THE MAN WHO WAS RAISED BY WOLVES
Abandoned as a child Marcos survived alone in the wild for 12 years, leading to him being dubbed ‘the Mowgli of Spain’ – but learning to live with people proved to be even more difficult
The man who was raised by wolves
THE first time Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja ever heard voices on the radio he panicked. He remembers thinking, “Those people have been inside there a long time!” It was 1966 and he’d woken from a nap in the convent where he was staying. Although there was nobody else in the room there were the sounds of a conversation coming from a small wooden box.
Convinced that there were people trapped inside it, he devised a plan. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of there,” he yelled at the radio. He ran towards the wall at the other end of the room, the device in his hand. There, breathless and red in the face, he held it high above his head and brought it down hard against the brick wall in one violent swing.
When he knelt down to search through the debris the people weren’t there. “I’ve killed them!” Marcos bellowed.
Although he was in his early twenties he was ignorant of the most basic technology because between the ages of seven and 19, according to his own testimony, he’d lived alone, far from civilisation in the Sierra Morena, a deserted mountain range of jagged peaks that stretches across southern Spain.
His story is that he was abandoned as a child of seven, in 1953, and left to fend for himself. Alone in the wild, as he tells it, he was raised by wolves, who protected and sheltered him. With no one to talk to he lost the use of language and began to bark, chirp, screech and howl.
Twelve years later police found him hiding in the mountains, wrapped in a deerskin and with long, matted hair. He tried to flee but the officers caught him, tied his hands and took him to the nearest village.
In the following years, adjusting to life among humans brought with it a series of shocks. When he first went to a cinema – to see a Western – he ran out because he was terrified of the cowboys
galloping toward the camera. The first time he ate in a restaurant he was surprised he had to pay for his food.
Now 72, Marcos still struggles to understand society’s expectations.
“For most of my life,” Marcos tells me, “I had a very bad time among humans.”
He lives in Rante, a sleepy hamlet of 60 or so families in Galicia in north-west Spain. He’s retired and spends his time walking in the countryside or hanging out at the bar – “where he likes to play the clown”, a waitress tells me – or hunting wild boar with a friend.
The rest of the time he stays home, watching daytime TV for hours. I meet Marcos in his cramped, cold living room. The walls are plastered with photographs, old magazine pages and calendars of naked women.
“I’m too much of a human now,” he says. “Before, when I first started living among people, I didn’t even have a bed – I slept on piles of newspapers.”
The small, ordinary house was given to him six years ago by one of his friends in the village. There are dirty plates in the kitchen sink, a half-made bed, wooden cupboards, a desk and a TV.
Nothing about Marcos’ appearance suggests an unusual past: he looks like a typical Spanish septuagenarian, thin, with salt-and-pepper hair and ruddy cheeks. A cigarette habitually protrudes from his thin lips.
But within moments of meeting him, I can sense something different in his demeanour. He finds it difficult to look me in the eye and stares intensely at the ground whenever he speaks.
On the desk behind him is a pile of cuttings from Spanish newspapers, with headlines such as The Wolfman of the Sierra Morena and Living Among Wolves – mementoes of a bewildering new period in his life.
In 2010 the Spanish director Gerardo Olivares released a film, Entrelobos (Among Wolves), based on Marcos’ life in the mountains. The movie, which was a modest hit in Spain, was a heavily romanticised depiction of his’ coexistence with nature, with the story told through the eyes of the “wolf child”.
“Some details were missing but I do like it,” Marcos says. “I watch it all the time, especially when I’m sad or can’t get to sleep.”
Suddenly, to his shock and dismay, Marcos became a celebrity: Spanish TV declared him the “son of wolves”; the BBC dubbed him “the wolf man”. Span- ish papers seemed to write about him every other month. At first he was pleased with the attention: after years of rejection and disbelief his story was being told and he was finally being accepted. But soon, people wanted more of him than he could give.
‘With no one to talk to he lost the use of language and began to bark, chirp, screech and howl'
MARCOS was born on 8 June 1946 in a squat, whitewashed house in the village of Añora in Andalusia. His parents, Melchor and Araceli, had two other boys. The rural economy had collapsed after the civil war and life was harsh. “The family were poor, and they left for Madrid in search of work,” Marcos’ cousin, Anastasia Sanchez, says.
