Among Wolves: The Story Of The Boy Who Survived In The Middle Of Nature
“I have the feeling that I have learned a lot from wolves and very little from men.” This is the phrase that perfectly defines much of the life of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, the boy from Cazorla who lived in the midst of nature during the postwar period, with the only company of wolves.
His father, because he had no means to support it, had to sell it to a goatherd, who died in the middle of the forest, leaving him totally alone when he was seven years old. No one could imagine that twelve years later, this boy would have been able to move on and become the nineteen-year-old strongman they ended up finding.
Today, Marcos feels that he has not finished adapting to society and notes that the world of men is too superficial: “people care what clothes you wear, whether or not it makes a good combination.”
He doesn’t quite understand why human beings complain so much when we really have everything to get ahead, survive and be happy. As he says, this stage of his life was one of the happiest, especially because he learned to hunt and was never short of food.
Wolves as the only family
When Marcos was left alone in the forest he would never think that he would soon cease to be so and that a family would come to welcome him and pamper him. It was a pack of wolves who decided to adopt him. He started giving him the food that he had hunted and he no longer wanted the cubs and this made the older wolves take confidence in him and start treating him like just another cub.
Contrary to what we may believe, little Marcos did not want to return to society. As a child, he had been beaten by his stepmother and neglected by his father. He had suffered in his flesh hatred, cruelty, hunger, poverty … and therefore, he rejected everything that had to do with that world.
The anthropologist who wrote the thesis on this case, Gabriel Janer, comments that Marcos is not inventing anything, but he is trying to imagine a love that can cover his need for affection, the one that was not given to him as a child.
And the wolves managed to cover her. Thanks to them, Marcos felt loved, cared for and this contributed to his being happy in nature. When he thinks of the day the Civil Guard found him and returned him to society, he does not know if they did him good or bad, since from here the hard life of man began for him; in his opinion, harsher than nature’s.
Life in society
Going back to society meant doing things that perhaps one does not want to do : working to earn money with which you can buy food, suffering in your bones envy, resentment, the mockery of other men. According to Marcos, you don’t find all this with wolves.
Since he came to the human world, they have not stopped deceiving him, taking advantage of his naivety. “I did not know what money was nor did I care. I didn’t understand why you had to have money to pick an apple ”.
People suffer because of these pseudo-needs, when we really already have everything that is necessary to live well covered. The deceptive advertising with which we are bombarded is largely to blame, but we are precisely the ones who enhance its effect by supporting the ideas that others defend and that only respond to their interests.
Marcos doesn’t quite understand why people complain so much in a world of abundance. There is no hunting, the clothes are already made and ready for you to buy, we have drinking water and it is easy to live under a roof. Then?
We live in a society that tries to control us, manipulate us so that we fall into what they want to do with us: consume, tell us what time we should get up, how we should dress or what jobs to do. That is why we suffer. This denaturing of the human being fills him with deep feelings of anxiety.
It is true that none of us will live the life of Marcos, but we would do ourselves a lot of good if we began to free ourselves of absurd needs : walking lighter with luggage and observing the abundance with which we are actually surrounded, will give us wings and lucidity to passport to so much unnecessary suffering.
