Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?