For weeks, people in Mallahanpurwa and the scattered hamlets of Kaiserganj had started to breathe again. After months of horror, the Forest Department announced that the last member of a “killer pack” of four wolves had been shot dead on November 15.
Operations were scaled back, patrols grew thinner, and an exhausted population dared to hope the nightmare was finally over.
Then, just three weeks later, in the pale light of a Sunday dawn, the nightmare walked straight back into a villager’s home.
In a hut at Mallahanpurwa, a young mother slept on a cot with her four-month-old baby tucked beside her.
Sometime before sunrise, an animal slipped silently through the doorway. By the time the mother stirred, sensing movement, the intruder had already locked its jaws around the infant and vanished into the dark.
She woke to the sight every parent dreads: the wolf’s tail disappearing into the lane, her baby gone.
Hours later, villagers and forest staff found only scraps of clothing and bloodstains inside a sugarcane field nearly a kilometre away. The child wasn’t coming back.
This was not an isolated horror.
It was the fourth wolf attack in just ten days in this pocket of the Bahraich district.
A five-year-old boy had been killed in the same village on November 28, and two five-year-old girls were mauled in separate attacks on December 5 in Mallahanpurwa and Baburi.
For the people of Kaiserganj tehsil, the message was clear: the wolves had never really left. Only the Forest Department had.
A region that lives with wolves – and with denial
Bahraich is not new to wolves, and wolves are not new to blood. In 2024, along the Mahsi–Ghaghara belt of the same district, a pack of wolves triggered what the state itself later admitted was a full-blown emergency.
From March to September, at least ten people – nine of them children – were killed and more than 30 injured in a string of nighttime attacks, most victims snatched while sleeping in flimsy, doorless houses or out in the open.
The government launched “Operation Bhediya”: multiple teams with drones, camera traps, night patrols, and tranquilliser guns fanned out across floodplains and sugarcane fields.
Several wolves were caught or killed, and the operation was briefly hailed as a success.
But the data told another story. Between July 17 and early September 2024 alone, wolves killed eight people – seven of them small children – and injured at least 18.
And as later tallies emerged, officials acknowledged that, since March, around ten people had died and over 30 were injured in these attacks, spread across dozens of villages.
Instead of treating this as a long-term pattern of conflict in a fragile landscape, the system treated it like a problem to be closed with a file: capture a few animals, brief the media, declare mission accomplished.
The villagers were left with grief and an unspoken warning – if wolves could do this once, they could do it again.
2025: The “killer pack” and the illusion of safety
By the time the first frightening reports started surfacing again in September 2025 from Kaiserganj and nearby areas, no one could claim ignorance.
Officials themselves admitted that wolves had once more killed multiple people and injured at least 30 in a fresh wave of attacks, mostly targeting children and an elderly couple.
In response, the state hardened its stance.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath carried out an aerial survey of the affected belt and authorised an operation to capture the wolves – and, if capture failed, to shoot them.
A four-member pack was blamed for the killings. By mid-November, three wolves had been killed or neutralised.
On November 15, forest officials shot a female wolf they described as the last member of the “killer pack” that had, by their count, killed at least eight people and injured about 30 in roughly two months.
Relief, they said, had returned to Bahraich.
Except it hadn’t.
Within weeks, fresh attacks erupted – first in September and October, then through late November and early December.
Various official tallies from this period tell a chilling story: since September 9, six people – four children and an elderly couple – have died, and 30 others were injured in wolf attacks in Mahsi–Bahraich.
Another set of figures from Kaiserganj and neighbouring villages says that, in roughly three months, at least ten people – eight of them children – were killed and 32 injured across nearly 85 terrorised villages.
Put simply, even as authorities were framing the issue as a discrete “killer pack” problem, wolves continued to roam, adapt, and strike.
Links between specific individual animals and particular attacks were never fully established.
But the Forest Department behaved as if the threat had a neat headcount. When those four wolves were counted out, vigilance was allowed to slip.
The wolves, of course, did not read that press note.
Villagers across Bahraich can tell you where the real problem lies. The landscape is a patchwork: riverine forest fringes, grasslands, and thick belts of sugarcane growing taller than a person.
These fields are perfect for wolves – narrow paths, cool shade, and cover dense enough to hide a predator from both human eyes and drone cameras.
For the poor in these villages, safety is fragile. Many houses still lack solid doors; many families sleep outside in the heat or on open verandahs during power cuts.
Children often lie beside their parents on low cots, the only barrier between them and the night a torn mosquito net.
These are the conditions under which the Bahraich wolves have perfected their pattern: slip in, seize the smallest body, and vanish into the fields before the adults can even stand up.
Forest officials say now, as they said in 2024, that sugarcane makes surveillance hard, that wolves move alone after attacking, and that they lack the manpower to keep eyes on dozens of scattered hamlets all night long.
They talk of drones, thermal cameras, camera traps, nets, and posters teaching villagers how to recognise the paw prints of wolves, tigers, leopards, hyenas, and jackals.
What they do not like to admit is that they already knew all of this from the last round of horror – and still failed to treat it as a permanent threat.
