And Then There Was One
Discovery of a lone survivor of an unknown Indian tribe in Brazil set off accusations of murder and a struggle over ownership of one of the world's last great wilderness areas

By Monte Reel
Sunday, January 13, 2008; W12

THe Rumor Was A Wild One, and it seized Marcelo dos Santos with the power of a primary myth.

There's an Indian living in the woods around here, some local ranch hands were saying in 1996. He wears no clothes. Get near him, and he vanishes. He is utterly alone.

Marcelo knew a lot about elusive Indians -- more than just about anyone. He was a sertanista, a uniquely Brazilian profession that is part jungle explorer, part ethnologist and part bureaucrat. As a member of Funai -- the Brazilian government agency charged with protecting indigenous interests and cultures -- Marcelo's specialty was "uncontacted" Indians, those tribes that remain isolated from modern man. His territory was Rondonia, a heavily forested area that had been largely undeveloped before the government declared it a state and opened it to agriculture in the early 1980s. After that, loggers and ranchers began streaming in, and Marcelo blamed them for the denuded pastureland that was eating into the forest from all sides.

Just a few months earlier, Marcelo and his tracking partner Altair Algayer had made first contact with an isolated tribe of Kanoe Indians that had been reduced to five survivors. Shortly after that, they found another tribe, the Akuntsu, with only six members living several miles from the Kanoe. They'd gotten the land for those tribes declared off-limits to development. And for that, the loggers and ranchers who wanted a piece of that land for themselves viewed Marcelo and Altair just as suspiciously as those two viewed the loggers and ranchers.

But this rumor, of a single Indian on his own in the jungle, was too compelling to ignore, even if it meant spending time among the kind of people that Funai explorers generally tried to avoid.

The rumor's trail led to a logging operation near a cattle ranch. Marcelo and Altair, careful to sneak past the boss, found the company cook.

"Yeah, I've seen him," the cook told them, "and I know where he lives. Do you want to see?"

Before they followed the cook to the sharply drawn border between pasture and forest, they had their doubts about the story. Couldn't the Indian have been a wandering member of the Akuntsu tribe, who also customarily wore no clothes?

Wasn't the idea of an essentially self-sufficient man living in unbroken communion with nature practically impossible now, more than 500 years after conquistadors, prospectors, slavers, missionaries, rubber tappers and scientists started penetrating the Amazon's depths?

But when they stepped into the forest with the cook, they walked straight into an epic quest that would obsess, delight and terrify them for more than a decade. It would send them dodging arrows and would incite pitched battles with landowners that would upend lives forever. They would become detectives, piecing together the clues of a murder case that would ultimately offer them a glimpse of fathomless solitude.

On the constricting edge of one of the last truly wild places on Earth, one man's unlikely existence would show them what true survival meant and would underscore the value of mystery in a world with little room left for the unknown.

ALTAIR, CLUTCHING HIS RIFLE WITH ONE HAND, TWISTED THROUGH A TANGLE OF FERNS. It was the peak of the dry season in 1998. They called this a rain forest, but it hadn't even sprinkled here in 60 days. Insects swirled within the streaming bars of light that penetrated the canopy of jatoba trees. A papery rustle accompanied each footstep as he hiked deeper into the forest.

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.

"You know, Altair," the man told him, "we're always looking for allies."

That exchange is what eventually led to his introduction to his trusted friend and mentor Marcelo dos Santos. Marcelo had joined Funai's jungle crew years earlier, after growing up in Sao Paulo, one of the most relentlessly urban environments on Earth. After dropping out of college, Marcelo sold all of his possessions and moved to Rondonia, where a friend had told him the trees were enormous and the lifestyle slow. When he arrived in the summer of 1974, he discovered that his friend had recently moved. He drifted for a while until he stumbled upon Funai's local office.

Indians, he thought . They live without money, without possessions. Sharing all, claiming nothing. Maybe this is the place for me.

Marcelo went native, dramatically. After being hired by Funai, he spent almost all of his time in the jungle with tribes. He hunted with them, choked down the same insect larvae they ate, journeyed across untrodden paths in search of fruits. For nearly two years, he went barefoot -- until his feet were so battered he could barely walk. In 1979, he began working with a tribe called the Negarote, which had only 18 members surviving from the estimated 300 in the late 1950s. His job was to nurse the tribe back to health, acting as a sort of social worker. For several years, he went from hut to hut, living among the families. He built a small house next to the tribal village and lived with the Negarote until 1990.

