According to Wikipedia: Ishi (ca. 1860 – March 25, 1916) was the pseudonym of the last member of the Yahi, in turn the last surviving group of the Yana people of California. Ishi is believed to be the last Native American in Northern California to have lived most of his life completely outside the European American culture. He emerged from the wild near Oroville, California, leaving his ancestral homeland in the foothills near Lassen Peak.
A film about Ishi’s discovery was made for HBO in 1992 called, The Last of His Tribe. It starred Graham Greene and Jon Voight. The film had an impact on me.
The following is a short story that was inspired by the film, and the subsequent research I have done since then.
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The wind takes me like smoke. I am an eagle in the air. No boundaries, just where the vision takes me.
The brush anchored in desert turn to freckles, above the bending river that smiles around a narrow butte. Deep set sockets under shadow of a mesa-brow watch my ascent as I arc to the East and towards the sun.
I close on standing rock; august giants that shape the breaths of spirits. They run like the buffalo to the north, the gate of each stride straddling my longest memories and my furthest dreams. The winds turn white as they bounce from humped back to humped back. I cross the trail of bowed earth to flatlands.
I can see my shadow below me – the edges swallowed by the tall grass. The blades dance in chains and send waves of golden current rippling across the surface of the swaying sea.
A pack of hunters tumble from an island of trees. Squeaking and growling, nipping and licking, they jump and roll under the growing light. The alpha stands proud with his back to the sun – his eyes like floating torches. He licks his snout and leaves behind a cluster of water moons. They are following a trail that hangs in the air.
I can see beyond the hunters’ horizon to a train of prairie schooners. The canvas sails painted with the colors of the dawn. The hunters are led by the stench of the herded sheep and cattle that follow the train. There are thousands of them devouring a swath across the land, to the West towards California and the sparkling streams of yellow dust.
I saw the dust as a child and wondered what it was. My grandfather told me it was scales from fish that turned to rock like some trees. My mother told me it was tears from the Sun that shot across the night sky, “She cries for the children left alone in the dark. All mothers do.”
I wonder what pulls from the yellow dust at these people. The riders of the train talk of its luster. I have only seen it shine with borrowed light. Perhaps it is what’s left of fallen stars.
I want to throw it back into the sky. Maybe they will follow it there like the hungry hunters they pull behind them.
Noon has come and the train is stopped. There are children running and the men are sleepy. There are fires all around with women preparing food. A man sits with his family. Hair falls from his face like dirty water from a pale cliff. He is smiling and talking with his children.
“Don’t you ever get tired?” he asks.
His boy jumps into the air, his arms spread wide to catch it. He soars high like the raven and squawks his vision to me.
No, never tired, never bored. There is the night that bristles with gods and heroes, there are the veins in the leaves and the paths in the branches to keep my wonder. There is the infinite imagination of nature that cuts the lines in your brow and textures my skin with curiosity.
I sleep because I can’t stay awake longer. Without the dreams to answer my questions in liquid shades, sleep would be death pauses. On loose ground, with pointed sticks, I have drawn the plans for ships with special sails for I have watched the sun and the moon from everywhere but above.
I had many questions, father. Less as my voice sinks, and fewer as my mind fills with runoff from the venerable vessels above me – the still water that grows and rots at once.
The women call for the men and the children. Stew from a cast pot slides like a molten stream. The father opens his mouth and points it towards the sky like a chimney. Bread first, then the fingers, plow up the stuff that sticks to the sides. He licks the salty residue from his lips. Acid snake strikes from his stomach and bites the back of his throat. He swallows it back and drowns it with water from a tin cup.
He starts to write, pausing now and again to look around him. I cannot read his language but I know what it says. He is worried about the people of the plains. The train is traveling through the place of the Lakota.
He is worried for his family and the friends he has made on the journey. He prays to the Great Spirit of his people to keep them safe. He does not know that the Lakota have been herded by the soldiers. He does not know that the yellow dust does nothing to stir the people of the plains.
I enter the dreams of the father. He is wearing a suit with a silk knot around his neck. He has time captured in a golden box with spinning arrows to tell of its restlessness. The hair is gone from his face except for a gleaming patch under his nose, its bristles combed and shaped into ox horns. He sits with his writing in a room with painted paper walls.
His children play at his feet while his wife reads what he has written. He thinks that time is escaping from the golden box. He wonders where he can find more to replace it. He takes the pages in his hands and throws them into the fireplace. He takes his silk knot and throws it into the flames then rises above the camp. He smiles as he looks down at his slumbering family.
The vision splinters from his dream to mine. I watch them sleep as the hunters sniff through what’s been left on the ground.
I wake beneath a canopy of clay wind chimes. Mingling cowbells on a lazy day. I sit and wrap the blanket around me and poke at the orange fire fluttering up from the pit.
The shivering in my bones rattle out through my teeth as I try to wrap the blanket tighter than it will go. The cold earth sucks heat from my body and pulls my head down; burning water inside an ember pops and puts it back on my spine.
Maya comes inside the shack and tosses a log into the pit. Her hair moves in the firelight, shifting with the amber bath around us. She straddles my stomach, her hair soaked and tangled with my fingers. “What did you see?”
“They dream of flying, they dream of family. They’re not cruel in their dreams. They are frightened,” I say as I press my lips to her growing belly.
“What are they frightened of?”
I stare at the log she fed, the bark turned white like burning snow. “I don’t know.”
She pulls corn from our sack and places them near the fire. “My father has seen the bear in his dreams. He thinks it’s the spirit guide to our child.”
“The bear?” I smile.
She kisses me and holds my face. The tip of her nose traces a line across my brow, then along the ridge of my nose and down to the ball of flesh that’s anchors it above my lips, “If it’s a boy, you can teach him to hunt and fish.”
I kiss her hair, “And to ask, and to dream, and to follow his visions.”
Say What?