caught that fella over there. I read
about it in the newspaper when I was younger. I know they had a lot of
them California Indians come up there but they couldn't understand him.
I'll bet a Washo could have understood him." I asked if he thought it had
been a wild man and he nodded in affirmation.

The "wild man" of course was the now-famous Ishi, the last of the Southern
Yana who wandered half starved into a slaughterhouse in Oroville in 1911.

The Coyote And Other Figures

Washo myths contain a number of tales about a bumbling, not very bright,
generally malevolent Coyote, who as a companion of Wolf seems to devote a
great deal of time to eating Indians and to sexual misadventures.

Modern Washo seem less willing than their forebears to weave Coyote into
tales but are no less conscious of his malevolent presence. Peyotists
often see visions or dream of Coyote (d'Azevedo and Merriam 1957), and
quick asides about Coyote's influence are apt to come up in conversation
either as tentative jokes or in seriousness. One tale of a modern
occurrence involving Coyote did come my way through the kindness of Warren
d'Azevedo. His informant was the brother-in-law of my own informant and,
like his kinsman, a semimystic, very conscious of his Indianness and
credited by other Washo with powers beyond those of an ordinary man in
hunting.

"I was staying in this shack with the guy who owned it. One night
he didn't come home but I kept hearing something walking around
that shack. The next morning when that guy came home he was all
tired out and there was Coyote tracks all around that shack. I got
my gun and told that guy to stay away from me" (d'Azevedo).

The An, a huge man-eating bird described in Lowie's myth number 13, is no
longer alive, but according to several informants the creature's bones or
at least the island on which it nested can be seen by people flying over
the lake because they are only a bit below the surface. Washo insist that
white airplane pilots see the shape of the island daily but keep silent
because they don't want to confirm an Indian story. One day on a trip
around Lake Tahoe my Indian companion, a sometime leader among the Washo
asked: "If we get that money from our claim do you think one of them
archeologist fellas could go down under the water and find that there an
bird's skeleton?"

The foregoing paragraphs illustrate the tenacity with which Washo
mythology has maint