Every March, Felix

He went through life as one of those wolves he studied so hard: untamed yet noble, rugged yet elegant, rugged yet self-confident. With his voice of forge and steel, he flooded the homes of an entire country with his passionate defense of the wild world. His passionate stories made it possible for millions of Spaniards to vibrate with the glide of an eagle, to enjoy the beauty of the lynx, the attacks of the goshawk or the incomparable magnetism of the wolf. In those years when the great Cousteau reigned underwater, our legendary Felix reigned above the earth. Like the great myths of Homer, he died the same day he was born, on March 14, on the perpetual ice of Alaska, leaving a body that was mourned by millions of people and an enormous naturalistic legacy, unparalleled to date.

His life, from his magical childhood in the Burgos paramo where he had his cradle, to the eternal snows of the blue desert of Shaktoolik who were his slab, is an enormous teaching of a Paleolithic man who survived ten thousand years of devastation, a luminous being who was not only an unreachable communicator, but a guardian of old and secret codes, rescuing essential knowledge from oblivion to face the future of the human species.

In his fieldwork, beyond animals, he showed us his passion for how primitive peoples lived, his amazement at cave paintings, falconry, the atavic —ancient— relationship between human beings and wolves and other reminiscences of prehistoric times in which, according to his official biographer, Benigno Varillas, we were free, nomadic, autonomous and happier, advancing their pioneering vision of a global world interconnected by science and technology, where knowledge and respect for our peers and wildlife would form an essential part of humanity.

His career was an intense and exciting attempt to decipher the true meaning of life, teaching us to entire generations that our ancestors established a harmony with their environment that lasted for millions of years, weaving a tangle of affective, cultural and emotional bonds between their peers and the other creatures of the planet, contrasting the deterioration, pessimism and material ties of industrial societies with the contagious optimism of those who told stories around a fire, read the stars and they knew the secrets of the forests; the profound message of those they loved, to the bone marrow of their bones, that prodigious gift that is called LIFE.

Albert Einstein had said that there is only one force in the universe greater than electricity or nuclear energy: willpower, the same one that Felix gave us wrapped in enthusiasm and creativity, in perpetual and insatiable curiosity together with the purest freedom of spirit, a kind of last hero who died because he was made of flesh and blood but will live forever to be an elevated, a bearer of the torch and the message of the other, beyond life and death, of the depth, of what really matters, because Felix was part of those beings who changed us with their light and made us better with their example, and that is what we wanted to tell you here today: that once a man, a walking gentleman, with a camera and some field notebooks, walked among us, who gave his life to cut that of planet Earth.

All you have to do is trust, great master, that, looking at that infinite cycle from which you now look at us, you can keep peeking at your Burgos paramo and your lands of Castile, continue to see the great herds of caribou crossing the plains while the endless nights with their cosmic mantle cover you. May humanity remember you beyond time, that the howls of the wolf cradle you at dawn and that the eagles give you eternal shade with their free flight.

Goodbye, friend Felix.

Until always, brother wolf.

To learn more:

• Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente. Biography and Message. Benigno Varillas (2020)
• Felix, a man on Earth. Odile Rodriguez de la Fuente (2020)
• What a wonderful place to die. Juan Manuel Ramos Compliment (2020)
• The wonderful childhood of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. Michael Pou (2021)

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