The following stories were told to me as contemporary or relatively recent occurrences:
1. “There is these wild fellas up in the mountains. I guess you call them giants. One time there was an old man who had set up a blind to hunt chipmunks, [pg 368] like I told you yesterday. He was up in the pine-nut hills and he had killed four chipmunks. One of these fellas come along and he snatched up a chipmunk and he ate it. Then he snatched another and ate it. He tried to grab another but the old man wrestled with him and stopped him from getting the chipmunk and then he got away. He tussled with that wild man and got away. But a long time after when he was real old and went around with a long stick [staff], he went out walking and he didn't come back. They went out looking for him and found his tracks leading up the foot of Job's Peak and they ended there. His stick was stuck in the ground and at the end of his tracks it looked like something had snatched him up.”
When I asked if the wild men had gotten him my informant said he thought so. The theme of a wild man's attempting to take part of a catch from a Washo recalls the myth as reported by Lowie, although in the version he recorded the incident occurred between Wadsworth and Sparks and the final battle took place at Walker Lake, whereas my informant changed the locale to the Carson Valley area.
2. “My old grandfather had this happen to him. He was hunting up by the Lake [Tahoe], In them days hunters just carried little thin rabbit skin blankets. They covered up their front and put their back to the fire. My old grandfather was just laying there when he noticed the fire going down (maybe that wild man did something to the fire). Pretty soon he saw a big shadow. He was pretty scared and just laid there. Pretty soon he felt a hand feeling his feet and in between his toes and up his leg and all around his hole [anus]. Pretty soon it reached his face and tried to put his finger in my grandfather's mouth. My grandfather bit that finger real hard and the wild man yelled and ran away.”
I asked if the wild men still existed and my informant replied: “Sure. They are up there in the mountains. They are pretty smart and you can't see them. But us Washo can hear them talking. We can understand their language. I have thought a lot about it and they should have called some Washo over to Oroville when they 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.