And Then There Was One

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Last of His Kind

A Brazilian team's first face-to-face encounter with a man said to be the last living member of his indigenous tribe.And Then There Was One (Post Magazine, Jan. 13, 2008)

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Altair, Marcelo and the rest of the Funai team had been in the forest for three days already on this expedition, but this was only the latest in a series of trips since they had accompanied the logging cook into the forest two years earlier. On that first hike, they had found a single hut, big enough for just one person. But it had been abandoned several months before, judging by the tracking evidence that Marcelo and Altair observed.

On subsequent expeditions, team members found more single-person huts. Each contained a deep hole dug inside the hut, too narrow to kneel down in -- a befuddling feature, because no other tribes in the region were known to do this. But the huts had all been recently abandoned. Just when it seemed the trackers were getting close to the Indian, he'd move somewhere else. To find him and make contact, they'd need a highly mobile team that -- over the course of months or even years, if necessary -- could launch extended expeditions.

They called their division of Funai the Guapore Contact Front, and they knew from the beginning that those expeditions could be dangerous for both sides. Their involvement could add incentive for local ranchers to get there first and try to flush the Indian out of the area, by whatever means necessary. But now, after two years of expeditions that led them to more recently abandoned huts, the team was convinced the Indian was nearby.

Altair threw his rifle over his shoulder and continued down a lightly beaten path. Marcelo walked behind him, as did Vincent Carelli, an old friend of Marcelo's and a former Funai indigenist who often accompanied the team on expeditions with a video camera.

As team members progressed along the path, they soon encountered the same sort of animal trap they had seen repeatedly during previous expeditions -- a deep pit with sharp spikes carved from the wood of tupuca palms at the bottom. Altair found tracking evidence -- bent twigs and ground markings -- suggesting that someone recently had walked northeast along that same path.

This wasn't the kind of path that Altair seemed born to tread. People called him "the German," a nod to his fair hair and light eyes. He was born near Brazil's east coast into a family of farmers who followed the government's call to become frontiersmen in the newly created state of Rondonia. Altair's father couldn't resist the pull of the program's slogan: "A Land Without Men, for Men Without Land."

But the family was a little too late. Nearly all of the farms that had been cut out of the forest had been claimed by the time they arrived in 1984. Lacking the resources to clear a new plot themselves, they farmed someone else's land on the edge of the jungle.

Altair, who was 15, contracted malaria eight times that first year. But he wasn't one to hold grudges against nature -- something about the landscape connected with him in a way it

simply didn't with the rest of the family. He'd wade into the bush and drink it all in: snakes, tapirs, huge electric eels slithering fatly in muddy inlets.

After less than two years, when Altair's two youngest sisters were shivering from malarial fevers, his father decided to exit the risky business of frontier agriculture. But Altair wasn't ready to surrender to the forest. So, he did what most Amazonian boys of his age did: He became a logger.

He was working a lumberyard in the north of Rondonia when a Funai team came to investigate reports of indios bravos -- "wild Indians" -- in a nearby national reserve being tapped by loggers for hardwood. The team collected evidence in the woods, found bows and arrows, and took pictures of small crop fields. But most of the loggers complained that the evidence was contrived to ruin their commercial prospects.

To Altair, it seemed obvious that Indians lived in the area, and when one of the Funai explorers stopped at the lumberyard, Altair told him so.