appear and devour the gods and the firmament! Farther to the south, we find Scandinavian tradition replete with weird wolf-lore; and it is the same in Finland and all over Russia, Germany, and France, where the horrible fiction of the loup-garou — partly ghoul and partly wolf-man — still holds its own. Indeed, so terribly associated are the crimes of wolves and the sufferings of men that all over Europe, from the snows of Lapland to sunny Spain, the gruesome legend is a household story, and the wehr-wolf and wolf-children carry on the old Greek and Latin superstitions of the lycanthropes.
It is, however, in the East, in India, that the wolf attains the complete measure of its obliquities; for just. as the korait snake kills a greater number of human beings than the far more deadly cobra, so the wolf takes infinitely more lives than the tiger. Thousands of adults fall victims annually to this animal’s daring and ferocity, and the destruction of child-life by it is prodigious. It is not only in the remoter districts, where jungles and rocky wildernesses are found, that the wolves thus prey upon man, but in the very midst of busy towns.
They will creep, so the natives say, into houses, and lick the babies from the sleeping mothers’ arms. The soft warm touch of the wild beast’s tongue melts the guardian fingers open. One by one they loosen their hold, and, as the wrists sink apart, the baby slides gradually out of the protecting arms against the soft coat of the wolf. It does not wake, and then the brute bends down its head to find the child’s throat. There is a sudden snap of closing teeth, a little strangling cry, and the mother starts to her feet to hear the rustle of the
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