their adobe cabins or mobile homes or government-issue cinder block. The sheep dogs never barked at him. By morning he had slipped away to the pastures where the sheep would be herded, and waited out of sight until the shepherds dozed off leaving the sheep in the protection of their dogs. In the fattest days of summer the sheep did not return at night to corrals; they followed the creeks from meadow to meadow. These were the best times. He lay in the tall grass looking through a forest of black legs at the blue pasture above where clouds grazed.

The society of sheep is calming. The lambs kicked up their heels and he played with them. Lambs are soft and before the onset of rut, their games are all muted, mountings and head buttings and prancing pirouettes, and so he was never bloody afterwards. Even their voices are tuned to gentle pleadings. This world of vegetarians; how much more generous than the world of coyotes. The ewes and rams grazed through the day, moving slowly across the meadows, and barely compelled into motion, he would reach up, and like a man with a wine sack, squeeze milk down his throat. He was lulled into sleep, would wake seamlessly from a doze into the green and blue and the intense industry of bugs on nearby stalks. Lifting his head, he would see a few feet beyond the band of sheep that had drifted away, and taking just a few drunken steps he would lay down again beneath the udder that had floated away from him.

But, a little boy eventually becomes restless inside these rhythms so broadened to the scope of the earth as to become flat. Herbivores with their fermenting digestions divide time no more finely than the seasons. He looked into their eyes but could find there only his own reflection in the black pool of their large pupils. Try as he might he could never find the chip in that nearly three hundred and sixty degree of vision through which they looked out; nowhere could he find the moment of time in which they were awake. He could not maintain their silence. Discontent, surprise, forced him towards exclamation. Suspended across a whole season, no sound can carry, but for days parsed into minutes or less, where most things seem immobile, sound is needed to call to others cut to the quick.

Deer often grazed among the flock, taking advantage of the protection of shepherds and dogs. He began following after them at night to where they bedded down beneath the pinions. What did they promise? They were a society of does and fawns and yearlings, and even more silent than sheep, but there were chords strung taut between them. Though he was not included in this network, this community alarm system anchored them in a time nearer to his; they were aware of him. But, the kinship he found with deer was in their form. A shape within their shape beckoned, drawn between their spindly legs and bony haunches, and the gingerly step of their pointed hooves barely alighting on the ground. Suddenly, with none of the startling quality of suddenness, they would appear in the meadow, as if they had always been there. They were as temporary around the movements of that inner shape as he was himself.

He was beset by nightmares and images. In his sleep there were sunsets over still bays, and there were ocean waves that threatened to drown him, and snow capped mountain peaks, panthers and golden cities with minarets and domes. In a garden in one of these cities he had witnessed willowy girls transform themselves into deer and laurel trees. Without words, he could not mark his memories off from dreams. Dread and beauty walked in his world and lived in any form they chose; when he was with the deer, he could see them moving from one disguise to another and even sense them passing in the open air. At six years old, he was in love for the first time.

The coyotes moved towards the source of their food. They were driven by statistics; the closer they moved to Santa Fe the more food to be found. Other species were doing the same. Of course, old grazing and hunting lands went under the tarmac, but the truth is that no beast that could weave itself into the pattern of roads, yards, parking lots, shopping centers, gardens and garbage cans had ever lived as well. A salt lick, a water hole, these are parsimoniously given in the wild, and these treasure troves become killing fields as the pilgrims gather. But, in cities and towns, or on ranches, the world was suddenly disgorging its hoardings in a flood. People were never seen as the agents of this bounty, and confrontations occurred when they tried to assert ownership over their discoveries of food vomiting geysers, but for the small or wily or fugitive, it was a year round feast.

