Wild Boy

  SUMMER AND WINTER, the wild boy lived in the forest.

  He dug for roots with his bare hands and searched for nuts in the dry, dead leaves on the forest floor. Poisonous mushrooms grew there, too, but the boy had learned what was safe and what wasn’t. Before he ate anything, he sniffed it.

  He went naked, like an animal. But he walked upright, like a human.

  Animal trails led like green tunnels through the underbrush, but if the boy followed them, he always kept in mind where a stream was, for when he was thirsty, he had to find water. He had no way to carry it: no water jar or animal skin.

  He had no tools. No fire.

  He was (as nearly as anyone could figure out later) about nine years old.

  Under his chin he bore a long, straight scar, slashed across his throat as though someone had tried to kill him and left him for dead in the forest. Yet somehow, the wild boy had survived.

  In wintertime his bare feet left tracks in the snow, but no one seemed to notice them. If he came upon a tiny clearing and a peasant’s stone cottage, he didn’t show himself. If he smelled the smoke from woodcutters’ fires, he stayed hidden. Season after season passed, and no one knew about the boy living all by himself in the woods.

  In places the forest gave way to rocky heights where blueberries ripened in the sun. If the wild boy scrambled up the rocks, he could see the distant ridges that circled all around him, as though he were standing in a bowl. What lay beyond, he had no way of knowing.

  Below the lookout rocks, in a river valley just visible through the treetops, lay a village called Lacaune.

  Sounds carried far in that valley: a rooster crowing, a dog barking, or a cowbell clanging. But if the wild boy heard them, he stayed far away. He loped through the trees and was gone.

  ONE DAY IN THE VILLAGE OF LACAUNE, a couple of peasants returned from the woods with a strange story. They’d seen a naked boy crouched on the forest floor, his hands digging through the leaves for something to eat. They’d watched, curious. But they hadn’t caught him.

  So the wild boy’s life in the woods went on.

  In the mornings, he could watch as mist gathered in the mountain valleys before it faded in the sunlight. He could listen to rain pattering on the tree leaves. He could wake from sleep to see the round moon filling the night woods with light and shadows. A whole year passed as it always did in the forest.

  Until one day, when the wild boy was about ten . . .

  A group of woodsmen spotted him, and somehow, they caught him. He fought and bit, but it did no good. They took him to Lacaune and led him to the town square. It was paved with river rocks, bumpy beneath the wild boy’s bare feet. At its center, an ancient fountain splashed. All around, the tall houses of village merchants made a wall that blocked out the mountains.

  Villagers gathered around the wild boy, jabbering in words he didn’t understand. Women washing their laundry in the stone troughs nearby set it aside and hurried over to see.

  No one alive today knows the details of what happened next — whether the woodsmen kept a rope around the wild boy’s neck or tied his hands behind his back. No one knows if that night, they took him somewhere to sleep or left him in the square, tied and helpless. But every day, he was forced to stand, hour after hour, for everyone to see.

  And maybe it was then that the wild boy began to hate the staring eyes of crowds.

  But at last (exactly how, no one knows) he got loose. He ran for the forest and was free again.

  His time as a prisoner had taught him something, though: where there were people, there was food.

  Now sometimes when he was hungry, he visited the farm fields on the edge of the village. With the safety of the forest behind him, he dug for potatoes and turnips. Sometimes he carried them back into the woods. Other times he ate them where he stood.

  When autumn came, the ferns on the forest floor withered to brown. The trees turned red and gold. Soon frost would touch the fields with white and the first snowflakes would swirl from the sky, but the wild boy could live through winter in the forest.

  He’d done it for a long time.

  The snow melted, and in the pale sunlight, wildflowers bloomed on the forest floor. The oaks and beeches put on their new leaves. Summer came, and the forest was shady again, dense and deep.

  On July 25, 1799, when the wild boy was around eleven years old, he was captured again.