Ten years of blood on the edges of the forest
Over the past decade, Bahraich and its forests – especially the Mahsi and Katarniaghat ranges and now Kaiserganj – have quietly become one of north India’s most dangerous frontlines of man–animal conflict.
The numbers, even from just the last two years, are devastating.
In 2024, the Bahraich wolf attacks from March to September left at least ten people dead – mostly children – and over 30 injured, according to multiple official and media assessments.
In 2024 alone, one government operation admitted that eight people – seven children and a woman – died in just two months in concentrated attacks, prompting emergency meetings and night-patrol orders.
In 2025, especially from September onward, fresh patterns emerged. One set of official briefings pointed to six deaths (four children and an elderly couple) and around 30 injuries since September 9 in the Bahraich region.
Another tally from the ongoing crisis in Kaiserganj and nearby areas said ten people had died and 32 were injured in about three months, affecting around 85 villages.
Taken together, and even allowing for overlaps in the way these figures are reported, wolves alone have likely killed well over twenty people – most of them children – and injured upwards of sixty in the Bahraich district in roughly the past two years.
The majority of these deaths and injuries have occurred at night, inside or just outside people’s homes.
And wolves are not the only predators claiming human lives.
In the Katarniaghat Wildlife Division, which falls in the same district, tigers have killed and injured villagers even as the wolf crisis raged further east.
In late 2025, a 21-year-old man was killed while cutting grass near his village in the Sujauli range; a woman had been injured in a similar attack just two days earlier.
Around the same time, a young male tiger that had been stalking villages in the Murtiha range was finally trapped in a cage, only after what reports described as a spate of wildlife attacks.
All this has unfolded in barely two years of sustained coverage. Older local memories are filled with stories of big cats and wolves taking livestock and, occasionally, children – but those incidents were rarely documented as systematically as the 2024–25 wolf emergency.
What is clear is that, in the last decade, Bahraich’s forest fringe has turned into a place where living close to wildlife too often means dying because of wildlife.
“We knew this would happen again” – The charge against the Forest Department.
Villagers in Mallahanpurwa, Baburi, Godahiya and other hamlets of Kaiserganj do not speak in the language of policy or official operations.
Their question is blunt: if the government knew that wolves had already killed so many children across Bahraich since 2024, why were preventive measures not in place round-the-year?
They see patrols that swell after a killing and fade when the TV cameras leave.
They see sugarcane fields left uncleared right up to their doorsteps, even after the Forest Department itself now admits that dense crops act as hiding spots for predators after an attack.
They see posters teaching them to identify footprints and advisories telling them not to sleep outside – but they also see the same fragile huts, the same poverty, the same absence of basic doors or secure windows that made their children easy prey during the 2024 attacks.
Officials, when pressed, point to limited manpower, the difficulty of monitoring dozens of villages night after night, and the challenge of distinguishing between multiple wolves roaming across sugarcane, river, and forest patches.
They stress the complexity of balancing wildlife protection with human safety, and remind critics that wolves are an endangered species in India.
But that is precisely the point. If the region is both a crucial habitat and a proven killing ground, the responsibility on the Forest Department is heavier, not lighter.
Protecting wildlife in such a landscape cannot mean allowing it to repeatedly prey on children who sleep within a kilometre of the forest boundary.
The job of the Forest Department was never only to count wolves, dart them, or shoot a few on orders from above.
It was to anticipate that the same terrain, the same crops, the same poverty, and the same patterns of attack would keep coming together to produce fresh tragedies unless something fundamentally changed.
That didn’t happen.
A cunning predator – and a system that never learns
No one in Bahraich underestimates the wolf.
They call it shaatir – cunning. It knows when to come, where to slip in, and whom to take.
It tests fences, watches sleeping patterns, retreats at the first shout and returns the next night from another direction.
Yet, over the past ten years and especially in the last two, the wolves have not only exposed the vulnerability of poor forest-fringe communities – they have exposed the blind spots of the very system meant to protect both animals and humans.
Every wave of attacks has been treated as a “case” with a beginning and an end: identify a pack, name an operation, catch or kill a few animals, send press releases, move on.
The reality on the ground is different. Wolves continue to roam the sugarcane and riverine grasslands.
Tigers still move through Katarniaghat towards agricultural land. Villagers still sleep in houses where a predator only needs a low leap to enter.
And children in places like Mallahanpurwa still go to bed within reach of a pair of yellow eyes watching from the darkness beyond the field bund.
The four-month-old baby taken from his mother’s side, the five-year-old boy lifted from his home, the two little girls whose screams scared away the wolf but not the future – their stories are not freak accidents.
They are the predictable results of a state that reacts only after the blood has already been spilt.
Until Bahraich’s forests are managed as shared space, where wildlife corridors, cropping patterns, housing safety and community preparedness are all treated as non-negotiable, the wolves will keep testing the boundaries.
And every time the government declares “mission accomplished” too soon, it sends exactly the wrong message – not to the people, but to the predator.
The wolves of Bahraich have learnt how to live with humans. The question now is whether the Forest Department will learn how to protect them.
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