Two minutes after the lights went out, the wolves attacked. Her mother Sunita remembers, “By the time we realized what was happening, they had taken her away.”
The following day, Sandhya’s body was discovered laying 500 meters from her house in the sugarcane fields.
Eight-year-old Utkarsh was resting behind a mosquito net in a nearby village earlier in the month when his mother noticed a wolf making its way into their house.
“The creature shot out of the darkness. I cried out, ‘Leave my boy alone!’ “My neighbors came running in, and the wolf ran away,” she narrates.
A spate of wolf attacks that began in mid-April have terrified some thirty communities in the Bahraich area, which is close to the Nepali border. The wolves have killed and taken nine youngsters and an adult. A one-year-old kid was the youngest casualty, while a 45-year-old woman was the oldest. There are at least 34 more injured people.
The villages that are impacted are engulfed in panic and fear. Children are kept inside the many unlocked village homes, and men are seen at night policing the dimly lit streets. To frighten the wolves, authorities have set traps, utilized firecrackers, and deployed drones and cameras. Three wolves have been taken and brought to zoos thus far.
