Wild Boy by Mary Losure Page B

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