Feral Character Background

 Peter Lyndon Smythe began his career as a dockworker in the small harbor town of Crab Cove, Maine when he was sixteen. Born into a lower middle class family and left fatherless at age eight, it took him ten years of hard labor to earn a place at the main office of Winston Shipping. At twenty-seven, he married the boss’ daughter, Sarah Anne Winston, a shy introverted girl of twenty-five. For another decade, he worked his way up the corporate ladder to at last be named a full partner.

 It was in that year that their only child, Jessica Anne, turned eight. The hard work her father had invested in order to achieve his high station in life had made a hard man of him. He was ruthless in business and a rigid disciplinarian at home. His wife lived constantly in his shadow. Jessica was raised in a strict, sterile environment. Subjected to the finest education money could buy, Jessica was expected to marry well, establish the Smythe family's social significance, and in due time, to provide an heir to the Winston-Smythe fortune.

 Despite her restrictive upbringing, Jessica was a bright, happy girl who took her financial circumstances for granted. On a European jaunt, she met a biology student named William Charles Collins. While Billy was not unattractive, at first Jesse found him far too serious to take seriously. But as they became better friends, she found herself drawn to him. She never realized he shared her feelings until one day he blurted out that he loved her and wanted her to marry him. To the surprise of both of them, she accepted.

The evening she took him home to meet her parents was a disaster. Billy was awkward and out of place. Her mother never said a word and her father was furious. Not only was this young upstart from a less than prestigious family, he had no business sense and he was from, of all places, California.

Jesse and her father quarreled bitterly. It was not the first such volatile disagreement, but it was their last. Dragging a reluctant Billy behind, she slammed the door behind her and vowed never to return. Withdrawing her rather substantial savings, they flew to Mexico and were married in a small mining town named Santa Bonita.

She used the last of her savings to buy a car and lease a small apartment in Berkeley, taking a clerical position with a nearby grocery to pay the bills while Billy completed the two years remaining on his master’s degree.

Peter Smythe made a few abortive attempts to force Jesse to abandon her new life. But a legal adult at nineteen, Jesse resisted his attempts with a stubbornness which mirrored his own.

Upon graduation, a medical firm in Portland, Oregon called Genetech hired Billy. There he continued where his master's thesis had left off, researching the natural conditions that inhibit the physical and mental development of fetuses and very young infants. Billy hoped that by removing these inhibiting factors, he could reduce or eliminate non-genetic disorders, sudden infant death syndrome, and the deaths of premature infants. His research suggested that a child produced under such conditions might be an exceptional human being, physically and mentally.  After much discussion, he and Jesse decided they were ready to have a child, and that they would test this process of pre-natal and infant care themselves. Maintaining Jesse in optimal conditions on a perfect -- perfectly boring, she called it --- diet, providing the unborn child with all the proper nutrients, chemicals, gases, altitude, sonic waves, etc., produced a strapping thirteen pound baby boy by caesarian section.

For three years the child grew and developed with unusual speed. His strength, coordination, and comprehension were remarkable. Although exposed to common childhood illnesses, the child, whom they had named Drake after Billy's maternal grandfather, was never sick. His minor childish injuries healed very swiftly and his appetite was unfailingly enormous. He learned to walk and talk at a very young age, and passed all other developmental hurdles in remarkable time.

Genetech watched Drake's development with keen interest. Unknown to Billy Collins, one phase of Genetech's operation involved producing super powered mutants to sell as agents to various criminal organizations. With the growing anti-mutant hysteria, this operation was growing less profitable. But Billy's process, while very time consuming, produced not mutants, but super-humans. The marketability of such a product was unlimited.  But only if Genetech could keep the secret of their creation from the world.

When his son was three years old, and had shown nothing but beneficial effects from the process, Billy decided it was time to release his discoveries to the world. He met unexpected opposition from his employers at Genetech, who had until now allowed him complete freedom. His employers informed him that, since Genetech had financed his research, its results belonged to them alone. Billy felt that this was his one chance to improve the world, just like the company's logo claimed. He was shocked when his employers actually resorted to threats to prevent him from attending the medical conference in San Francisco where he planned to present his paper.