He eventually left the village to head a mapping project in southern Rondonia, where the jungle was rapidly falling to logging and ranching. Marcelo and Altair hit it off instantly, and they soon formed the core of the Guapore Contact Front, assigned with the mission of minimizing the clashes between loggers and whatever uncontacted tribes might remain in the forest. Their expeditions took them to the most remote areas of the region, and they often camped out in the forest for months at a time.

But their assignment at hand -- making contact with the lone Indian -- was a challenge like none they'd ever faced. Fresh off of their successes in contacting the Kanoe and Akuntsu tribes, they set their sights on recruiting the one man they figured would be most able to provide a window onto the life of the lone Indian: Pur¿ Kano¿.

It had been just over a year since they had made first contact with Purá, the only adult male in the five-member Kanoe tribe. Marcelo and Altair had sat for hours with Purá, patiently communicating with hand gestures. Eventually, an elderly Indian from the other side of Rondonia who spoke Portuguese and a related tribal language was brought in to translate the stories of Purá and his mother, Tutuá. Slowly, the team pieced together the Kanoe tribe's grim history.

In the 1970s, when the group numbered about 50, all of the tribe's adult males ventured out of their tiny village together in search of different Indian groups in the hope of arranging marriages. After several days, the men didn't return, so a small group of women formed a search party. They found the men massacred, killed by unknown assailants. The women panicked, convinced they couldn't survive and care for their children on their own. So they made a pact: All of them -- women and children -- would drink a deadly poison derived from the timbo plant and commit collective suicide. But Purá's mother, Tutuá, refused to swallow. As she vomited fiercely, she rid herself of the traces of poison and was able to stop her two children, her sister and her niece from sipping the fatal brew.

The tiny tribe had lived on its own for nearly two decades -- until Marcelo and Altair encountered Purá and his sister on a jungle trail in September 1995. The team members figured that if anyone could help them find the lone Indian, an Indian who had been in a similar situation until very recently might be their best bet.

So now, in 1998, Purá was walking alongside Marcelo, Altair and Vincent as they discovered the spiked trap on the narrow trail.

Not long after that, Purá stiffened and motioned to the others -- he'd heard something behind him.

"Quiet!" Marcelo whispered to the others.

They stood still and listened. Amid the ever-present chorus of bird song, they heard a rustling. The Indian was near the trap that they'd just discovered. They walked toward him, but he disappeared -- it was as if he'd found a crack in the deep green curtain of foliage behind him and quietly slipped offstage. They spread out at random angles, until Altair saw something about 200 yards off the trail: a small thatch hut, the same kind that they had found hastily abandoned elsewhere in the forest.

This time, the Indian was inside. They approached very slowly.

"Hi, my friend," Altair said. There was no response, but, through a slight gap in the thatch, Altair could see the man's eyes.

"He's there," Altair said to the others, "standing inside the hut."

Vincent aimed his video camera as Altair inched closer. Something was protruding through the thatch wall, twisting in place.

"Look," Altair said. "An arrow inside."

It was a fluted bamboo arrow, sharpened to a deadly point. Pur¿ nervously decided to speak up: "Mampi no," he said in the Kanoe tongue. Don't shoot. The man didn't react and continued to twist the arrow.

Purá began an awkward dance, clapping his hands arrhythmically -- a tribal ritual meant to summon protection from the gods. The Indian hadn't responded to Purá's words, and he wasn't responding now. It made Purá suspect he was from a tribe Purá had never encountered.

Altair again stepped slowly toward the hut, and he saw the Indian draw his bow. Altair slowly backed up, showing the man his palms, meaning no harm. The Indian lowered his bow. Altair, hands still up in the air, slowly took another step forward; the man drew his bow again. Altair got the message: The Indian was drawing an imaginary line in the dirt about 10 feet around his hut, saying, Keep your distance.

For nearly six hours, they maintained the standoff. They built a small fire, offered the Indian food and tools, gifts they thought might convince him that they were friendly.

"Here, this ax is yours," Altair said, tossing it toward the hut. "This water yam, too."

The Indian eventually took the food that Altair dangled in front of the hut's opening on the end of a long stick. Then he tore it to shreds and tossed it back outside, uneaten.

At one point, Vincent moved a little closer with his camera to get a clear view of the Indian's face through an opening in the hut's wall of leaves. The Indian was looking beyond Altair, directly eyeing the camera.

