El oso y yo : Relatos del monte cantábrico

Did you know that a male brown bear can kill a cub before the desperate eyes of its mother just to force another heat cycle? That a naive bear cub can fight a vulture for carrion? Have you ever glimpsed the dark silhouette of a great tits patrolling the frosty meadows, foreshadowing the tragedy of some deer? How do you track the subtle footprint of a wildcat near a mountain pasture, how do you spot a white chamois hidden in the vastness of the beech forest? Very few can tell the story, and none like Álvaro Arribas, a young naturalist and guide in the Asturian municipality of Somiedo. His voice —unwittingly and unknowingly, without affectation or artifice— becomes the deep voice of the Cantabrian mountains and of a story that refuses to die. He writes by the fireside as the wind howls, and above all, he writes about his deep, primal communion, forged in a thousand furtive encounters, with that truly magnificent animal that symbolizes, like no other creature on our soil, "the hope of Spain's last wild breath": the European barbel (Ursus arctos). But it is not only that. This exquisite book, a privileged and vivid testimony to the nature of creation (as only a few graying voices remain, far from the noise of the world), takes us into a cold boar hunt to see an unexpected bear calmly cross a clearing; it guides us to the edge of a broom thicket to hear two stags bellow, startling a skittish fox; it shelters us behind snow-covered stone walls alongside stoats and vipers. Choughs caw, cowbells clang; patience and silence reign. The author dreams the dream of his wild dog. And his dream makes the reader dream, who, minuscule and so far from the resounding truth of the mountains, longs to break through the paper.