In the capital Melchor found work in a brick factory but soon after the family arrived his wife died. According to Anastasia, Melchor couldn’t cope on his own. He soon met another woman and sent one of his sons to live with his family in Barcelona, and left another with relatives in Madrid. ( Juan, the only surviving brother, didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)
Melchor kept Marcos with him and together the new family returned to the south, to Cardeña – about 50km east of his birthplace. Melchor took a job making charcoal. Marcos, at the age of four, took care of the family’s pigs.
Then, one day – Marcos thinks he was about six – a man arrived on a chestnut horse. The man spoke briefly with Melchor and then took Marcos home with him. He’d never been in such a big house. In a sprawling kitchen he was fed a thick, meaty stew.
The rich man told him his father had sold him. From now on, he said, the boy
would work for him, tending his herd of 300 goats. “And that was it,” Marcos tells me.
Julian Pitt-Rivers, a British anthropologist who published a classic study of a traditional Andalusian community in the early ’50s, wrote that it was common in the rural south for children from impoverished families to be sent to the mountains to look after sheep and goats.
The next morning the man took Marcos on horseback into the mountains, to a small cave deep in the Sierra Morena, a sparsely populated mountain range full of wolves and wild boars. There, Marcos was handed over to the care of an elderly shepherd. He slept outside, and at first was frightened by the animal noises. The taciturn old shepherd gave him goat’s milk to drink, and taught him how to trap hares and light fires.
But one day not long after Marcos arrived the shepherd said he was going off to shoot a rabbit and never returned. Nobody came to replace him. The landlord appeared from time to time to check on the goats but Marcos hid from him. He didn’t want to be taken back to his family home, where he’d suffered years of beatings. “Even in my worst moments I preferred the mountains to the thought of home,” he says.
In the following weeks, the young boy tried to suck milk from the goats. He tried to catch pheasants and fish for trout but had little success. So instead he started following the lead of the animals. He watched how wild boars dug for tubers and how the birds picked berries from bushes.
With the basic knowledge he’d learnt from the shepherd he improvised traps for rabbits and noticed that when he gutted them in the river, their blood attracted the fish. When he got older he also learnt how to hunt and skin deer.
He says he was still a child, only six or seven, the first time he encountered wolves. He was looking for shelter from a storm when he stumbled across a den. Not knowing any better, he entered the cave and fell asleep with the pups. The she-wolf had been out hunting and when she returned with food she growled and snarled at the boy. He thought the wolf was going to attack him, he says, but she let him take a piece of the meat instead.
Wolves aren’t the only animals he lived among: he says he made friends with foxes and snakes, and that his enemy was the wild boar. He says he spoke to them all in a mix of grunts, howls and halfremembered words: “I couldn’t tell you what language it was, but I did speak.” He says this with absolute confidence, as if nothing could’ve been truer.
IN EARLY 1965 a park ranger reported to the police that he’d seen a man with long hair, dressed in a deerskin, roaming the Sierra Morena. Three mounted officers were sent to search for him. Marcos says they found him eating fruit under the shade of a tree. He remembers they tried to talk to him and that he didn’t know how to respond. Although he understood their questions he hadn’t spoken in years and no words came. He ran.
The officers caught up with Marcos easily. They tied his hands to the saddle of one of their horses and dragged him off the mountain. Marcos says he howled as he left the hillside.
First, the officers took him to a nearby town, Fuencaliente, and brought him to a barbershop. “I was sitting in the chair and I remember looking in the mirror and wondering who was staring back at me.” When the barber took out a razor and began to sharpen it, Marcos lunged at him. “I thought it was either him or me,” he recalls. The officers had to restrain him.
Then, Marcos remembers, he was taken to the local jail in Cardeña, about 20km away, while the officers searched for his father. After tracking Melchor down they soon realised he had no interest in his son. Stuck with what to do with Marcos, they simply left him in the main square of Cardeña.
Two shepherds took him in and put him to work tending their sheep. Just a few days after his capture Marcos was back in the mountains, looking after animals again.
In the spring of 1966 the shepherds moved their flock near the villageof Lopera, where there was good grazing.