Realizing his danger, but not the extent of it, he secretly destroyed all the information on his process in his lab, the Genetech computer, and his home. Canceling his flight reservations on a commercial airline, he made arrangements to stay with his parents in California for a few weeks till he could work things out.

Packing their most essential belongings, Billy chartered a small private plane and took off with Jesse and Drake. He never suspected that there was a bomb on the plane till it exploded into flame over a heavily forested area. Although he managed to partially control the crash, there was no clearing. The plane slammed into the tree and hit the ground hard, burning.

In the front of the plane, Billy and Jesse were killed on impact. Drake, strapped in a back seat, was shaken and battered, but due to his small size and exceptional resilience, survived the initial crash. As the fire raged around him, the terrified child struggled to escape the confining straps that had saved his life only moments before. When the flames reached him and began to burn, the pain drove him into frenzy. He fought wildly against the straps until they finally gave. Badly burned and half suffocated, he stumbled into the woods and collapsed.

The plane burned for the rest of the night. In the morning, little was left but ashes and rubble, too hot to touch. Drake wandered into the woods in search of his parents, and soon became lost. He wandered all that day, calling and crying, knowing in a child's way that they could not answer, but unable to accept it. He slept on soft grass through the warm summer night and dreamed of fire.

By the time he woke in the morning, Drake's injuries were almost healed, and he was ravenous. Hunger was a new concept to the well-kept child. He tried eating some of the plants around him, leaves, and grass, even toadstools. Fortunately, his body rejected all the inedible substances immediately. As hungry as before, Drake wandered through the woods, trying dozens of things, managing only to keep down a handful of berries, which did little to assuage his growing hunger. Late in the afternoon, as twilight etched long shadows against the ground, Drake stumbled across a pack of wolves.

The mostly eaten carcass of a large doe lay to one side of where the gorged pack dozed. Recognizing the man-smell, the pack came to its feet menacingly. But Drake's belly was rumbling hungrily at the sight of the meat, he wanted some of it, surely the doggies would share. As he approached the carcass, a young bitch heavy with new life stepped in front of him, curling back her lips in a snarl. She was astonished when he came fearlessly up and patted her on the head. For a half second she almost attacked, but feeling the young life in her own belly, she could not kill the man-cub. The instinct to protect her own young made her cherish the life of even the young human.  She stood over him with something resembling protectiveness as he rummaged about the bones looking for meat.  The pack watched, sensing the child was no threat. When he had eaten until his belly bulged, he curled up beside her and slept. When it came time to move on, she woke him and nudged him to follow the pack.

Her mate and the rest of the pack were reluctant to accept the man-cub. He moved too slowly and too loudly and required constant protection. He did not have the woods sense of a newborn cub. But as her time grew near, the she-wolf grew ever more protective and possessive, and the pack finally accepted his presence.

Her cubs were born and grew fat and strong all through the summer, half grown by the time the weather began to grow cold. But her man-cub was still nearly helpless. Yet, although the wolves didn't think so, Drake was adapting to his new environment very swiftly. Constant play with his wolf siblings built up his strength, running and hunting with the pack taught him speed and silence, and repeated bumps and scrapes encouraged his natural healing abilities to improve immensely. These regenerative abilities triggered a metabolic shift that toughened Drake’s body to damage and bad weather, as well as hardening his nails and allowing his teeth to sharpen into fangs. In much the same fashion as the wolves were putting on dense winter coats, Drake's system was preparing to face the hardships of winter.

The man-cub was very dependent on his mother for those first few years. She had streaks of grey in her muzzle before he ever made a serious ki11. But she lived to see him grow stronger, faster, more deadly than his wolf brothers, and she was happy, for she knew that he was still a cub. When she died, he howled like a wolf and wept like a man.

