He was particularly fond of children, Kroeber recorded. He taught Kroeber as much as he could: demonstrated the skills of flint-knapping, explained his language, told the stories of his people one last time so they could be written down and preserved. He ended up living with the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of California, Alfred Kroeber. Knowing that he was the last surviving Yahi, Ishi was desperate to communicate some of the culture that would be entirely lost when he was gone.
When he realised they were truly all gone, when a series of forest fires meant he was close to starvation, he allowed himself to be found and taken in. He was the very last of his people, and had been living in the wilderness alone, travelling to places he remembered from the time when his tribe had flourished, in the hope of finding some remnant of those he’d grown up with. He called himself “Ishi” – a word in the Yahi language that means simply “man”. He was known at the time and popularised in the press as “the last wild Indian”. "On 29 August 1911, a 50-year-old man, a member of the Yahi group of the Native American Yana people, walked out of the forest near Oroville, California, and was captured by the local sheriff. Naiomi Alderman described the book as follows in the Guardian Newspaper
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