For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.

It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood

Once in his life, a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.