  This time, it was three hunters who spotted him, and perhaps they had dogs, for the wild boy climbed a tree. The hunters caught him anyway, tied him up tight, and marched him down the mountain to Lacaune.

  And this time, he wasn’t put on display. Instead, the hunters took him to stay with a poor old widow who lived in a little cottage just behind the Lacaune village square.

  Why they chose her, no one knows. Perhaps she was the only one in the village who would take in a strange, wild boy.

  Stories told later said she made him wear a shirt to cover his nakedness, but if she did, it couldn’t have been easy, for the wild boy hated clothes. Perhaps she was a gentle, patient person who was kind to him and he wore a shirt to please her. Or maybe the hunters forced the scratching, biting boy into a shirt he couldn’t get off. The peasants’ stories offer no clues.

  They do say the widow seemed to like the wild boy.

  She offered him meat, both raw and cooked in an iron pot over the fire, but he wouldn’t eat it. When she gave him acorns, he sniffed them first, then ate them. After sniffing them, he ate chestnuts, walnuts, and potatoes, too.

  The walls of the widow’s cottage, like the other cottages in Lacaune, were made of stone. Dim light came through the tiny windows.

  Maybe once — so long ago that he had forgotten all but the faintest memory — the wild boy had lived in a cottage much like this one.

  Maybe, as the widow tended her cooking fire or swept her hearth with her hazel-twig broom, the wild boy watched her, trying to remember his own mother, his own home.

  Eight days passed.

  But the wild boy’s real home, now, wasn’t a cottage. It was the woods, the wind, the night stars, and the moon shining down.

  So the wild boy escaped again.

  This time he climbed the mountain slopes until the village was far below him, its gray stone roofs growing smaller the higher he climbed. When he reached the summit, he loped down the other side into another valley. Ahead of him lay more mountains.

  Now, in this new country, the wild boy seemed to have less fear of strangers.

  Sometimes when he saw a peasant’s cottage, he would walk right up to it and go inside.

  There he would stand, a thin, wild-haired boy dressed only in a tattered and dirty shirt. Perhaps the peasants were curious, or maybe they pitied him, but in any case they gave him food.

  And when they offered him potatoes, he did something no one seems to have noticed him doing before: he would put them into the fire to cook. Maybe he had learned that from watching the old lady, but in any case, he wasn’t very patient. He’d pull them from the fire, eat them when they were still burning hot, and be out the door.

  As the summer days passed, he roamed the countryside, visiting isolated farms and stopping several times at one farm where the people were particularly nice to him.

  In time, he worked his way down the mountain slopes. Ahead of him lay a long, low saddle of land. The wild boy loped across it, through stony fields where peasants grew rye for their coarse, black bread. Along the walls and hedges that divided one field from another grew blackberries and wild plums. Perhaps he stopped to sniff them first, before he ate them.

  Now all around him lay a landscape of fields and woods. On distant hills, the spires of village churches poked the sky. Beyond lay more hills: the world unfolding into the blue distance.

  The wild
boy could see far now that he’d left the forest — but he could also be seen. Soon, peasants in the area began talking about a strange new visitor.

  Later, a man from the French government, a commissioner named Guiraud, rode his horse deep into that same country and asked people there about the wild boy.

  They told him stories of how the boy swam in streams and climbed trees, dug in the fields for food, and could run very fast on all fours.

  And people said, too, that when the mountain winds blew, the wild boy looked at the sky, made sounds deep in his throat, and gave great bursts of laughter.

  The days grew shorter. When fall ended, bitter cold set in, the coldest winter in many years.

  On January 8, 1800, the wild boy was coming down a narrow, steep-sided valley when it took a sharp turn. There, in front of him through the bare trees, loomed a tall white building with a red tile roof and wooden balconies. Around it, carved into the steep sides of the valley, lay vegetable gardens. Could there be potatoes or turnips beneath the cold earth?

  He loped forward, crouched down, and began to dig.