"Watch out, Vincent!"

An arrow whizzed past Altair toward Vincent, missing the cameraman's chest by inches.

Purá knew how dangerous a member of an isolated tribe could be if he believed his life was threatened. But even Purá, who had always relied only on the help of his small tribe to survive, couldn't fathom how hostile that Indian might be if he had lived for years with no established communion with another living soul.

Purá turned and ran as fast as he could through the forest, terrified.

THE AMAZON REGION IS AN AREA ABOUT 9/10THS THE SIZE OF THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES. It reaches into seven countries, but most of it is in Brazil. According to the book The Last Forest, by journalists Mark London and Brian Kelly, about 3 percent of the Amazon had been deforested in 1980, before the international movement to curb the Amazon's destruction gathered force. Now, about 20 percent is gone. A study released late last year by the Woods Hole Research Center -- in collaboration with the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research -- used deforestation estimates released by the Brazilian government to conclude that 55 percent of Brazil's portion of the Amazon would be cleared, logged or damaged by drought by 2030.

Inside the Amazon itself, not a lot of tears are being shed over the loss. Travel around Brazil, and you're sure to hear the refrain: How can a country be so rich in natural resources and be so poor at the same time?

A lot of Brazilians look at places such as the United States or the British Empire and detect a common thread: Those countries cashed in on their resources to position themselves at the top of the world economy. Meanwhile, Brazil's cities are buckling under the weight of shantytown growth and violence. So, to a lot of Brazilians, it sounds like rank hypocrisy when outsiders tell them that their own resources should be off-limits to development.

A 2005 survey conducted by Brazil's top polling organization, Ibope, found that nearly three out of five Brazilians distrust the activities of international environmental groups. Nowhere is this sentiment expressed more forcefully than in Rondonia. A lot of the politicians in the young state come from its founding industries of logging and ranching, and exploiting the antipathy toward environmental groups makes political sense. Even though Funai is part of the Brazilian government, local ranchers considered the Guapore Contact Front an extension of an international environmental movement designed to make their lives hell. Without help from the ranchers, the team often tried to turn to the ranch hands, low-paid peones who for years lived in splintery shacks near the forest and often didn't share their bosses' contempt for Funai's work.

Through the older workers, the Funai team learned that the ranches in the immediate vicinity had a long history of violent conflict with local tribes. In 1985, a bloody battle between farmers and a tribe on a nearby Indian reserve launched public debate as to whether the government should extend the reserve and limit farming there. According to the peones, the owner of another nearby plot of forested land took note of the problem and decided that if no one knew about the Indians on his land, he'd be better off. He instructed his pistoleros to distribute some "gifts" around the Indian village in the woods: bags of sugar laced with rat poison. Later, the trigger men were sent back to the Indians' area with orders to shoot anyone who might have survived, and to raze and burn any vestiges of their village.

THAT STORY WAS ON THE MINDS OF MARCELO AND ALTAIR when they were inspecting satellite images that Funai bought from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. They noticed a pale rectangle in the middle of the dark green forest -- a clearing that showed up on the images after January 1996, but not on those before it. It was odd, because no one deforested in January, the height of the rainy season. Stranger still, the rectangle was in the middle of nowhere, unconnected to any other clearing.

The land was claimed by two brothers, Hercules and Denes Dalafini. When Altair tried to pass through their ranch to get to the forest behind it, he confronted a locked gate and the wife of a ranch worker, who told him she had instructions from the Dalafinis not to let anyone from Funai onto the property. Marcelo went to the state capital, Porto Velho, and got a court order.

When, in late 1996, Funai team members finally were able to hike to the clearing, they found something surprisingly familiar: numerous trap holes. They also found another hole a lot like the ones that the Indian always had inside each of his huts, only bigger. Instead of being roughly five feet deep and three feet by one foot, this one was five feet deep and three feet by four feet. Team members still didn't know anything about the purpose of the holes, just that the Indian always strung a rudimentary hammock over the cavity to sleep. So, if the holes in the lone Indian's huts were big enough for one person to sleep over, the new hole they discovered was big enough for three or four people. As they scoured the undergrowth, they found 14 holes arranged in a large circle. The holes were old, judging by the dirt and vegetation that had begun to fill them. Off to the side, within the tangled brush that had recently started to grow back, they found papaya saplings and manioc shrubs, plants often grown in isolated Indian villages.

