Omega

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.