Harry Summerfield did not have a happy childhood. Although perfectly loving and caring about their only child, Harry's parents were consumerists in a big way. Every room of their compact two-up, two-down semi-detached contained an electric gizmo of one sort or another. There was a television in every room, complete with video. There were stereos, cd-players, and computers throughout the house. The kitchen had so many blenders, mixers, cookers and dish-washers, it looked like an appliance catalogue. And every item had a brand name. If it didn't have a brand name, Harry's parents were reluctant to let it into the house. It was only thanks to the little stickers on fruit that Harry didn't die of scurvy.
As a result, Harry grew up to be a quiet, polite, and utterly internalized young person, believing passionately that The Truth was Out There and that all people should Boldly Go Where No-One Had Been Before. He thought that everything that was ever produced came straight from cans and that Coke and Pepsi were mentioned in the Bible. Every thing he learnt was related to the way he lived - he learnt to read from the backs of cereal boxes, he learnt to write to send off for the special offers from whatever over-hyped action figure range he was collecting that week - and all his hopes, dreams and ambitions amounted to nothing more than a vague desire to purchase the latest disposable consumerable that was on offer.
Then one day, Harry went on a school trip to the zoo. The shock of seeing so many real live creatures after years of seeing them only in photographs was a revelation. That night he went home, calmly packed a bar of chocolate, a bag of crisps, and his Gameboy into a small traveling bag, and left his parents a note explaining that he had gone forever to live in the woods and be at one with the wild animals that lived there. He returned the next day, as have many young runaways who discover that the natural world is cold, wet, and severely lacking in plug sockets and other amenities, but from that day onwards he had a Dream.
And so, Harry sold all his action figures and console games, reassuring his parents that he was going to use the money to buy the new Sega 32bit HyperMegaSuperDrive. To their consternation, he used the money instead to buy books on maths, history, geography, and animals. Mainly animals. He read about the mating rituals of peacocks, how chimpanzees foraged for food, and how certain birds lived on top of rhinoceroses in exchange for picking all the ticks and fleas off them. He read about the biology of every creature that had ever been written about and managed to come top on biology at school most of the time as a result, although he refused to dissect any living creature which lost him marks and gained him some funny looks. But this aside, he excelled at school, and managed to get accepted on a Zoology course in another part of the country. He left his parents with a rather more sensible farewell note and a new washing machine to fill the gap he left in their lives, which it did nicely.
From there, things moved quickly. At university he met a wealthy young lady called Deborah, whom he married, and they used the dowry Deborah's parents had given them, along with a sizeable bank loan, to fulfill his Dream; the setting up of a wildlife park. The park soon became popular and Harry soon became wealthy, although he poured all the money he received right back into the park. And so things went well for a couple of years, until the fateful day the boy was found.1
It started like any ordinary day. Harry had just finished his usual early morning tour of the park and was settling down in his office to sort through the day's paperwork when one of the keepers rushed in with the news that there was a young boy in the wolf enclosure. At first Harry was incredulous but the keeper's urgency managed to persuade him to go and look, and sure enough there really was a boy in the wolf enclosure. He was a thin, muddy specimen of boyhood, wearing what looked like a pair of furry shorts, a vest, and little else. He was sleeping comfortably near to the wolves who were, much to Harry surprise, completely undisturbed by this intruder into their world.
Since it was fairly obvious that the wolves were not bothering the boy, Harry's next worry was that the boy might be bothering the wolves. Besides which, the boy' probably had parents who would be frantic with worry about what had happened to their son, although Harry had to admit that might be unlikely since there are very few parents who are liberal enough to let their child dress in furry shorts and a vest. So it was decided that someone would have to be lowered into the pit to grab the boy and then be hoisted out again. Someone bravely volunteered and so the plan was put into action..
At first things went well. However, once the volunteer was in the enclosure, a problem arose. Not from the wolves themselves - they thought the whole show was being put on for their entertainment and watched with amusement - but from the boy. The moment the volunteer touched him, he woke suddenly, leapt on his unfortunate rescuer with a feral howl and promptly sank his teeth firmly into the unfortunate man's thigh. The yell that echoed from the enclosure was taken by Harry as a good enough signal as any to raise the wounded man out of there. Unfortunately the boy was more than a little reluctant to let go of his prize and so was lifted some way into the air along with his victim until he decided that discretion was the better part of valor, unlocked his jaws, and fell lightly back to earth. The wolves thought this was hilarious.
Several more attempts were made that day, each ending in a similar fashion until Harry decided that the best solution was to leave the boy where he was until they could find some other way of getting him out. Some of the keepers protested at this until Harry pointed out that the boy seemed perfectly happy down there as did the wolves, and besides he was rapidly running out of unwounded keepers.