Days later, the team returned to the site with Vincent, whose camera was rolling when Hercules Dalafini and a couple of his employees arrived with two police officers. Marcelo and Altair explained that Funai was authorized by the courts to be on the land. But Vincent, though he used to work for Funai, wasn't on the payroll anymore. Even though he was authorized by Funai to be there, the legality of his presence was a judgment call.

"I want him arrested," Hercules Dalafini said, pointing out Vincent. "He's not part of Funai."

The police agreed and detained Vincent but released him the same day. Vincent decided to turn up the heat: The fact that he wasn't officially a Funai employee might have been used against him, but it could also work to his advantage, because he could move around with relative anonymity. So, with Marcelo and Altair's encouragement, he went to a small town called Xupinguaia by himself two days later, believing that he might find some ranch hands who could tell him something about how the land had been cleared.

He found the closest approximation to a hotel the town offered -- a couple of rooms in back of a restaurant available for rent. The proprietor was also a teacher, and he and Vincent hit it off. Vincent gently prodded him and found that the man knew of the Dalafinis. More important, the man knew someone who until recently had worked for them, a woman named Maria Elena.

After much coaxing by Vincent, Maria Elena told him that she and her husband had been hired by the brothers to clear and burn the land in early 1996. She said gunmen had also been hired to kill three Indians believed to still be living on the land. She didn't know if the gunmen found the Indians or not. Shortly after she started working there, she said, she got scared, quit and moved to Xupinguaia.

Vincent knew the information was explosive, and he continued interviewing peones, corroborating Maria Elena's story. Some said they heard that the pistoleros had chased three Indians out of the area, perhaps killing them. Vincent began to sleep behind the door of the rented room, afraid someone might burst in during the night and try to do the same to him.

"You have to be careful," the teacher told him. "People are asking about you. Don't walk around alone at night."

When he returned to the Funai team's base in the town of Vilhena with the tapes, the story quickly began to leak to the media. Advocacy groups issued news releases to try to whip up international interest. The New York-based Environmental Defense Fund distributed a four-page mailing to its members outlining part of the story that the Funai team had pieced together:

"Various reports confirm that in January of 1996 the rancher [Hercules Dalafini] hired a contractor to clearcut the area in the month of January. The contractor entered the village shooting, pulled down and burned the longhouse, and destroyed the garden of corn and squash . . . Later, a bulldozer opened an access road for the deforestation and attempted to cover up the vestiges of the village . . ."

A lawyer consulted by Funai advised the team members that the only charge their side likely could prove was "forced expulsion" -- which would result in a small fine and probably ratchet tensions to even more dangerous levels.

The Dalafinis denied the story completely -- there had never been Indians on their land, the brothers said.

But after the team encountered the lone Indian face to face in 1998, Marcelo drove to Porto Velho requesting that the Indian's roaming area -- approximately 23 square miles of it, anyway -- be declared off-limits to transit by humans and machines. Armed with the pictures that Vincent had captured of the man peering out of his hut, Marcelo made his pitch. In doing so, he invited the fury of an entire political class.

"I don't know why, with so many more serious problems facing this country, that the justice system would buy the crazy thesis presented by the Guapore Contact Front," Denes Dalafini told a Sao Paulo newspaper reporter in March 1999. "It's incredible. There never existed a village on our property, not even a hut. The Guapore Front is creating scenarios and forging evidence. I don't know how this farce has been constructed, but it is a farce. Who can guarantee me that they didn't place Indians there themselves? Everyone comments about how this group depends on foreign resources. That money is being put to good use."

Although the courts granted the team a temporary ban on development in the Indian's immediate area, the landowners had labeled the team members their archenemies. If Funai workers felt at times as if everyone was against them, it's because almost everyone was.

According to J¿lio Olivar, editor of the regional newspaper, Folha do Sul, the state's elected representatives voted, 23 to 1, to declare Marcelo a persona non grata in Rondonia.

"They said he was an enemy of progress," Olivar said.

The very idea of an individual man living completely cut off from the rest of human civilization stirred debate in Rondonia. Some people subscribed to a romantic concept of "the noble savage," which essentially argues that any contact with someone who has never been exposed to civilization corrupts an unspoiled innocence. Others believed that denying him assistance to make his life easier was itself a form of cruelty.

The Funai team members knew that although the Indian's disconnect with civilization was extreme, it wasn't complete.

The area of southern Rondonia where he roamed is a lowland that anthropologists believe served for centuries as a way station for Indian tribes traveling between the heart of the Amazon and the Andes. Complex civilizations have flourished there for centuries along the many rivers and inlets that cut through the woods.

