OMEGA
A Postscript for the autobiography of A. Hyatt Verrill, from the manuscript Archives of the Museum of the American Indian. Digitized by Doug Frizzle. (This document was not included in the NADM manuscript provided by University of British Columbia a number of years ago.)
There
were to have been two more chapters, but Death stilled the
great mentality of A. Hyatt Verrill before he had dictated them to me. He had underestimated his ability and strength
to stave off the inevitable. Time ran
out before he had done.
He
had, some years ago, written a fine
chapter on his interest in the Mormon
Church in his younger days and why he had never found a faith that answered his
requirements as he saw them, until
he was over seventy years of age and asked, along with me, Ruth, to be taken into
the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints in February, 1945. (The "Mormon
Church.") He felt that he had not done justice to this important subject and
had torn up the work that he had done,
planning to re-do it and much better than he thought he had at his first
attempt.
The
other chapter that never was written
was about his last expedition, the
trip to Mexico
to collect shells, animals, birds, and to do some
ethnological work in which he had become
interested. The most important result of this expedition was the acquirement of a live supposedly extinct "sun-dog"
of the Nahuas and early Mayas, and
known to the pre-Incas and Incas as the "Wari
Wilka." A creature of indescribable ferocity and utterly unpredictable
temperment. This specimen was caught in Chiapas
and brought up to Old Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico, by an aged Indian who was employed by a large
hacienda in southern Chiapas and was given
special leave by his employer that he might bring the
creature to us.