Wild Boy by Mary Losure Page A

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.

T HE 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,