There are similarities here to the film NELL, in which Jodie Foster plays a woman who grew up alone in the woods without human companionship or language. And the part of their lives in which they lived with two tigers is the part that most defines them, even at the end. But ultimately, both girls come to understand who they are. Becky's father, especially, struggles to transform his daughter back into a human girl he can recognize as his own. Both of them long for their tiger parents. Without language, they at first respond to their human kidnappers as animals would, with snarls and bared teeth. When Becky's father finds them and takes them back to civilization, they feel a profound sense of loss. And just as the two tigers protect and care for them, they also try to protect their animal "parents" from the threat of men who would kill them. Very quickly, both girls learn to tear flesh from a carcass with their hands and teeth, lap water from a stream, and run on all fours. Over the next several months, Hannah and Becky are treated as if they are the tiger's cubs - she and her mate feed them, teach them to hunt, and sleep curled up with them. Both would surely have died had a female Tasmanian tiger not pulled them to safety and taken them back to her lair. Hannah and her friend Becky are six and seven years old when a flash flood kills Hannah's parents and leaves them alone and terrified in the forest of Tasmania. And ultimately, Nowra makes us wonder about our own animal nature, and about what grace and humanity really mean. When they are eventually "rescued," they find it very difficult to become human again.
Louis Nowra's very unusual novel, INTO THAT FOREST, tells the story of two young girls in Tasmania who spend four years with a pair of Tasmanian tigers, losing their human language, learning to hunt, and eventually becoming virtually a tiger themselves. According to Wikipedia, they became extinct in the early 20th century because of farmers and bounty hunters who killed them ruthlessly to protect livestock and to sell their pelts. A Tasmanian tiger is a carnivorous marsupial that looks a bit like a wolf with a striped back.
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