Forced to take an adult role in the pack, the man-cub's abilities developed even more swiftly. Within a year he won the right to lead the pack. With his superhuman physique and intelligence, he proved an excellent leader. The only fault the pack found with his leadership was his attraction toward humans. He would spend hours crouching in the brush near an isolated home, watching the comings and goings of the people who lived there. He could not decide if he was human, wolf, or some part of both. He was blithely unaware of the werewolf craze his occasional sightings sparked.

On day, in a wooded area just outside the small polish community of Little Gdansk, the man-cub and his wolf family came across a pair of young humans in an open space. Motioning the wolves down, the boy crept as close as he dared and watched the humans eat and talk. He had been there for quite some time when the female human's eyes fixed on him. Mouth gaping, she pointed toward him, and a thin wail came from her mouth. As her mate picked up the killing thing that lay on the ground beside him, she leaped to her feet and ran toward the noisy monster in which humans traveled. Tripping over a pile of rocks, she fell hard, cutting her hands, legs and face on the rocks. The man-cub sprang away from the human, the wolves fleeing before him. A horrible noise came from the killing thing and the boy was flung to the ground, his back :on fire with pain. Using one of the wolves for support, he crawled to his feet and staggered into the woods, as the monster roared away behind him. Finding shelter in a lee of rock, the boy lay near death for several days, during which a massive werewolf hunt set humans tracking noisily through the forest.  The pack almost abandoned him, but their fierce loyalty won out over their good sense. They brought him meat to feed his insatiable appetite, and kept him warm.

When he was well enough to walk he led them high into the mountains to stay. There they lived and howled at the moon till a month after Drake's fifteenth birthday, the spread of a major forest fire drove them back down the mountain. Trapped between the wildfire and the one the humans had started to stop it, most of the pack perished. The man-cub, trapped in the middle of his worst nightmare, completely panicked. Carrying two wolf-friends who could run no more, he ran till a giant tree, weakened by fire, fell and crushed him beneath it. There he was protected from the worst of the inferno.  It was only by luck that the firefighters found him. Rigging a winch to lift the forest giant, they pulled the wolf-child and his lupine companions free. One of the wolves was dead, the other obviously dying. But they carried her down the mountain on the litter beside the unconscious feral child. The boy was rushed to a hospital, the wolf to a nearby vet clinic.

In addition to severe burns and smoke inhalation, the boy had several broken ribs, a compound fracture of one leg, and a concussion. But far more serious than any of his other injuries was the traumatic shock he had undergone. For almost a week, he hovered on the edge of death, remaining unconscious despite all efforts to bring him around. Slowly the scales tipped in favor of life, and he woke in a place totally alien to him. The pain of his injuries, which had healed little while he slept, the human and strange antiseptic smells, and the recent memory of fire and loss panicked him. Ripping out the long thorn that was stuck in his arm, he shattered the thing it was attached to. He tore off the clinging fabric swathed about him and began tearing with his claws at the mud thing stuck to his leg. 

As soon as he had started moving, something nearby had started making a strange repeating noise. He heard the sounds of humans nearby, coming closer, running. Seeing sky through an opening in the man-cave, he hobbled painfully toward it and tried to climb through. But there was something in his way, something clear like water, but hard and cool like stone. Whimpering with frustration and pain, he smashed it with his fist and it shattered into a hundred sparkling fragments. He almost leaped out before he realized he was standing at the edge of a cliff.  Just then, a part of the cave wall broke open, as he had seen other man-caves do, and a female human came in.  The rest of her pack stared curiously from behind her. He glanced at the sheer drop below and back at the female human. His frightened whine shifted to a growl deep in his throat when she took a step closer.

Dr. Emily Watkins-Paine stopped at the low voiced threat and re-evaluated. As a professor of anthropology at Harvard's Natural History Department, she had been sent out only yesterday to investigate reports of a feral child. She had been very skeptical.  Real feral children were exceedingly rare, and as the great forests diminished so did the likelihood of such wild children. She had assumed she would find nothing more than an uncommunicative teenaged runaway. But her examination of the unconscious boy had left her shaken. The bizarre development of his teeth and nails, his extraordinary mane of russet hair, the horrible injuries he had survived, made her wonder if he was even human. Now he stood before her, weaving but determined, his lip curled back in a ferocious snarl, threatening to leap out a fourth story window. He was smaller than her and painfully thin, hair in tangles around his naked body, much of it charred. One whole side of his body was horribly burned, as well as the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. The cast on his leg had huge gouges in it where he had tried tearing it off, and he had ripped off most of the other bandages.