But the dense forest made it an unusually easy place for individual groups to establish isolated communities capable of being relatively undisturbed by enemies. Linguists have found that many of the tribes -- though they might live just a few miles apart -- can have very little in common with their neighbors.

"Think of the Basque language in Spain and France," explained Hein van der Voort, a Dutch linguist specializing in the region's tribes. "It's a language that doesn't belong to any of the other European families of languages but seems completely isolated from them. It's unique in that way in Europe. In Rondonia, there are at least 10 such languages that have been identified so far."

Academics say that preserving such languages and cultures -- no matter how small -- is important for the potential knowledge they can provide for our own. Scientists, for example, can study native remedies in searching for cures; isolated languages can provide links between other cultures previously believed unrelated; and the study of traditional belief systems can open windows onto human nature.

Isolated tribes occasionally have limited contact with the modern world. Purá, for example, wasn't shocked to see white men when Marcelo and Altair first approached him on a forest trail in 1995. He'd known about their world, which was usually represented by loggers and ranchers, his whole life.

But Purá provided the team members with a very clear window on what can happen when outsiders suddenly intervene in the life of such a person. Ethical traps pop up everywhere. Shortly after Purá saw the jungle camp that Funai built to monitor the Kanoe and Akuntsu tribes -- a collection of large, rectangular wood-and-thatch huts with sloping rooftops -- Purá reconsidered the wigwam-shaped huts in his tiny village, tore them down and rebuilt new houses using the newly observed architectural style. He used knives, axes and machetes lent to him by the Funai team members, who didn't think it was right to deny him tools that they used themselves. The Kanoe -- unlike the Akuntsu, for example -- had always worn clothes tribe members made themslves, but, after Purá got to know the Funai team, he began to prefer T-shirts and shorts.

Team members believed that his traditional clothes were beautiful, but could they really blame him if he liked their exotic clothes and found them more comfortable, too? A similar circumstance arose with the Akuntsu. Though team members praised the beaded necklaces and jewelry that the women wore, they found that after contact was made, the women had begun to wear something new as earrings: aluminum tabs from soda and beer cans.

Even so, the Kanoe still struggled to survive, hunting for their meals and facing the painful realization that their prospects for lasting another generation were growing slimmer. Then in his mid-20s, Purá knew he needed to find a mate. His options were limited to one source: the three females of the Akuntsu, who were between the ages of 17 and 35. One morning in 2000, Marcelo accompanied Purá to the Akuntsu village to investigate the possibility of wooing a wife.

It was a long shot, and they all knew it. But Purá tucked his best T-shirt into a pair of denim shorts, buckled on a black leather belt and walked with Marcelo across a clearing where the Akuntsu chief was seated on a tiny wooden block. With nods and smiles, they greeted the chief, a wrinkled old man named Konibú who quickly caught on to the nature of the visit.

Soon, all six of the Akuntsu were gathered in the clearing, watching Purá take an interest in the youngest female of the tribe, 17-year-old Inuteia. After a couple hours of awkward hand signals and gestures, Purá moved behind her and began stroking her short black hair. She giggled. Then Inuteia reached a hand to her head and began pulling out individual hairs and placing them gently on Purá's bare forearm -- apparently an act of affection. To the casual observer, they seemed to be hitting it off. But the coupling never happened. The chief ultimately nixed the idea. The two tribes had an extraordinarily strained history.

But what about the lone Indian? As far as everyone knew, his tribe didn't have any long-standing rivalries with the Akuntsu. And because he seemed to resemble the Akuntsu more than the Kanoe -- at least in terms of his lack of clothing -- maybe he would more instantly relate to the Akuntsu than he had to Purá.

So Altair tried to persuade the Akuntsu women to accompany him on an expedition to try to find the Indian. It was no easy task. For starters, Altair needed to persuade them to ride for several miles in his Toyota truck before they started the long hike through the forest. None of the tribe members had ever set foot in a vehicle before -- in fact, when they first saw the truck, they refused to go near it. It took a full day before Altair persuaded them to sit on the bench seat. Eventually, he decided to try driving the chief and the three women toward the lone Indian's forest. He shut the doors and started the engine. Instantly, the passengers began banging at the windows until Altair had no choice but to turn off the engine and let them out.

