The Wolf Girl

**The Wolf Girl** is a story about a girl who has been seen hunting alongside a pack of wolves. The story appears in Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill your Bones. A retelling of "The Lobo Girl of Devil's River," reported by L.D. Bertillion in 1937, told to the author by a retired laborer named Juan de la Cruz Machuca.

## Plot

Travel northwest into the desert from Del Rio, Texas, and eventually you will come to Devil's River. In the 1830's, a trapper named John Dent and his wife, Molly settled where Dry Creek runs into Devil's River. Dent was after beaver, which were plentiful there. He and Molly built a cabin from brush, and near it, they put up an arbor to give them shade. Molly Dent became pregnant. When she was ready to have their child, John Dent raced on horseback to their nearest neighbors several miles away. "My wife is having a baby," he said to the man and his wife. "Can you help us?" They agreed to come at once.

As they got ready to leave, a violent storm came up, and a bolt of lightning struck and killed John Dent. The man and his wife managed to find his cabin, but did not arrived until the next day. By then, Molly Dent was dead too. It looked as if she had given birth before she died. But the neighbors could not find the baby. Since there were wolf tracks all around, they decided the wolves have eaten it. They buried Molly Dent and left.

A number of years after she died, people began to tell a strange tale. Some swore it was a true story, others said it never could have happened. The story begins in a small settlement a dozen miles from Molly Dent's grave. Early one morning, a pack of wolves raced in from the desert and killed some goats. Such attacks were not unusual in those days. But a boy thought he saw a naked young girl with long blonde hair, running with the wolves. A year or two later, a woman came upon some wolves eating a goat they had just killed. Eating the goat with them, she claimed, was a naked young girl with long blonde hair. When the wolves and the girl saw her, they fled. The woman said that at first, the girl ran on all fours, then she stood and ran like a human, swiftly as the wolves. People started wondering if this wolf girl was Molly Dent's daughter. Had a mother wolf carried her off the day she was born, and raised her with her pups? If so, by now she would be ten or eleven years old.

As the story is told, some men began to look for the girl. They searched along the riverbanks, and in the desert, and its canyons. And one day, it is said, they found her, walking in a canyon with a wolf at her side. When the wolf ran off, the girl hid in an opening in one of the canyon walls. When the men tried to capture her, she fought back, biting and scratching like an enraged animal. When they finally subdued her, she began screaming like a frighten young girl, and howling like a frighten young wolf. Her captors bounded her with rope, put her across a horse and took her to a small ranch house in the desert. They would turn her over to the sheriff the next day, they decided. They placed her in an empty room and untied her. Terror-stricken, she hid in the shadows. They left her and locked the door. Soon she was screaming and howling again. The men thought they would go mad listening to her, but at last, she stopped.

When night fell, wolves began howling in the distance. People say that each time they stopped, the girl howled in reply. As the story goes, the cries of wolves came from every direction, and got closer and closer. Suddenly, as if a signal had been given, wolves attacked the horses and other livestock. The men rushed into the darkness firing their guns. High up in the wall, in the room where they left the girl, was a small window. A plank was nailed across it. She pulled the plank off, crawled through the window and disappeared.

Years passed with no word of the girl. Then one day, some men on horseback came around a bend in the Rio Grande, not far from Devil's River. They claimed they saw a young woman, with long blonde hair, feeding two wolf pups. When she saw the men, she snatched up the pups and ran into the brush. They rode after her, but she quickly left them behind. They searched and searched, but found no trace of her. That is the last we know of the wolf girl. And it is there in the desert, near the Rio Grande, that this story ends.