The pack was sometimes glimpsed in early morning, silhouetted against a silvering sky. They foraged deeper and deeper into the city limits. They were loath to leave off gorging, forgot the hour, and found themselves miles from cover with daylight already upon them. There they were, single file along the shoulder of a road, mistaken for dogs until something fey in them was sensed, their nomads' airy step. Santa Fe was still more realtors gleam than realized sprawl, and though one day the pack was routed in sullen drowsiness from a golf course-they were napping near a pretty pool- there were hundreds of acres of scrub largely untouched except for a quixotic grid of dirt roads and rusty strands of barbed wire where they could have slept undisturbed for another ten years before development finally reached the parcels it had staked under evangelical titles-Yucca Blossom Fields, Saguaro Shangri-la, Hopi Happy Hunting Grounds, etc.

He was spotted frequently. His association with coyotes, if it were noticed at all would have been considered coincidental. Frankly, not even Indians or Mexicans had any interest in a runaway or orphan Indian or Mexican child. They were not that unusual, and neither was a child driven insane from his mother's alcoholism running bare-ass through the wasteland. Sansabot almost certainly did not discover him. What he did was pluck out of obscurity a street urchin who the rest of the community would have been content to leave in shadow. However, once retrieved he served as a diversion and palliative. With him in the spotlight, the rest of the shattered families could be left to shoulder their own guilt, and disowned by man and myth be swept under the carpet.

He had always been excluded by mutation from whichever creatures he adopted. Since he was ten when he was hauled back to human society, he had yet to conceive of sex as the sea in a conch shell a civilized person can. He had seen plenty of it-it is perhaps one mark of its tautology to beasts rather than microcosm, that boundless privacy is rarely sought. The animals he had chosen were quick about it, though in sheep and deer incontinently frequent, and during the short minute of mounting-though the lead up during estrous had been as transforming as disease, visiting the pain of desire and longing on placid beasts-the aphasia that enveloped them was a more complete eviction of him than their usual cud chewing or post gorge coma. So, he entered the city as the creature that had never heard a returning echo of his own subjectivity. For him as it is for other mammals, at least, the volume of that empty space cast a silence into the world that he sensed while others were sleeping, when over them is thrown a cloak of sacrosanct invisibility.

One morning he did not follow the other coyotes when they returned to the empty acres. Had he changed his mind later on, they would never have admitted him to the pack. How he had insinuated himself into de facto membership was a thing he would never be able to recall. In fact, soon after leaving the company of beasts and shadowing the lives of people, he began to forget his time among beasts. What would remain alive in his brain as a physical ache for the rest of his life was the era of childhood before the dew had lifted. Undoubtedly, it was during that period when innocence obscures form as completely as sleep that he had rolled around with other bulbous lambs and knobby fawns and yipping puppies and shoved his big head against their mother's teat; a creature whose geriatric immaturity extended to him the mammalian cues for mothering which neither sheep or deer or even coyote could refuse. But, come the steeply angled light of the afternoon of even the same day he hung behind at the garbage dump, the approach of a threateningly upright creature with a toppling gait and the overpowering and appetizing stench of sweating vegetarians, though noble in form as an angel, and the pack would have bolted from him, varmints though they were.

Those first days of intense observation and complete aloneness can only be compared to amnesia. Certain habits continued to pilot him and were enough to keep him fed and watered and hidden from view, but he remembered nothing and would awake like someone from a faint or a binge, a splinter of self awareness without origin in a universe that had no means to exist. The fear of extinction and the pain this fear caused was the extent of his being.