It marked the end of the team's attempts to introduce other tribe members to the lone Indian. The best way to help the Indian out, the team decided, was to leave little gifts for him near his huts. If he chose to use them, he might discover that the team members were trying to be helpful. Then maybe they could make contact with him and help set up a protected reserve for him.

So, they placed items such as seeds, knives and tools in front of his dwellings and on the lightly trampled paths throughout his area of the forest. After a while, he began to take them.

Paulo Pereira da Silva regularly accompanied the team members on expeditions as a Funai assistant, and he'd earned a reputation among them as a hardy scout who'd go just about anywhere, anytime. When the team members began to realize that the Indian seemed to be getting more comfortable with their advances, Paulo ventured into the woods with another Funai assistant to check on him. They found his hut, and they were pleased to see that he'd planted some of the seeds they'd given him. He wasn't inside the hut at the time they approached, but the bows and arrows he'd left there suggested he was nearby. Paulo started to saunter away from the clearing when he heard a voice.

"Ho!"

Paulo stopped and turned -- it was the Indian.

Paulo realized that he was standing near one of the Indian's spike-bottomed traps, which had been camouflaged with leaves and sticks. After the sharp shout, the Indian promptly ran away.

"I really think he was trying to warn me," Paulo said later, "to let me know that I should be careful. I think he had come to recognize us and to realize that we didn't mean him any harm."

The team members were recognizing something in him, too: his humanity. The Indian was no longer just the object of a quest but someone with an emotional burden that they were only beginning to comprehend.

DURING ANOTHER EXPEDITION, ALTAIR FOUND A SMALL BOW INSIDE THE INDIAN'S HUT. It was too small for the fluted arrows that most of the isolated Indians in Rondonia used to hunt pigs, monkeys and birds. It almost looked like a toy -- the same kind of bow that Purá's 5-year-old nephew often toted around to practice his aim by shooting at tree trunks.

The Funai team members thought about that bow for a long time. It couldn't have had a practical purpose.

"I think he must have had a child at some point," Altair said. "Or at least there had been a child in his tribe that he cared for. He couldn't have used the bow himself. It had to be a memento. Something made to keep a memory alive."

For Altair and the rest of the team, such thoughts often left them in a state of muted awe. But they'd grown accustomed to that. As some of the most tested jungle survivalists in the world, they respected the Indian's fortitude. Consider a simple threat, like a snakebite. When a poisonous snake bit Konibú, the Akuntsu chief, a member of his tribe was able to fetch a starchy root native to the forest used as a remedy. But if that had happened to the lone Indian, he would not have been able to run to find the root by himself.

In terms of purely physical survival, the difference between one person and two can be enormous. In terms of emotional survival, the difference was likely wider still.

"I sometimes think I could physically survive on my own in those circumstances if I had to -- I could hunt what I needed, get enough food and all that," Altair said. "But that's not the hard part. The hard part is being completely alone without any contact with anyone. It's the emotional part. That I couldn't survive."

In 2000, just as team members believed they were making headway at understanding the Indian, Altair found himself in a different kind of survival test. His job was at risk.

Altair had discovered a nearby piece of property where some trees had been cut without permission, and he noted the sign forged in metal over the ranch gate: Property of Amir Lando. He recognized the name as that of a senator in Brazil's national legislature. Because Lando had worked in the agency in charge of doling out the region's lands in the 1980s, he was prohibited from owning land there. Altair snapped a picture of the sign.

The senator denied owning the land, and the land records backed him up -- the land was registered in the name of a relative.

By the end of 2000, Marcelo decided he needed to take a break from the pressures of Rondonia, leaving the team in the hands of Altair. Shortly thereafter, Altair received some unwelcome news from officials in the national capital, Brasilia: His services were no longer required. If he wanted to remain with Funai, he would have to do so from a reassignment thousands of miles away. The editorial page of Folha do Sul linked the decision and Altair's public squabble with Lando, who was on the Senate appropriations committee in charge of federal budgeting decisions.

"After making life hell for Marcelo dos Santos, forcing the indigenist to move out of the state, Lando got the dismissal of his substitute, Altair . . ." the newspaper wrote. "Coincidentally, the allocation for Funai doubled after 'the German' was stripped of his position."

Altair's reassignment galvanized the members of Funai involved with uncontacted Indians throughout Brazil. That included the most legendary and outspoken sertanista alive -- a larger-than-life figure who is the most well-known Amazon explorer of his generation.