A curate named Juan Luis Galvez encountered Marcos, scared and still unable to speak. It was a year since he’d been discovered in the mountains but he’d still hardly
spent any time with humans.
Juan reported that he was at first utterly “unadapted to social norms”, seemingly immune to the cold and walked with the hunched, bow-legged gait of a monkey.
He moved the young man into his family home in Lopera, where he taught him how to dress himself, eat correctly and pronounce words. He even arranged football matches so Marcos could play with other local children. But Marcos resisted. “I would try to run back to the mountains whenever I could,” he says. “I didn’t feel comfortable among humans.”
Joaquin Pana, a priest in Lopera, told Gabriel Janer Manila, a Spanish anthropologist who wrote a PhD thesis about Marcos, that the boy “had been treated very badly by people” and seemed to be surprised by everything, whether it was a glass of wine, a cigarette or a broom.
At the end of the summer of 1966 Juan sent Marcos to a convent infirmary in Madrid. There doctors cut the calluses from his feet and placed a board on his back so that he’d stand straight, and the nuns carried on his language lessons.
But he never seemed to catch up, even after many years in the world. “I always felt I never had knowledge of anything that mattered to people,” Marcos says. “The only thing I knew was my life in the mountains, and nobody believed me.”
In the following years he held jobs as an assistant chef, a barman, a bricklayer and a road-sweeper.
It was while working on the island of Mallorca in 1975 that he was introduced to Gabriel, the anthropologist who’d go on to write a book about Marcos’ life.
“Here was this fragile-looking, childish man who was telling me the most incredible tales,” Gabriel says. “I admit, I struggled to believe him.” But the more he heard of Marcos’ story the more credible it seemed. The pair met almost every day for six months.
“I noticed his story never varied, the facts never changed, no matter how many times I asked him to tell it,” Gabriel wrote in his PhD thesis.
After subjecting him to a series of intelligence tests he determined that Marcos had no learning disabilities. Instead, he concluded, his emotional and social development had remained frozen at the moment in his childhood when he was abandoned.
“Even now,” he writes, “Marcos tries to apply to social life the rules he observed during his life in the mountains.”
Of course, the question of whether animals would ever allow a human to live among them remains the subject of fierce debate.
“It’s very possible for humans and wolves to co-exist,” says José España, a specialist in wolf behaviour, who knows Marcos. “But do I believe that every time he called the wolves they came to him, as he says? Well, that’s more debatable.” Certainly, the wolves would’ve come to Marcos when he had food.
“Marcos is what I would call a periphery wolf – tolerated by the alpha, and by the rest of the pack because he posed no threat.”
IN 1998 a retired policeman from Galicia, Manuel Barandela, was visiting his son in the town of Fuengirola, near Malaga in the south of Spain, when he spotted Marcos living in the basement of an abandoned building. They talked over lunch and Marcos gave him Gabriel’s book to read.
After reading his story Manuel decided to take him back to Rante, where he could offer him a home and give him work on his homestead.
In Rante, Marcos found quiet and solitude for the first time since his capture. Manuel tried to teach him to read but it proved almost impossible.
He found it hard to talk to him and began to worry that he’d made a mistake taking him in.
“In the end I came to see Marcos as a child,” he recalled in a Spanish interview in 2010, shortly before he died. “Understanding him this way made everything easier.”
Of course, it’s as a “child” that Marcos became an object of fascination. Suddenly people were writing to him from all over the world: some wanted to understand him, some wanted to take care of him.
“People still come round all the time. Some of them think I’m rich and try to exploit me. I don’t have a cent,” he tells me. He remembers one occasion a few years back when a woman visited his house and declared her love for him.
“She offered herself to me and said we should go into business together. I suppose she thought I made loads of money from the film!”
Marcos still can’t understand how his story was met with complete indifference for decades, only to make him famous 40 years after Gabriel first wrote about it. “Especially when I hadn’t changed,” he said.
To him, all this newly discovered adulation seemed just another hurtful, incomprehensible quirk of the human mind. People still make little sense to him. “When a person talks, they might say one thing but mean another,” he says. “Animals don’t do that.”
‘I didn’t feel comfortable among humans'