  He was caught (it’s said by the back of his tattered shirt) by the man who owned the building, a tanner named Vidal.

  But what did it matter, really? He’d always escaped before.

  Surely he could do it again.

  THE TANNER TOOK HIM INSIDE the building, which lay on the outskirts of a village named Saint-Sernin. Before long, everyone in the village ran to see. Among them was a village official named J.-J. Constans-Saint-Estève.

  “I found him seated in front of a fire that appeared to give him great pleasure,” the man wrote. But he noticed that from time to time, the boy seemed uneasy with so many people around.

  Constans-Saint-Estève came closer. He began to ask the wild boy questions, but got no reply. The village official spoke louder, but still the wild boy was silent.

  The strange boy’s eyes shone with intelligence, Constans-Saint-Estève remembered years later. But there was something in his expression that the man couldn’t quite read.

  Constans-Saint-Estève felt sorry for the wild boy, but he was also curious about him. More curious, it seemed, than anyone else who had seen him so far. The man was also, as a village official, the kind of person who was used to getting his way.

  So Constans-Saint-Estève decided to take the wild boy home with him.

  He took the boy’s hand, kindly, and tried to lead him toward the door, but the wild boy “resisted vigorously,” Constans-Saint-Estève wrote later.

  Yet when Constans-Saint-Estève patted him and kissed him and smiled at him in a friendly way, the wild boy suddenly seemed to change his mind. He let the man lead him out the door. Trailed by curious villagers, the two of them walked down the narrow valley.

  Soon they came to a river. A mill wheel turned in the water, creaking in the cold air. Above them, the village of Saint-Sernin perched high on the cliffs on the other side of the river.

  Constans-Saint-Estève and the wild boy crossed a stone bridge, then climbed steep steps cut into the rock. When they reached the village, they walked through a maze of streets until they came to a tall, narrow house crowded among all the others atop the cliffs. The man opened the door, and the wild boy went inside.

  A servant brought an earthenware plate of food piled with meat, both cooked and raw, along with rye bread and wheat bread, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, parsnips, an orange, and some potatoes.

  The wild boy picked up each kind of food, sniffed at it, and refused to eat anything but the potatoes. These he threw into the fire, then snatched them out again and ate them hot.

  Constans-Saint-Estève told the servant to get more potatoes, and the wild boy seemed happy to see them.

  When he was done eating, the wild boy looked around the room. He took Constans-Saint-Estève’s hand, led him to a pitcher of water, and rapped on it. When the servant brought wine instead of water, the boy wouldn’t drink it. He showed “great impatience,” Constans-Saint-Estève later recalled, until he was given water.

  Then, having eaten and drunk his fill, the wild boy bolted out the door.

  He ran swiftly, but the town of Saint-Sernin, high on its rock, was no easy place to escape from. The houses formed impassible walls, and they were hung with balconies from which anyone could spot a boy on the run. Many streets came to dead ends or led to cliffs, high above the river. Constans-Saint-Estève chased behind, yelling.

  “I had a hard time catching him,” Constans-Saint-Estève wrote later, but once captured, the wild boy let himself be led back to the house. The whole way back, he kept his face still, showing no signs of either pleasure or displeasure. Curious, the man began watching the wild boy more and more carefully.

  What was the wild boy thinking?

  He was content with simple things, Constans-Saint-Estève noticed. He would hold an acorn in his hand for the longest time, gazing at it as though the mere sight of it made him happy. Constans-Saint-Estève wrote that the boy had an “air of satisfaction that nothing could trouble.”

  Nothing, that is, except being trapped inside the house.

  The wild boy tried to find ways to escape, but Constans-Saint-Estève was always watching him. The wild boy had no way of knowing the reason, but it was this: Constans-Saint-Estève wanted to see if this odd boy really was what the peasants claimed: a truly wild human being.

  Why did that matter?

  It mattered because Constans-Saint-Estève, who had once lived in the great and faraway city of Paris, knew that scientists there would be very, very interested in studying a real wild human.

