Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

by Nando Parrado

“There is nothing in this fucking place to eat!” But of course there was food on the mountain—there was meat, plenty of it, and all in easy reach. It was as near as the bodies of the dead lying outside the fuselage under a thin layer of frost. It puzzles me that despite my compulsive drive to find anything edible, I ignored for so long the obvious presence of the only edible objects within a hundred miles. There are some lines, I suppose, that the mind is very slow to cross, but when my mind did finally cross that line, it did so with an impulse so primitive it shocked me. It was late afternoon and we were lying in the fuselage, preparing for night. My gaze fell on the slowly healing leg wound of a boy lying near me. The center of the wound was moist and raw, and there was a crust of dried blood at the edges. I could not stop looking at that crust, and as I smelled the faint blood-scent in the air, I felt my appetite rising. Then I looked up and met the gaze of other boys who had also been staring at the wound. In shame, we read each other’s thoughts and quickly glanced away, but for me something had happened that I couldn’t deny: I had looked at human flesh and instinctively recognized it as food.