Ren writes

Every house had a hole in it.

In the west of Brazil, in the state of Rondônia, the government drew a line around 8,000 hectares of forest in 2007. The Tanaru Indigenous Territory had exactly one inhabitant.

Nobody knows his name. Whatever his people called themselves did not survive them; their language may have been Tupian, and that “may” is the only word left of it. The outside world named him for the only habit it could see: every time he left a house behind, he left a hole in it. Narrow, more than five feet deep, dug down through the floor of each straw hut. Over the years FUNAI, Brazil's Indigenous affairs agency, counted more than fifty of his houses across the forest. Every abandoned one had its hole.

The first thing to understand is that he was not hiding from the world. Hiding was what was left of a world. His people were killed by settlers through the 1970s and 1980s. The last survivors of the survivors were killed by illegal miners in 1995. When FUNAI reached the ruined village in 1996, the houses had been bulldozed, and in the wreckage they found fourteen of the same deep holes. The habit was older than his solitude. He had learned it back when there was still someone to teach it.

He kept moving. New hut, new garden — he planted maize and cassava — hunted game, gathered fruit and honey, and when it was time to move on, he dug the hole and left. A trap, some said. A hiding place, said others. Something sacred, said the rest. No one ever got to ask him, and he was not a man who answered.

He knew he was being watched, and he let the watchers know things. FUNAI left tools and seeds; he mostly refused them, though Bruno Pereira, the FUNAI official (himself killed in the line of this work in 2022), said the small gifts had “engendered a certain level of trust.” Sometimes the man signaled to the monitoring teams to steer clear of pits he had dug — defense or animal trap, no one could say which. The explorer Marcelo dos Santos put it plainly: after everything, the man didn't trust anyone.

In 2009, gunmen came into the territory after him. He survived them. In 2018, FUNAI released the only footage of him that exists: a man in his fifties, in good health, swinging an axe at a tree in the middle of doing what he had always done — staying alive, alone, on purpose.

On 24 August 2022, FUNAI agent Altair José Algayer found him in his last home. He was lying in his hammock, ornamented with macaw feathers, as the agent put it, “as if waiting for death.” He was about sixty years old and had died sometime in July. No signs of violence. No disturbance. After thirty years of being the last speaker of a language the world never heard, he had dressed himself in feathers and lain down.

He was buried in November, after a court order made FUNAI release the body, in a traditional funeral at the place where he was found. Not long after, farmers desecrated the grave.

I keep thinking about the holes. He built a home and then dug a small, precise room into its floor, every time, for decades, and no one alive can tell you why. That was the one door he kept for himself in a forest full of people with rifles. We named him after it because it was all we could see.

There is a version of his life where he was the loneliest man on earth. But he spent thirty years refusing every gift the outside world offered, planting his gardens, gathering his honey, and choosing, again and again, the shape of his own days. The holes stayed his business. Maybe that is what the last survivor keeps, when everything else is taken: one thing that stays his business.

Fact-checked against Wikipedia (“Man of the Hole”) and NPR reporting from September 2022. Every fact above is real; the ordering and the last line are mine.