  So Constans-Saint-Estève observed the wild boy closely all that day, and the next.

  Then he got out his official government stationery, dipped a quill pen in an inkpot, and began a letter. It was addressed to the administrators of the nearest orphanage, which was in a small town called Saint-Affrique.

  “I have ordered brought to your orphanage . . . an unidentified child,” he wrote. “In every respect, this interesting and unfortunate being invites the care of humanity, perhaps even the attention of a philanthropic observer.” (“Philanthropic observer” was another way of saying scientist.) “I am informing the government,” he added, noting that the government would most likely decide to have the wild boy sent to Paris.

  “Would you see to it that all possible care is provided,” the letter went on. “Have the child watched during the day and bedded for the night in a room from which he cannot escape.”

  When the gendarmes (military policemen) came to the door of Constans-Saint-Estève’s house, they wore stiff blue-and-red coats, tall black boots, and long swords. They took the wild boy away with them, and they cannot have been very gentle about it, because afterward, he hated men in uniforms.

  All day, he was jostled and jolted as the horses made their way down the slopes of Saint-Sernin, then galloped down the road toward Saint-Affrique. The town lay at the end of a wide valley, beyond which lay more mountains.

  As night fell, the gendarmes reined in their horses on swampy ground by a wide river. Through a set of stone gateposts, they entered a walled garden. At its far end sat the dark hulk of a building — the orphanage of Saint-Affrique.

  The next day — January 11, 1800 — a new entry was added to the list of names in the orphanage’s admittance book.

  A young savage, found in the woods near Saint-Sernin. Deaf and mute.

  The wild boy was not deaf, as people at the orphanage soon discovered. But they must have wondered: If he wasn’t really deaf, maybe he wasn’t really wild, either? For this is what they did next: They took the wild boy outside and led him to an open field, bare in the wintertime. Beyond it, the mountains loomed.

  And then they let him loose.

  “He took to running on all fours,” a man at the orphanage wrote later. “If we had not followed him closely and overtaken him, he would soon have reached the mountain and disappeared.”

  Instead, he was led back t
o the grim, gray building.

  Within the orphanage’s stone walls, there were sometimes tiny babies abandoned by their parents. Sometimes brothers and sisters appeared on its doorstep, stayed until they were ten or twelve, then went out into the world to seek their fortunes. Their names were written in a big, thick roll book, the dates recorded under columns labeled “Entered” and “Left.” For those who weren’t lucky enough to leave, there was a third column: “Dead.”

  But at that particular time, the winter of 1800, the wild boy seems to have been the only child there. The roll book then shows only grown-ups: people living in a building that served not only as an orphanage, but also as a hospital and a poorhouse. They included wounded soldiers, villagers who were sick or old, a woman who was “feeble in spirit,” and a nameless, homeless man picked up in the town square.

  Now all of them could gaze with surprise at the newest arrival — a wild boy.

  “His eyes are dark and full of life,” an orphanage administrator wrote. “He searches incessantly for a means of escape.”

  They offered him bread, but he smelled it, bit it, and threw it away. “We made him a gown of gray linen,” the orphanage administrator wrote. “He does not know how to get it off, but this garment annoys him greatly. We have just let him free in the garden. Wanting to escape, he tried to break one of the strips of wood in the gate. He never speaks. When he is given potatoes, he takes as many as his pretty little hands can hold. If the potatoes are cooked (he prefers them thus), he peels them and eats them like a monkey. He has a pleasing laugh. If you take his potatoes away from him, he lets out sharp cries.”

  The man wrote that the wild boy appeared to be about twelve years old, at most.

  IN THE GREAT CATHEDRAL TOWN OF RODEZ, just a few days’ journey north of the orphanage, lived a thin-faced, long-nosed professor named Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre. He was a priest but also a scientist, which in those times was not unusual. And one day, the news reached him that a wild boy had been discovered in the woods and was now not far from Rodez.