A Siberian bone attacks a French anthropologist

Suffering a serious car accident or being the victim of a terrorist attack can break your body and leave you with severe and lasting psychological wounds. Being attacked by a brown bone in the midst of the prodigious and immense nature of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, can also leave your body destroyed and can mark you with psychological wounds that are difficult to heal and do not easily erase. But there is something else here. The brutal encounter between the wild animal and the defenseless human being represents the dissolution of the boundary that separates the pure biology of the beast and the moral and ideological world of the person. It is the embrace—unnatural and extremely natural: wonder and monstrosity—of two worlds, the fusion between the atavistic past and the modern present. This is how anthropologist Nastassja Martin (Grenoble, France, 1986) explains it in her book Believe in wild animals.

Martin knows what she's talking about because in 2016, during an expedition to visit the highest volcano in Kamchatka, she was attacked by a brown bone. In addition to leaving wounds all over her body, the animal bit her head and tore off a piece of her jaw and two teeth. It nearly killed her. From this terrible and extraordinary event—there must be very few humans who, since the beginning of time, have survived a bone attack: it's hard to imagine a more special minority, a more select group of chosen ones—Martin assembles a book that hybridizes the story of personal survival and the ethnographic document of travel and spiritual quest with a mythical and mystical double fall.

With a rich and evocative prose, but direct and free of filigree, Martin reconstructs her experience as a patient, as a woman, as a geopolitical and animist laboratory ("my body has become a territory where Western surgeons converse with Siberian bones"), as a daughter, as an outsider always conscious of being one and who tries to understand otherness by interfering little and not disturbing) and, also, as a citizen of Western societies wounded by anguish, skepticism and existential uprooting.

Martin recalls that, exhausted by who she was and tired of her job, she suffered a profound crisis and went looking for remedies, solutions, and answers in the "forests of the North." What she found was a jawbone made of bone, a tracheotomy, a Russian hospital with its own unique health care staff, and several French hospitals with their equally unique health care staff. However, in addition to all this, she also found spirits and dreams, another way of relating to nature, and the ancient wisdom of ancient civilizations increasingly plundered by the Russian Empire... "I've seen the world too much." alter of the animal; the all-too-human world of hospitals. I've lost my place in the world; I'm looking for a break. A place to rebuild myself." The literary and human result of this search is overwhelming and fascinating.