Embers of Hope
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 17: The Knowing
The years after the signs stopped had a different quality than the years before.
Not worse, exactly. Different in the specific way that certainty, even terrible certainty, is different from uncertainty — the suffering changes its character when it stops being anticipatory and becomes simply what it is. He had spent eleven years not knowing and now he knew and the knowing was its own kind of territory, one he had not inhabited before and had to learn to live in.
He learned.
This was perhaps the thing about him that would have surprised people who did not know him well — his capacity to learn the things that could not be taught, to sit with a reality until he understood its actual dimensions and then orient himself within those dimensions and continue. The war had required this of him repeatedly. The years after the women left had required it in a different register. The years after the signs stopped required it again.
He was forty-three years old when the signs stopped. He had the ranch and his health and the specific competence of a man who has been doing physical work his whole adult life and has become very good at it. He had the shelf in the kitchen with its accumulated objects and the clay pot and the dried plants from the rafter. He had a box under the floorboard with legal documents and a child’s bark drawing and a small woven piece and a moccasin that had been too small for any foot for years but that he had never moved from its position beside the box.
He had his Yana, which had continued to develop in the strange solitary way of a language kept alive by one person speaking it to horses and clay pots and the open air of a ranch in northern California. He read everything he could find about the Yahi and the Yana people, which was not much and was frequently wrong in ways he knew it was wrong from the inside, but which he read anyway because it was the only external acknowledgment that what he had lived had existed, that the people he had loved were real people with a real history that deserved to be known.
He read about a man emerging from the wilderness near Oroville in 1911.
He was sitting at the kitchen table on a September morning in 1911 when he read it in the Redding paper. Not the front page — the Redding paper did not consider it front page material — but prominent enough, with a photograph that he looked at for a long time.
A man. Gaunt, dark, wrapped in a canvas coat that was not his. Standing in what appeared to be a yard or a pen of some kind, looking at the camera with an expression that Coulter recognized before he could name what he recognized in it.
He had seen that expression on three faces across a kitchen table on a spring morning in 1870. The expression of a person who has been carrying something enormous for a long time and has arrived somewhere that is neither safety nor surrender but simply the end of the carrying.
Ishi, the paper called him. Last of the Yahi.
Coulter read the article through twice. The man had been living alone in the hills for years, apparently the sole survivor of his people. He had emerged when he could no longer sustain himself in the wilderness. He was being taken to San Francisco, to the university, to live under the care of anthropologists who were apparently interested in what he carried.
Coulter sat at the table for a long time after reading it.
Ishi.
The name they had given Miwena’s son in the kitchen of this house, on a February evening with snow falling outside and the names written on the back of a flour sack map with a piece of charcoal. The name Daha had spoken in the formal register of Yahi ceremonial language, his voice not entirely steady. The name Coulter had said after, in English — James — both names together making the person, Yahi and English, both things.
He looked at the photograph again.
The man in the photograph was estimated at approximately fifty years old. Ishi — his Ishi, the boy born in June of 1871 in this house on this ranch — would be forty years old in 1911. Not fifty. The ages did not match precisely. But ages in a newspaper were estimates and estimates of men who had lived in the hills without calendars could be wrong by a decade or more.
He looked at the photograph.
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