The Many Ways of Being Human

8.3

California and the Great Basin

In late August 1911, dogs flush a starving man out of a slaughterhouse pen in Oroville, and the sheriff locks him in a cell. He gives no name, because in Yana a person does not speak his own name. The chapter turns to California, with about a hundred languages and a dense population that never planted a grain field, living on acorns.