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.In fact, a pop-ular Sunday afternoon activity in the early part of the twentieth centurywas to hold a  mound dig party in hopes of finding buried artifacts.Butenough of the mounds have been preserved that after much study byFigure 4.2 Effigy mounds depicting (clockwise) a deer, a water panther, adog, and a bird.(Linda S.Godfrey)Dude, Where's My Werewolf? The Beast of Bray Road 47jFigure 4.3 The Beast of Bray Road was sighted in a region that is also hometo Indian burial mounds like the Great Bear Indian mound seen here.(TomBean/Corbis)archaeologists and anthropologists, some interesting things are knownabout them.Some, but not all, of the mounds were used for burials.Sheboygan sIndian Mounds Park contains a mound that was opened and found tocontain a burial.The remains were recreated by casting them in resin,and replaced into the site with a Plexiglas cover so that the mound can beviewed as it looked when it was opened.Tribal anthropologists have noted that the mound shapes representthe same totem animals revered by the Ho-Chunk, and many expertsthink that the far distant ancestors of the Ho-Chunk may have been the(continues)48 WEREWOLVESi(continued)builders of the effigy mounds.Most agree that the mounds repre-sented important religious beliefs of the builders, and perhaps wereintended to harmonize spirits of the sky (birds) with spirits of the water(turtles, lizards, and water panthers) and of the earth (bear, deer).42Strangely, a few of the mounds that are shaped like men featureprojections on the head that could have represented horns worn bymedicine men or were they meant to show the pointed ears of awolf-headed, bipedal creature? The true purpose of the animal effigymounds may never be known, but it is an interesting coincidence thatthey are found almost nowhere else in the world but the southern halfof Wisconsin, which also happens to be the main location of present-day sightings of manwolves.5Will the Real WerewolfPlease Stand Up?olves once flourished in India as they did in other wild placesWaround the globe.Adaptive species that they are, wolves of-ten make their dens in unexpected places even in the giant, conicalmounds left by termite colonies in India.So it didn t strike two men asterribly unusual when they discovered several wolves running from amassive cone of dirt in the wilds southwest of Calcutta one day around1920.What shocked them was the fact that two small human females,about three years and five years old, also came crawling out, and ap-peared to have been living inside the earthen shelter with the wolves!The girls did not want to be  rescued, reported the men.Growl-ing, biting, and kicking savagely, they acted like tiny werewolves.Oneof the men, a missionary named Reverend Singh, took them back tothe small orphanage he ran.After seeing to it that they were bathedand cleaned up, he set about trying to teach them proper human be-havior.He named the younger Amala, and her supposed older sister,Kamala.It may have occurred to him that publicity about two wildwolf-girls could benefit his orphanage financially.He soon found, however, that although he had succeeded in takingthe girls out of the wolf den, it wasn t so easy to take the wolf den outof the girls.They refused to eat anything but raw meat, ran aroundon all fours, and would only try to stand up if Singh held meat above49i j50 WEREWOLVESithem in the same way dogs are taught to beg.They had no interest inhuman company but loved a hyena cub that was brought for them toplay with.They stubbornly refused to be housebroken, urinating anddefecating where and when they pleased.Their behavior continued to dismay everyone who observed them.One of the girls, on finding a dead cow near the compound, attackedthe carcass with her hands and teeth, and then secretly dragged partsof it back to the orphanage garden where she could chew on it all sheliked.Singh wrote that in the dark, the eyes of both girls glowed astrange, faint blue color.(Many researchers have accused him of mak-ing this up, since human eyes lack the necessary membrane to reflectlight like those of animals.) The girls also howled plaintively at regularintervals and resisted learning the simplest words.Amala died of a kidney infection only a year after being taken fromthe termite mound.Kamala lived eight years after that, until 1929.She had finally managed to learn a few words and even form shortsentences.She had acquired toileting skills, as well, and was allowed togo to church services [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]