He started in an industrial section, a blight of used car lots and body shops and junkyards and bars and diners plopped down along a two-lane strip of cracked highway. At night it was abandoned; a few lone cars hurtled along the highway, one of the terminal drunks somehow still standing would stagger out a doorway and catch up with the others slumped against the wall. The junk man lived in a corrugated shed in his junkyard. He added his empty bean cans to the piles of tin, and the child would lick them clean in the rusty cab of an old pick up truck without an engine where he slept. Maybe at one time the junk man had gone about collecting for his yard, or maybe disposal had been consolidated into a municipal dump drying up his sources, but the yard was not disturbed by any commerce. All day the child heard a drone similar to a beehive; it was the man's radio. When the sun was up he came out of his shack and sat on a chair and listened to his radio. He sat under a faded beach umbrella drinking beer. He spit frequently. It was commentary and philosophical, and he brought the phlegm up from deep down in his gut. He hauled himself out of his chair and wobbled a few steps in the direction of the morass of junk and peed. After shaking his penis dry, he would stand holding it, surveying his kingdom. Then plow his way back to the chair. Either the child had never seen a man pee before or the impression left on him by the shepherds had been wiped clean with the rest. He had always peed down on all fours like the animals. The utility of the man's organ was remedial; He tried peeing standing up. At first it did not work, apparently the hose was not large enough, but after several days he learned how to release the sphincter without having to spread his buttocks, and for the first time in his life, he peed without wetting his forearms. He also tried spitting. He was a wiz at imitating the introductory sounds, but had no idea how to cough up phlegm or where it came from. What he could do was vomit, a thing he had learned from the coyotes who are always starving and rushing whatever they can down their gullet before a sibling beats them to it, and as a consequence poisoning themselves. He would hunker down on all fours and set his stomach to convulsing and back away from the issue as they did, imitating too the more or less daffy, submissive expression they wore afterwards. This could not be applied to spitting.

The junkyard man was innocent of bathing and the child liked his smell. He did not know the man was listening to ball games and he could not filter music out of static and hiss in the radio, but because the junk man spent his time alone, and in idleness like an animal, and smelled of dirt and piss and sweat, the child was not startled off. Had Sansabot not collared him a few months later, his life would probably have played itself out in the frayed margins at the city limits where eating garbage, mumbling incoherently, being bare-ass and bare-foot and defecating al fresco-in short, living like an animal-would go unnoticed. In these despised precincts where insanity, failure, exile and shame engineer devolution, the direction of his migration would have remained hidden. But, he did not just settle there. At night he wandered.

Imagine him for a minute. He can barely see this place he is in, and cannot remember it at all. In fact, he has no memory. What can serve for coyotes and is useless opulence for sheep, is insufficient for a boy. And immediacy and reflex are vanishing small within the emptiness of human potential. He could not find them to grab onto, and fell into the well.

He walked through a golden city following the sound of a flute played by a boy with horns and the legs of a goat. The gardens were breathing out and the smell of flowers and fruit was in the air. A crash and a boom startled him into a run. It was a symphony playing on a phonograph; it hurt his ears. A bird disturbed in sleep began to sing from a walled garden. He climbed over and rested in the fragrant damp. A light came on in a window above and a woman came out on a balcony. It was the golden city; this was the shadow of the golden city. This was its reflection cast here, the width of the streets, the placements of gardens, the fig and lemon tree, the bird singing and the woman come to the balcony to listen in duet with him, all these had happened before in the golden city and were reflected here. He could hear the flute; he could hear that the tune had found the flute. The flute was only the scantest coalescence of the tune, the rest overflowed into the city that was built to catch the song and hold it from trailing off.

Soon after that he recognized himself in a broken mirror left under a street lamp to be picked up with the trash. He saw the street lamp first and recognized it in the mirror, and then he saw the little boy's face with the light beside it, and he knew it was his, and he cried. Not for lost years, not for loneliness, but for the universe he saw there.

He was remanded to a foster family who were paid for the discarded children they processed. He was a tough case and they did not spare the rod. A ten year old who is not toilet trained and who can not talk can be handled in no other way. He did learn to use the bathroom and wear clothes, and because he was not actually born to a sheep or coyote and must have been lost no earlier than at two years of age or so, he was able eventually to cobble together a kind of pidgin language, mostly nouns and signs, and strike out again on his own after a few years, and as if following road kill back to its original source, wound up in New York City where beasts, chimaeras or saints can be accommodated. He never did master letters beyond what was needed to read envelopes and so gain employment in a mailroom along with the retarded and debilitated, and so he could never tell us that instinct is not an irritant that must be staunched but instead is the longest distance light must travel to existence.

His dwellings were always nearly bare of furniture but cluttered with the wrappings from fast food joints. He kept his taste for grease and salt. If someone had ever seen him sleeping on his mattress on the floor, lying on his side, his arms and legs making palsied jerks, and yipping, they might have found it sad, but no one ever did. He was dreaming of the moon.