Initial diagnosis: autism.”
She clicked the recorder off, frowning. It didn’t feel right. She Googled autism, symptoms of, and read through the list of behaviors typically associated with autism. None of it was new information.
• Language delay
• Some never acquire language
• Lack of pleasure at being touched
• Unable/unwilling to make eye contact
• Ignores surroundings
• May appear deaf, due to ignoring of sounds/world around him/her
• Repetitive physical behaviors common, i.e., hand clapping, toe tapping
• Severe temper tantrums
• Unintelligible gibberish
• Savant abilities may develop, often in math or music or drawing
• Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to age level
The list went on. According to the DSM IV criteria, a patient who exhibited a set number of the symptoms could reasonably be diagnosed as autistic. Unfortunately, she hadn’t observed the child fully enough to answer many of the behavioral questions. Like: did the girl like to be touched? Could she exhibit reciprocal emotions? To these, Julia had no concrete answers.
But she had a gut response.
The girl could speak, at least some, and she could hear and understand some limited amount. Strangely, Julia was convinced that the girl’s responses were normal; it was the world around her that was wrong.
There was no point in running through the related diagnoses—Asperger’s syndrome, Ratt’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, or PDD NOS. She simply didn’t have enough information. On her pad, she wrote: Tomorrow: study social interaction, patterns of behavior (if any), motor skills.
She clicked the pen shut, tapped it on the table.
There was something she was missing. She went back to the computer and started searching. She had no idea what she was looking for.
For the next two hours she sat there taking notes on whatever childhood behavioral and mental disorders she could find, but none of them gave her that Aha! moment. Finally, at around eleven, she ran a Google search on lost children. That took her to a lot of television movies and kidnapping sites. That was her sister’s job. She added woods to the search to see how many similar cases there were of children lost or abandoned in a forest or national park.
Feral children came up. It was a phrase she hadn’t seen in print since her college days. Below it was the sentence fragment: . . . lost or abandoned children raised by wolves or bears in the deep woods may seem . . .
She moved the cursor and clicked. Text appeared on the screen.
Feral children are lost, abandoned, or otherwise forgotten children who survive in completely isolated conditions. The idea of children raised by wolves or bears is prevalent in legend, although there are few scientifically documented cases. Some of the more celebrated such children include:
• The three Hungarian bear boys (17th century)
• The girl of Oranienburg (1717)
• Peter, the wild boy (1726)
• Victor of Aveyron (1797)
• Kaspar Hauser (1828)
• Kamala and Amala of India (1920)
• Genie (1970)