"It is a crooked decision, because this public servant is a decent man," said Sydney Possuelo, who founded Funai's uncontacted Indian division years before. "The president of Funai informed me that the decision to transfer Algayer was an act influenced by political pressure . . . It is the act of a scoundrel."

Even Sydney couldn't stop the transfer. But the then-60-year-old, who had explored more of the Amazon's interior than anyone alive -- and who was personally responsible for millions of acres of government-demarcated Indian reserves -- had found an individual case that perfectly encapsulated the tensions he had seen coming to a head for decades.

Marcelo and Altair had looked up to Sydney as a sertanista, but they didn't always agree with his brash style. For years, they'd all get together in Brasilia. Marcelo and Altair would go over their expedition reports and update Sydney on the latest twist in the trail of the lone Indian, and Sydney's reaction was usually the same: Push it. Make contact before the loggers do. He believed it was the only way to save the Indian from a certain murder.

Marcelo and Altair had disagreed. If the Indian wasn't ready for contact, they thought, a forced meeting would end in tragedy, one way or another. After Altair was dismissed, Sydney eventually found someone who shared his view: his own son Orlando.

ORLANDO AND HIS EXPEDITIONARY TEAM HAD SPENT ABOUT A MONTH IN 2005 exploring the forest before they found the first trace of the Indian -- a muddy footprint. Then it was another 10 days before they found the clearing with his most recently constructed hut. Team members decided this was their chance, so they returned to their base camp and returned with gifts: a pig, peanuts, seeds and a knife.

Orlando, then 20, stood back by the tree line, hesitant to approach. He knew that the Indian hadn't responded kindly to encounters in the past, and he didn't want to do anything rash. But the other three members of his team -- two local hires named Francisco and a Funai veteran named Celso -- were antsy. They'd all spent a month on the Indian's trail without success, and they figured this was no time to be shy. Even though Orlando was the team leader, the other guys were older. He felt weird giving them orders, so instead of saying something, he let the churning in his stomach continue without comment as the others inched closer to the hut.

Then Orlando squinted into the thatch and saw movement.

"He's in there," he told the others. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

Celso saw the same movement, but his instinct was entirely different.

"Come on," Celso said, as he continued to approach the hut. "I see something."

A second later, Orlando heard the sickening twang of a bowstring and the unmistakable, timpani-like boing that an arrow makes when it hits a target. Orlando didn't wait to look. He turned and ran as fast as he could, dodging trees, slamming into others, tripping over manioc plants, his arms pinwheeling for balance.

He stopped and turned to see what had happened to the others. The two Franciscos had been close on his heels, but Celso was moving slower. They soon saw why: the long wooden arrow sticking out of his chest.

Blood had already bloomed across his white T-shirt. To Orlando, it looked as if the arrow had pierced him directly in the heart. Actually, it was an inch or so higher.

"Are you okay?"

Even though Celso had managed to flee, it was clear that he was far from okay. His skin was pale as the other three men carefully extracted the arrow, and his breaths were weak and shallow. With each breath, the hollowed wound belched wetly. Kneeling beside Celso, Orlando removed his own belt and T-shirt, tying them together to make a sort of harness that he draped over his shoulders. The others lifted Celso into the strap-like seat that dangled from Orlando's back, and the 20-year-old carried the older man as if he were hoisting a very heavy backpack.

They began walking at about 4 p.m., and it was 8 p.m. when they finally reached the ranch where they had parked their truck. The Franciscos fetched a medical kit and a satellite telephone from the truck, while Orlando stayed with Celso, who was drifting in and out of consciousness.

Orlando rifled through the medical kit for painkillers, but their names meant nothing to him. With the sat phone, he called a doctor he knew in Brasilia and read the labels to him.

"Use the diclofenac sodium injection," the doctor told him.

As Orlando administered the injection, Celso tried to speak.

"I love my wife," he said. "Will you tell her that for me? Will you tell my wife that I love her?"

Orlando hadn't really been worried until that moment. Celso was in full death-bed mode, laying it on thick.

"Don't die now," Orlando said. "I just carried you all that way!"

It wasn't until 3 a.m. that they arrived at the hospital in Vilhena. The arrow had nicked the lung lining, but Celso would recover.

Orlando's hopes of contacting the Indian, however, would not. The experience led him to the conclusion that his predecessors had reached: Preserving the Indian's survival was more important than revealing his secrets. In his case, the mere existence of this mystery was more valuable than its possible solution.