So the boy was left where he was. Every day, Harry and the zoo staff would get together to try new ways of getting the boy out of the pit and every day they would fail. At the same time, small crowds started to gather to watch these extraordinary attempts and even shout encouragement when things started to go wrong. And Harry began to notice a curious thing. At the end of each new rescue attempt, the on-lookers would depart to tell their friends and families about what they had seen. And the next day the people they told came to see what was so interesting. And they brought people whom they told about it, who brought along people who they told. And slowly, day by day, the crowd grew bigger. And as the crowd grew bigger, the park started to make more money from the extra visitors. Even when the rescue attempts had failed, they stayed to look at some of the other animals. Eventually Harry called a halt to these attempts, but people still came to see the boy. And the park made more money. So Harry decided to keep the boy as an attraction.
Of course, there was outrage when the news broke. Hordes of people from child protection agencies and social workers flocked to the park to protest. But Harry gradually managed to persuade them that the boy wasn't suffering. He showed them how well the boy was being treated both by the keepers and the wolves, how he had plenty of space in which to exercise, and how well the boy was fed along with the other wolves, even pointing out that the raw meat he was fed was perfectly nutritious and much healthier than some of the junk food alternatives boys of his age would be feeding themselves with. He even showed them how he had taken it upon himself to look after the boy, making sure that he was in the best of health and playing with him as if he were Harry's own son. Besides which, the numerous independent rescue attempts that were made (for Harry allowed anyone to try, with his permission) nearly always ended in failure, and the only time one successfully brought the boy out of the enclosure he had sat on his haunches and howled so mournfully and continuously that his 'rescuers' were moved enough to return him to the enclosure.
And so things went smoothly for a time. Then one day a big car pulled up outside Harry's office and an American got out. He smiled far too broadly and introduced himself to Harry as Jim-Bob Higgins, Animal Impresario Extraordinaire and shook Harry's hand. He explained to Harry how he had heard about the wolf-boy that was attracting so many people to Harry's park and how he had come to make Harry a generous financial offer in exchange for the boy so that he could exhibit the boy properly with all the panache and showmanship that he had learned over the years. Harry said no. The American's smile was a little less wide as he pointed out that Harry's park was small compared to the ones in the States and that he surely couldn't be expected to exhibit such a specimen as the wolf-boy to its full potential. Harry pointed out that the boy was a he, not an it. The American explained how he could make old wolfie-boy as big a name as Michael Jackson with TV interviews, nationwide tours and promotional sponsorship, all of which would make Harry a very wealthy man. Harry said that money didn't matter to him and the American was forced to leave.
The next day he returned with a young lady. The American introduced her as the wolf-boy's natural mother whom he, Jim-Bob Higgens, had gone to great lengths to track down out of the goodness of his heart and the desire not to see any family suffering the agony of separation. Harry asked whether the woman could prove that she was the wolf-boy's mother and the American replied to this by thrusting a briefcase full of papers into Harry's hands. The American explained that wolfie's mother had decided that not only did she want her son back but she was going to sue Harry's park for not getting in contact with her and had asked him to handle the case for her. He handed Harry a summons to appear in court in a month's time before getting back in the car and driving away. Harry looked at the legal papers. They were very complex.
That night, Harry was so worried by the American that he told Deborah about it. Fortunately Deborah was much calmer about it than Harry since, like Harry, she too had a Dream, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to put it into action. She told Harry about it and together they worked out a plan.
The next day, much to the keeper's surprise, Harry commissioned a new enclosure to be built for the wolf-boy. He hired a team of builders who could be seen every day excavating the ground and planting trees and so on. On top of this, Harry was now spending all his spare time in the wolf enclosure, only coming out for meals and important park business. The keepers were perplexed by this strange behavior and asked Deborah if she knew what was wrong with her husband, but she just smiled enigmatically and said that everyone was allowed a hobby. And so a month passed.
The day before the hearing, the American received a phone call from a distressed Harry insisting that he came over at once. When he arrived at the park, he found Harry with a young keeper called Steven. It seemed that when Steven had transferred the wolf boy into his new enclosure, the boy had vanished deep into the trees and was refusing to come out., despite Harry's best efforts. The American realised that his whole case hinged on the presence of the wolf boy and demanded that he be let into the enclosure in order to bring the boy back out. At first Harry was reluctant but the American insisted and so it was that Steven let him into the enclosure before carefully locking the gate behind him...
When the day of the court case arrived, the American failed to turn up, and so the case was dismissed. Although the wolf boy was never found, people flocked to see Harry's new attraction - a genuine wild man. At first, the wild man had been hostile but after several weeks of patient attention by his keeper Steven he soon calmed down and began to enjoy his new life. Steven was such a diligent and caring keeper that Harry and Deborah adopted him and when Harry retired, the ownership of the park passed on to Steven. Steven was as kind and thoughtful an owner as Harry had been, and although he often spent his evenings sitting in the wolf enclosure communing with the beasts, no-one really minded.
1Actually, it's inaccurate to call it the fateful day. The really fateful day occurred six months before that when the bank started to send warning letters about loan repayment just as the number of visitors dropped significantly. But since these were quite ordinary events, no one really considered them as fateful, which is a shame really.
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