In a quiet voice she ordered the others to stay out while she tried to calm him. Ignoring their objections and warnings, she closed the door behind her. Although she had misgivings about the wolf-child’s claws and fangs, she lowered herself to a sitting position, back against the door. Anything that frightened him would only drive him out the window.  She could only hope that in his weakened state he could not keep up a defensive posture for very long. Within fifteen minutes he sank to a crouching position, whimpering softly, and began licking his burned hands in doglike fashion. Emily was surprised at the surge of compassion she felt for the strange child. He had lived through more grievous injury than any normal human being could withstand, only to be disfigured and left alone in a world not his own. She wondered if he had been lucky after all.  She began speaking softly to him, and he looked up and growled. When she did not move, but continued speaking in a quiet, friendly voice, he went back to his ministrations. Gradually she raised her voice enough to be heard outside the door, and asked that a large piece of raw meat be brought. At the soft rap on the door, the boy looked up apprehensively. She was forced to scoot forward to allow the meat to be passed in, and he was seriously considering going out the window when he caught the scent. After a week of unconsciousness and intravenous feeding, his appetite had become an animal unto itself. Without the will to resist, he turned and stared at the meat she held out to him. His flat nose wrinkled appreciatively and drool wet his chin as he approached cautiously.  When he was within a few feet, he snatched it with blinding speed and retreated back to the window with it.  He ripped it apart and gulped it down in a matter of seconds.

He looked up at her with the same expression used by her hungry spaniel and jumped back when she laughed. The three pound roast had barely made a dent in his appetite. She ordered up more meat, in chunks this time, fairly certain his evident hunger would force him to eat from her hand. While she waited she watched him, and was amazed to see that his condition was improving rapidly.  Already, the burns looked several days older, and most of the swelling and bruises had vanished. He began tearing at the cast on his leg with his claws, breaking off chunks of it. She spoke sharply to distract him, but after growling at her he continued his efforts. Eventually he managed to chip away the entire cast. The wound where the bone had protruded through the skin had healed considerably, but it was obvious that the bones hadn’t had enough time to knit. After examining his newly recovered limb, he removed the rest of his bandages.

A rap on the door indicated the arrival of more meat, and with some scuffling a large bowl with at least ten pounds of meat cut into large chunks was handed in. Emily kept an eye on the wary feral child, but he did not bolt again. He had already scented the meat.

As soon as the door closed he advanced halfway across the room on hands and knees, eyeing the bowl ravenously. She removed the largest chunk of meat and extended it, half expecting to lose her hand with it. After only a brief hesitation he snatched it and backed away. Swallowing it in a single gulp, he looked hopefully at her. She offered him another, and he crawled forward to snatch it, scuttling again to the window. After the fourth piece, he did not continue the painful process of dragging his injured leg back and forth to the window. She continued to feed him, each time holding the meat closer to her body, rigidly controlling her excitement as she watched his rapid healing ability grow a thin film of new skin over the burns.

By the time he had eaten a dozen pieces of meat he was practically in her lap. As she handed him one, she cautiously reached out and patted him on the head. With a horrible snarl he withdrew several feet away. Resolutely she held the meat close to her body while he stared at her with a frustrated high-pitched whine. Finally he crawled close enough to take the meat, and again she reached toward him, this time to stroke his hair. Though he recoiled again, he neither growled nor ran away, and soon he allowed her to touch him without fear. A few minutes after he had finished the meat, his eyelids began to droop and the healing process slowed, then stopped. All his injuries looked a month or more old by this point.

As it became harder for him to stay awake, she continued stroking his matted hair, murmuring soft words of reassurance. He curled up on his side and closed his eyes in utter weariness, his breath slowing into sleep rhythms. With a pang of guilt she picked up the hypodermic that had been sent in with the meat. Then she glanced at the fourth story window across the room which he had almost leaped from and used the injection.

