Floods are the main threat that the poor folk of Bahraich, in the marshy Terai region south of the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, have to grapple with this time of year. This year, they are stalked by a new danger, fierce in tooth and claw, which steals in at night and picks its targets, preferring the very young.

“The first victim of the wolves was a three-year-old girl at the Misranpurva colony in Sisaiya Churamani village. The wolves dragged her away on March 10. We have been living in fear since then,” Bansi Lala, resident of the Hardi area, told reporters on Thursday.

“Then these animals took away a two-year-old boy from Nayapurva sub-village on March 23.”

The villagers say the forest department ignored their pleas for months before deploying drones and teams, armed with tranquilliser guns, a few weeks ago.

Two dozen cages with trapdoors, chunks of meat placed inside as bait, have been set up in the region’s villages. They have netted four wolves over the past four days, the latest captured on Thursday morning.

The forest department says, citing the evidence of its infrared drones, that only two more of these man-eating wolves are left to be caught. But the residents of about 35 villages in the Hardi and Mahasi areas of the district remain terror-stricken.

No one steps out after sundown. People sleep together in community settings; young men take turns guarding their villages through the night.

“Two wolves are still free. We have deployed several teams to catch them and protect the villagers,” Renuka Singh, chief conservator of forests, Uttar Pradesh, said on Thursday.

She claimed the wolves had killed five villagers in the Hardi area since March. But the villagers say the toll is nine dead — including six children — and 35 injured.

“We kept complaining since March but these officers were in deep slumber and ignored dozens of written requests from us to do something,” Bansi Lala said.

“We then decided to build our own teams to protect ourselves. But the wolves again got active after a few days in a group of villages about 15km from here. They later returned to our area and attacked a villager early this month while we were thinking they had gone back to the forest. The government woke up only after that.”

Bahraich district magistrate Monika Rani said the wolves tend to attack “either small children or those who have houses without doors or those going towards the forest for morning ablutions”.

“We are putting up doors in these houses using government funds. The villagers of the affected areas have been asked to stay indoors or step out in groups,” she said.

Divisional forest officer (DFO) Ajit Pratap Singh said: “Six wolves were roaming in packs of two or three and attacking people. While we have caged four, two others were last seen on Thursday morning near the Raipur Canal. We hope to catch them soon.

“One of them we tranquillised and put inside our cage in Sisaiya Churamani with a net on Thursday morning. There was one more with it, but it escaped.”

Singh said the infrared drones had captured the remaining two wolves in the sugarcane fields close to the forests. Sixteen teams are looking for them.

Some of the wolves had been spotted a few days ago in neighbouring Barabanki district, too, but there were no reports of attacks.

Barabanki DFO Akash Deep Badhawan said the wolf caught on Thursday was “lame” and had carried out most of the attacks.

A villager from the Hardi area, seeking anonymity, confirmed that the villagers had informed the local administration about the wolves in March “but they didn’t take us seriously”.

Arun Kumar Saxena, minister of state with independent charge of forests, visited the family of the first baby killed in Sisaiya Churamani on Wednesday evening.

“The injured are getting free treatment at the hospitals and those who have lost family members will receive compensation,” he said.

The affected areas are close to the Katarniya Ghat Wildlife Sanctuary, where the concentration of wild animals is very high. However, the trapped wolves will not be set free in the wild but sent to various zoos, officials said.