To observe an bear leaving its months of Encame, it is necessary to take many hours of waiting, a few kilometers, watching patiently for a telescope patiently. Biologists are thrown on the floor or use small field chairs, eat chocolate, support insect bites and speak little: they may comment on the passage of a mouse or a deer. It is necessary to blend with nature, to leave, as far as possible, to be an intruder in the ecosystem.
Then the Osa appears, which has passed winter with the vital functions at the idle, accompanied by two or three dares. “It is incredible to be shown in shape. It comes out, eat some grass and take their young on the most difficult roads, so that they fall, bounce and learn, ”says the writer and journalist Marta del Iriego Anta (La Bañeza, León, 54 years). Some of those hours of silent expectation have passed in the mountains of Asturias and León accompanying the Biologists of the CSIC (of the Cantabrian Brown Bear group) and has also treated the guards of the bear patrols. From there he has taken some wicker to write his novel Cordillera (DNA), where, with some traces of the Leonese language, it deals with the conflicts between humans and wolves and bears, and also of humans with each other: the farmers and the conservationists, those of the countryside and those of the city .
From irrigation he grew up in the small Leonese city of La Bañeza, but his father had a majada of sheep in a small town, where they used to spend time. During the pandemic confinements, the writer went there to spend six months with her son, avoiding the apocalyptic trance on her floor of the Madrid trail. There he recovered a photo that his father had taken, somewhat blurred, in which he posed in La Majada with a “lamb” in his arms. He realized that he needed to write something that happened outdoors, to connect with his country childhood, that he also literally took it out of the city. “I wanted something with snowstorms, blisters, mountains and cliffs,” he says in an outburst of German romanticism. And it is what he has done.
The interview takes place in plants then exists, a plant and antique store in the Madrid trail, where they give the author a piece of green (not as taken as the mountain) in the middle of the urban gray. They kindly offer a glass of wine, although noon advises drinking water. The writer remembers the transhumant shepherds who in her childhood came down from the mountain, to travel from north to southern León. “They were tall and blond, they went down with their mastiffs, they looked like mythological beings,” he says, it is not known whether to recreate a past or showing a memory deformed by fantasy.
His novel has something mythical (and the name of the stage, neighborhoods of Luna, leads to dream) as the mountain for mountaineers, almost a sleeping god who presence and contains his life is mythical. “The mountain people cannot live in the moor, they need that telluric force of the rock. In Babia, it seems that the mountains are born directly from the plain, mountains that arise brutally with very strange ways. Living there gives a different way of seeing things, ”says the writer.
In Cordillerathose who live there (and have a different way of seeing things) are the transhumant nidia shepherde , also Pastora Merinera: “It is a heroin of the 21st century.” There is also Cacique Evelio, which represents the most conservative forces of the field, macho, authoritarian and determined to allow an energy company to raise its wind turbines in the mountains. Darío comes from the city, the biologist destined to investigate wild animals and that is involved in the confrontation that the bear and the wolf cause in that society. Some want to kill them, others protect them, others study them. It is difficult to read the forest for the profane, but there is a whole cosmos in which animals, scientists, guards or poachers are related.
“In the mountain range there is a conflict between farmers and conservationists. It is a complicated conflict, because we all want the wolf and bear to prolve, but the farmers do not want to be told what is good for them, ”says the author, that during the writing of her novel he saw how two appeared two Cabezas de Lobos beheaded on the stairs of the City Council of the Asturian town of Ponga. “It is really something that happens frequently, but I think a solution can be found,” says the author. “If the loose flock is left, the wolf is likely to attack it, but that is like leaving the house door in Madrid. You can live together, you can put electric shepherds (cables that give cramps to animals so that they do not get out of the fold), have mastiffs … but there are those who have a brutal hatred of the wolf and want to end it, ”says the author.
Other conflicts are shown in the novel: that of abandoned mines (whose closing led to depopulation), that of the aforementioned wind turbines (“companies usually come to the mountain when it is profitable and then abandon everything when it ceases to be,” he says the author) or that of the reservoirs, for which the irrigation feels love-as: it is beautiful how the waters reflect the mountains, but the waters also contain a tragedy. In the reservoir (they usually call it “swamp”, although it is not the same) of neighborhoods of Luna, there are 11 submerged villages. “The protagonist of the novel repeats the names high, as her grandmother did, not to be lost. They were very beautiful names, like Luna de Luna, ”says the writer.
Julio Llazares, a Leonese novelist strongly linked to these lands, speaks in his books of abandoned peoples and flooded peoples, such as Vegamián, in the Porma reservoir. In recent times, culture has often reflected clashes between the countryside and the city, as seen in films such as The beasts (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, 2022) O Alcarràs (Carla Simón, 2022). There are those who want to return to the countryside but without adopting traditional rural life, but maintaining urban trades thanks to technology: a kind of urbanization of the countryside. And many times customs are not understood. “Back to the field is not so easy, you have to adapt to the rhythms, you have to learn from what you see there, sometimes there are clashes and clashes. I have seen people who come from Madrid, who put the music at full volume and protest because the dogs are loose and there are cow’s cagajones down the street. Who is more civilized the village or urbanite? ”Says irrigation.
In the end, the novel can also be understood as a reflection on the estrangement of the natural world. “A city child can say 500 brand names, but not so many animals names: we are far from nature,” concludes the author.