Heavily drugged, the wolf-child was moved to a windowless room and held to the bed with restraints. His leg was reset and a new cast put on it. When he awoke the next day, he raged and frothed at the straps till the doctors were sure he would hurt himself. But Emily pointed out the repetition of the previous day’s incredible healing. This accelerated regeneration process left him weak and famished, and after being hand fed chunks of meat till his belly bulged, he fell into a deep and untroubled sleep.

By the third day he was strong enough to break free of the straps and run amok, terrorizing patients and staff----and destroying thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Fortunately, he did not discover the stairwell, nor was he desperate enough to jump out a fifth story window. Finally Emily, who had been sitting with the wolf-child and feeding him by hand as he daily grew stronger, was able to calm him enough to sedate him.

It was obvious that the hospital was not equipped to deal with him, so he was released to the care of the Harvard Anthropology Department. There he languished in a gorilla cage while an environment was prepared for him. During this time, the wolf-child was depressed and moody, unresponsive to friendly overtures by the staff. He made no real attempt to escape. He had nowhere to go, nothing to go back to. His world had once again died in flames.  By the time he was transferred to his special environment, his leg, though still tender, was almost healed. The burns had been reduced to pink scars, which faded more each day.  When placed in his new environment, he brightened considerably. A fair replica of a forest setting, interlaced with a maze of stone walls that concealed one-way glass panels, it took almost an entire floor of the venerable Natural Science building. The wolf-child, though still lonely, settled into his new home comfortably.

He lived in this environment for almost three months, blissfully unaware of the hundreds of students, reporters and scientists who filed through between the walls of his life.  It was the desire of the department that he remain as he was, an uncivilized wolf-child, to enable them to study "man the animal" at length. But both men and wolves are social creatures, and Emily soon had to begin spending time in the cage with him, just to provide companionship.

From their studies, they learned that the wolf-child had somehow developed superhuman traits. His strength, speed, agility and constitution were beyond human capacity.  The full damage he had taken in the fire, more than enough to kill a normal human, was completely healed. The disfiguring burns had not even left scars. Due to his increased metabolism, the wolf-child had to eat three times as much as a normal human, and extensive use of his regenerative abilities required a corresponding increase in food consumption.  Additionally, he showed all the signs of a remarkable intelligence.

Emily should not have been startled when the child first spoke. Up till this point, she had thought of him as half dog, half ape. Now she was forced to regard him as human, and, as he progressively became more human, his being caged and treated like an animal began to disturb her. He learned quickly, and soon Emily was able to carry on simple conversations with him. He had a very short attention span, and either could not or would not remember how he came to be lost in the forest. Once, when she questioned him at length about his mother and father, he told her they had "burned up". She assumed he was referring to or identifying with his wolf friends, but afterwards, when she questioned him about his parents, he became angry and frightened and refused to talk. He insisted his name was Feral, a word he had obviously picked up from her.

Her department head was at first angry with her for teaching him so much. But she finally convinced him that they had a responsibility to try and identify him, and that much could be learned from his "humanization".  One day, Emily sat down with a comb and British determination and spent four hours washing and combing the tangles out of Feral's knee length hair. To his great dismay, she brushed out more than she left in, but she placated him by teaching him how to weave it into a long, wrist thick braid. Critically examining his reflection in his small pool, he grinned and pronounced himself human. Then a frown creased his forehead. He muttered a name, almost unintelligible. Emily excitedly questioned him, but he ran off into the maze.

Emily took all the variations of what Feral might have said and the story of the wolf-child to the police. At first they were skeptical, but Emily brought one of the detectives to visit Feral, and made a believer of him.  Dental records were obviously useless, and his hands were so calloused from the adaptation to the heavy claws and to running semi-upright that his fingerprints were very distorted. But the detective looked on the case as a personal challenge and made a hobby of it.

Emily was surprised to learn that many of her students still found the wolf-child ugly. It was not his Fangs nor crumpled nose that put them off, but his lack of simple hygiene and his posture and mannerisms. Emily was able to overlook these things and see that underneath; there was quite an attractive boy.