A report that Marcelo had written after an encounter with the lone Indian in 1998 was still apt:

"He does not at this moment desire to have a dialogue, or to receive visits from those of us who want to. This is his right. More than anyone else, he knows what it is to lose relatives, to be killed at the hands of those who now appear as friends, offering tools and food. He is alone, and it seems that he wants to die that way. It is his right."

BY THE BEGINNING OF 2006, THINGS SEEMED PRETTY BLEAK for the sertanistas and their goal of protecting the Indian's land. A proposal was making its way through the Brazilian Senate that would give members of the National Congress veto power over the creation of any Indian reserve. That January, the Brazilian press suggested that the president of Funai, Mercio Pereira Gomes, believed Indians in Brazil perhaps had too much land and that the Supreme Court should reconsider the country's conservation policy. The newspapers called Sydney for reaction, and he spoke his mind, unleashing a torrent of criticism against Gomes. Although Gomes said the press had misinterpreted his comments, Sydney's career with Funai was put to an unceremonious end.

But other changes in the works proved to be more fortunate for the Funai team. By the end of 2006, Altair was given the chance to return to Rondonia and resume command of the team in charge of the area of the lone Indian. One of the first things he did was assemble an expedition to verify the man's survival.

On January 19, 2007, Altair and his team set out at the height of the rainy season from Vilhena for the Indian's territory. For three days, they got stuck on muddy dirt roads, crossed raging streams on wobbly bridges constructed of broken logs, got soaked in torrential rains. On the morning of January 22, beside a small tributary, team members found a tree that looked as if something had taken a big bite out of it. They all knew immediately what had happened: Someone had chopped into it, just under the point where a large beehive clung to the trunk. This is how the Indians of the area collect honey. Judging from the splintering and the state of the resin, Altair estimated that it had been done about three months earlier.

They followed the tributary, and that afternoon they spotted a narrow trail and found another tree cut into for honey, this cut about four months old. Nearby they found a hut -- peak-roofed, slightly bigger than the others. When they peered inside, they saw the hole, about five feet deep, that told them exactly whose home this had been. Some old arrows and spikes, the kind the Indian placed in the bottom of his traps, lay on the ground beside the hole. The hut had been built in a small but comfortable clearing near an ample supply of flowing freshwater and trees bearing lots of edible fruits and nuts.

But the man who lived in the hut wasn't home. Perhaps he had recently abandoned that site and moved onto another in the vicinity. But the team was sure of one thing: The Indian was still around, and he was healthy enough to be maintaining the rigorous lifestyle necessary for survival. After he returned from that expedition to Vilhena, Altair called Funai headquarters in Brasilia to look into the possibility of creating a temporary reserve for the lone Indian. With a few more expeditions, he'd have the evidence he needed to convince the bosses in Brasilia that -- after all these years -- the Indian deserved a protected area. When he called, he found a sympathetic ear on the other end of the line in the man who had just been named the new head of the isolated Indians division: Marcelo dos Santos.

On Marcelo's recommendation, and after reviewing all of the evidence the team had collected over a decade, the Brazilian government early last year announced that, to protect the Indian, it was declaring an area of more than 20,000 acres in southern Rondonia off-limits to any development. In a base station at the zone's perimeter, a small camp has been built for Funai members who regularly visit to make sure no one is violating the order. Team members have a similar camp between the tiny Kanoe and Akuntsu villages.

At night in the Funai camps, the moon struggles to cast the foliage in a weak silver glow, and the leaves shine as if they are stamped in a thin foil. If the moon is full, sickle-winged nightjars sing a call-and-answer in the trees, without regard for the luckless creatures who don't share their nocturnal tendencies.

During the rainy season, when the clouds blot out the moon, the darkness can seem suffocating in the huts where the explorers sleep. The nightjars are silent. Moisture penetrates even the most expertly woven palm thatch. Droplets form among the spiderwebs that line the undersides of the weave, gathering weight. Time is measured in irregular drips. Within a darkness so complete, it is easy to imagine oneself as perfectly isolated, to forget another team member is sleeping in another hammock just a few feet away.

Somewhere in the nearby woods, the team members believe, a man is sleeping under circumstances that are similar to theirs -- but entirely different, too. There is no one at his side.

His protected zone is an island of green in the middle of an ocean of red dirt fields and ranches. About the size of the island of Hong Kong, it has a population of one.

Monte Reel, The Post's South America correspondent based in Buenos Aires, can be reached at reelm@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.