Word: koi
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...children in a jungle clearing. All fled except a ten-year-old boy who scurried up a palm tree and was caught. He went into paroxysms of trembling, sweating and moaning, but his captors treated him kindly, and after a while he quieted down, announced that his name was Koi and that he was a Xetá. He was sent to Curitiba, where he was taught to speak Portuguese and was brought up almost like a son by the director of the local office of the Indian Protection Service. In civilized clothes he did not look unusual except...
...from Curitiba came Anthropology Professor Jose Loureiro of the University of Parana, bringing Koi with him. He had studied every reference to the mysterious Xetás and spent long, frustrating hours with the boy, who refused to answer most questions about his people...
...some instinct rather than memory, Koi led Loureiro to camps of his people, which proved to be pathetic palm-leaf shelters set in tiny jungle clearings. The camps were always empty, but piles of fresh coconut shells and animal bones proved that Xetás were near. Logs showed charred holes where fires had been kindled by friction. At last, in the sixth camp, Professor Loureiro" found a stone ax. "It was fantastic," he said. "A Stone Age implement in actual use by living hands...
Timid Warriors. That year he saw no living Xetás. But when he went back the next year, Koi led him to a clearing, and there 18 Xetás were huddled in five shelters. The Xetás looked ferocious, with contorted mouths and tusks sticking out of their chins. Actually they were scared to death. Two of the fierce-looking men bolted into the jungle. The rest accepted gifts of sugar with trembling hands. But overnight, they vanished...
Gradually Professor Loureiro won the Xetás' confidence, returning season after season to talk with them through Koi. He made taped records of their speech, whose strange sounds seem to blend with the calls and cries of the jungle. Said Czech Philologist Cestmir Loukotka, who studied the tapes: "It is an entirely new language. The Xetás are a people apart, with a culture and ethnic consciousness of their own, a Stone Age remnant now unique in the world...