Only a week after the incident with his name, a group of government scientists came to examine Feral. Emily disapproved of the way they handled him, poking and prodding and measuring with less consideration than she would show a lab animal. After a minute examination, which included taking samples of skin, hair, feces, urine, blood and bone marrow, they released Feral back into his cage and left. Three days later, Emily was called into the director's office. She was informed that Feral was to be taken to a government research center in Washington for two weeks. Scientists felt that, if they could unlock the secret of his regeneration, it would be a major medical advance. Emily could certainly see the benefits of such research, but she remembered the calloused way the research scientists had handled Feral, and was reluctant to let him go. Denying personal involvement, she pointed out that they had no legal right, regardless of circumstances, to shuffle a human being from lab to lab. But the director was already decided, and Emily was powerless to change things.

The wolf-child, once again heavily sedated, was loaded into an unmarked panel truck and taken away. Emily felt at loose ends without Feral to occupy her time, and fretted around the office, trying to assemble her notes for the paper she was trying to write. A little more than a week after Feral left, the police detective contacted Emily. He had narrowed down the field to three likely possibilities; a family from Washington state whose child had been kidnapped, a family of travelers whose station wagon-had crashed and burned, and a family of three whose light plane had disappeared and never been found~ The wolf-child’s name, age, and physical characteristics best matched that of the child whose plane had disappeared.

The two weeks passed, then three, and no sign of Feral's return. The director acted like a frightened rabbit whenever she mentioned it to him, and she began to realize more was going on than she had initially thought. The director, while not a courageous man, was generally a responsible one, and she believed he was being forced to relinquish possession of the wolf-boy. When four weeks had passed with no change, she took matters into her own hands.

Peter Lyndon Smythe was very surprised to receive her call. Not only was he skeptical and suspicious, he was frankly hostile. Emily guessed that, as a wealthy man, Smythe had been deluged with False Finds and pranksters. Still, she felt it was unreasonable of him to refuse to come until he had concluded a business deal he was working on, which would require more than a week.

When Emily told the director she had summoned Smythe, he went livid with rage. She had never seen him so angry as when he shouted her that she had no idea what she was meddling in and to get out. Two days later, the same panel truck came and delivered Feral. Emily sat in the forest maze with him and waited for him to wake up. She saw that his hair was loose and tangled again and brushed it out and braided it.  He slept for several more hours, and when he began to regain consciousness, he seemed reluctant to wake up. When he finally opened his eyes, he looked wildly around and, seeing Emily, scrambled away until he had his back to the stone. She spoke to him, asking if he remembered her, but he only pulled his knees up and covered his face with his hands. Crouching beside him, she stroked his hair and spoke in a soothing voice. But he only curled up tighter and began whimpering. Keeping her temper tightly reined so as not to frighten him, she continued talking to him and petting him till he fell into a light, restless sleep.

She went and raged at the director for an hour, though he totally denied responsibility.  Then she returned with a quantity of fresh meat to wait for the wolf-child to waken. Even after sleeping he looked pale and exhausted, and for the first time he refused to eat. After much coaxing, he took a piece of meat, examining it carefully before eating it. Each piece was treated in this fashion, sniffed over and inspected suspiciously, and torn into shreds before eating. Two pieces he refused to eat, but methodically ate the rest, then sat and regarded her intently. She drew a candy bar out of her pocket, unwrapped it, and offered it to him. He hesitated, obviously afraid, but could not resist the treat.

It was three days before she could get him to speak. Although his vocabulary was much improved, he was nervous and reluctant to talk. He had also developed a nervous habit of chopping his words into hard to understand pieces. She had told him immediately that his grandfather was coming, but it was nearly impossible to make him understand the complex family relationship that represented. She bought him a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt and a vest, although it was difficult getting him to wear them. Finally she brought in a stack of magazines and books and showed him that all human beings wore clothing. At the same time, she started toilet training him, which he caught onto quickly. Other human traits he learned slowly or not at all, such as eating cooked food slowly off a plate with utensils; not eating bones, pits, or paper; always walking upright; and not acting oddly in public.

