Hypothermia

beat, and said that she liked them. We also saw a photo exhibit about Ishi at the University Museum at Cal Berkeley.
    The story of the last Indian in the United States living in a pure, untainted condition shouldn’t be a difficult one to tell, nor would it seem to conceal any unavoidable pitfalls for anyone ardently devoted to relating certain things while meaning others. But there’s something in the tale—or inside me—that makes it elusive: I’ve tried the pastiche technique, direct narration, diary entries, epistolary form, even the dreaded stream of consciousness, but the whole thing keeps slipping through my fingers like a fistful of marbles.
    The facts are simple and transparent: early one morning, a group of workers found a man collapsed on the doorstep of a slaughterhouse, dying from starvation and exhaustion. They carried him inside the building and gave him water. Then they noticed that he was a wild Indian, something that made no sense, under the circumstances, but which their parents and grandparents had taught them to identify as an enemy. They tied his hands and feet—as if he were really capable of escaping—and sent for the sheriff.
    The officer in question, perhaps the last Wild West cowboy still working for the government in that part of the United States, threw the Indian over the back of his horse, just as he was, and took him to jail, not because he wanted to make him suffer but because he didn’t know what else to do with him—at least that’s what he told the press. For the record, it seems that he dressed Ishi in his own clothes, and fed him food that his wife cooked especially so that the Indian wouldn’t die of hunger before he was turned over to the army, which was what the sheriff figured he was bound to do with him.
    By midday, the news of the discovery had sped like a burning fuse through the whole area, so that a memorably tumultuous crowd gathered at the jail for a glimpse of the last savage in the United States. Among those that filed past his cell was a San Francisco newspaper correspondent, who dispatched a feverish wire describing the sheriff’s highly extraordinary negotiations between his own impassioned citizens—still nursing wounds from the long-ended Indian wars in that region—and the various owners of vaudeville shows that wanted to buy the Indian and add him to their slate of attractions.
    Luckily for Ishi, who would’ve died had the sheriff been less honest or the army faster in coming to seize him and drag him off to a reservation, the story in the San Francisco newspaper was read by a professor. When the man noticed that nobody could understand the Indian’s language, he deduced that Ishi must be a speaker of Yana, a supposedly extinct language for which a friend of his was compiling a glossary.
    The professor caught the first train to Oroville and, armed with his colleague’s notes about the Yahis’ language, went and rescued Ishi. Once back in San Francisco, he realized that, while saving the Indian, he hadn’t considered the problem of where to lodge him. So, although his own brand of logic seems even crazier than either Ishi’s or the sheriff’s, he obeyed what it whispered in his ear and brought him to the Museum of Anthropology.
    In the days following these events, there was some discussion about what to do with Ishi, but finally everyone agreed that the best place for the last surviving aborigine in the United States was, ultimately, a museum. Ishi spent the rest of his life there, much more comfortable and seemingly more satisfied than if he had been out in the woods. At first he lived in the guest rooms, then in the staff quarters, and at last in the sunniest of the exhibition rooms. There they set up a bed for him so that he could die from tuberculosis in peace and comfort three years after surrendering to white people.
    It’s probably true that this story’s power is located simply in the events themselves; trying to articulate its meaning always ends up making it seem like cheap sentiment, or, worse yet, a parable of virtuous political intentions; the lowest sort of affectation, guaranteed. To spin metaphors out of a story that means something on its own terms is like being in love with love: however powerful it might seem at first, it always turns out badly.
    Whichever way you want to read it, the story of the man who earned his living as a museum piece always seemed fascinating and revealing to me, mostly due to the fact that,