Feral had made remarkable progress in the five days since Emily had coaxed him back out of his shell. She was impressed with his eager intelligence and his ability to emulate the humans around him. She wished all her students were so hungry for what she could teach. Taking him out into the staff areas, she allowed him to peer through the one-way glass into his habitat. The staff, which had some affection toward the wolf-child, helped Emily with the mammoth task of teaching Feral to be human in five days.

When the day came for Feral to meet his grandfather, Emily was reasonably confident that her student would make a good showing. Till she met Peter Smythe. A stern, forbidding man in his late sixties, over six feet tall, Smythe turned disapproving ice grey eyes on everything around him. His wife, a shy, retiring woman dressed in conservative clothing of expensive cut, seemed quite intimidated by her husband. Her first sight of Smythe gave Emily two pieces of information; there was going to be trouble, and Smythe was without a doubt Feral's grandfather. Despite differences in size and coloring, and the distortion of Feral's features, the resemblance between them was undeniable. She only hoped that Smythe would see beyond his own resolute disbelief to his face mirrored on that of the wolf-child.

She took them to the staff lounge where Feral waited in apprehensive confusion. When she opened the door, he started up from behind the couch he had been investigating with a guilty expression. He sat down, somewhat tardily but quite properly, then remembering how one greets people, bounced to his Feet and offered Smythe his hand.  Emily watched the knowledge dawn on Sarah Ann Smythe's face as she looked form one to the other of them...this is my grandson. But her husband's face was closed. He did not take the clawed hand the wolf-child offered him, but stared with flinty eyes down at him. Emily looked at Feral through different eyes as he drew back the rejected hand and sniffed at it with a puzzled expression.  She saw rather than the brilliant child who had learned so much in so little time, a shaggy beast with claws and fangs and a flat, twitching nose. For the first time, Feral seemed ugly to her. Completely against her will, she began mumbling excuses and apologies, even as Feral, no longer able to control his curiosity, began politely sniffing around their general vicinity, like any dog. But Mrs. Smythe provided a welcome contrast to her husband's disdain.  When the boy began investigating her handbag, she reached out a wondering hand to touch his face. Feral sniffed at her fingers and gave them a tentative lick, before shaking her hand as Emily had taught him to do.

Smythe frowned and demanded an explanation of how she could claim this animal was any relation of his. She tried to stammer out the wolf-child's history, overwhelmed by Smythe's presence and authority. It was clear the situation was hopeless, and she was ready to give up when Mrs. Smythe intervened. Holding the wolf-child's hand tightly between both of her own, she told her husband that her grandson was coming home. Smythe was clearly unaccustomed to such assertiveness from his wife, and unprepared for the consequences of refusal. Against his better judgment, he conceded the argument, and agreed to take custody of Feral.

With unexpected sadness, Emily gathered up a small assortment of toys and picture books the boy had accumulated during his stay and handed them to the chauffer. Walking with them out to the car, she kissed him on the cheek, and then helped convince the confused and somewhat frightened wolf-boy to enter the car. Her last sight of him was his face pressed against the rear window of the car as they drove off.

 The busy, crowded airport was a wondrous and terrifying place. Fretting ceaselessly with his uncomfortable clothing, the wolf-boy clung to his grandmother's hand, alternately intrigued and cowed by the myriad sights, sounds and smells. Finally, after attracting stares from hundreds of humans, he was led to a cave resembling the rolling one which had brought him to this place. When the plane took off, sudden memory of his last flight and its terrible ending drove him cowering under one of the seats. No amount of cajoling or commanding could force him out till half an hour after they had landed. By this point, Smythe was at the end of his patience.

 This situation was little remedied by Feral's first few days at the estate. He refused to eat anything but raw meat, could barely be forced to wear clothing, and whined and snarled like a wild animal. He spilled and broke and tore a great many things, and would spend happy hours just flushing a toilet. His grandmother bought him a television, and after some confusion over how the tiny humans were kept in the box, spent most of his time staring at the flickering images and learning.

 He had been at the estate for five days when an ugly confrontation with his grandfather occurred. Smythe, having made prior arrangements with the household staff to see that Feral was safely settled in front of his television, brought a client home for cocktails. The maid, who was supposed to have seen to it, had lost track of time and forgotten. Smythe and his client came in to find the wolf-boy sitting under the dining room table naked, meticulously tearing pictures out of a stack of books. After escorting the shocked client out, Smythe returned in a towering rage. It began with him dragging Feral bodily from under the table and raging at him, and ended with the boy exhibiting his own temper and super-human strength in destroying half the dining room furniture. Smythe suddenly was faced with the understanding that the boy was not merely unmanageable, he was dangerous.

 The next day, Feral sat in his room watching "Donahue". It was a story on mutant rights, and there were a number of people both on stage and in the audience who were even more un-human looking than he was. He listened with sharp interest as a quiet, human looking woman argued with the volatile crowd for the right of all intelligent life forms to live in peace and happiness. The program became something about cleaning clothing, and Feral found his attention wandering to his grandfather's voice on the downstairs phone.

 There was some reluctance on Smythe's part to make the call.  Although he would certainly deny it, he had a growing belief that this wild creature actually was his grandson. But the boy was powerful and dangerous, and if things were to continue on their present course, the boy was likely to injure or even kill someone.  Even Sarah had to admit this after seeing the destruction in the dining room. Dr. Paine's voice sounded sleepy on the other end of the phone till she recognized his voice. She responded with mixed feelings to his explanation of the problem, and he had a feeling she was not telling him something. He retained misgivings, even after she agreed to send a car around for him after dinner, and hung up the phone slowly. Yet, the woman had seemed to have some control over the boy, and an institution would be the safest place for him. Perhaps in six months or a year, the boy would be ready to come home.

 Feral struggled to understand what he had heard. His grandfather was sending him back to Emily-Paine, which was all right, for he certainly like her. But he was certain that, if he went back there, the men-who-smelled-funny would take him back to the hurting place again. There they had hurt him again and again in many different ways, put bad things in his food which made him hurt inside, and wouldn't talk to him or let him out of the metal box. With much sadness, he started to leave the room, then stopped and went back for the picture on the nightstand. A smiling man and woman. "Mother" and "father" he had been told they were called, but something inside him knew them by another name. Looking at the picture made him hurt inside, but he put it carefully in his pocket anyway. Quiet as a wolf, he slipped out the back door and into the snow. He was not sure where he would go. The wolves were dead and the forest had all burned up. Then he remembered the woman on the television, Empath. He wondered if he was a mutant, like the others who were different on the television. He would find her, and ask her what he should do, where he should go.

 Emily tried hard to conceal her joy when she heard of Feral's escape. She alone of all the researchers guessed that he would not return to the woods. A team of students and scientists were dispatched to find him.  The were flown to the Smythe estate to track him from where he left, provisioned For a long stay in the snowy Canadian wilderness. The Harvard team was not the only group sent out to look For Feral. The government research team, hoping to discover a super-soldier Formula, also engaged trackers.  And Genetech, whose ears were everywhere, had learned of the wild-boy's actual identity, and sent superpowered agents after him.

 Ignorant of all these hungry pursuers, Feral hunted, walked, and hopped freight trains all the way across country to California. Spring was already well upon the land by the time the worn and cheerful form presented itself on Empath's doorstep. He told her, in his choppy vocabulary, a hundred adventures he had found along the way, friends and enemies made, and asked her if he was a mutant, and what to do with himself. Empath was in an awkward position. The boy was a minor, and it appeared that Harvard University had legal custody of him. But she could hardly return him to the merciless hands of the military researchers, either. Although he was no mutant, he clearly possessed superhuman abilities. She resolved to shelter him as best she could, and introduced him to the team of heroes called SPAD, alongside whom she sometimes Fought. Feral settled into the life of the superhero with enthusiasm, and his short career has been a busy one.

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Last updated: 03/21/03.