And the journey is an evocation of... a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures. - N. Scott Momaday

The story of the arrowmaker, the "man made of words," is perhaps the first story I was told. ...it is a story about a story, about the efficacy of language and the power of words. ...I am sure I do not yet understand it in all of its consequent meanings. Nor do I expect to understand it so. The stories that I keep close... are those that yield more and more of their spirit in time.

Meditation on Wilderness

In the evening’s orange and umber light,
There comes vagrant ducks skidding on the pond.
Together they veer inward to the reeds.
The forest — aspen, oak, and pine — recedes,
And the sky is smudged on the ridge beyond.
There is more in my soul than in my sight.

I would move to the other side of sound;
I would be among the bears, keeping still,
Not watching, waiting instead. I would dream,
And in that old bewilderment would seem
Whole in a beyond of dreams, primal will
Drawn to the center of this dark surround.

The sacred here emerges and abides.
The day burns down, the hours dissolve in time;
The bears parade the deeper continent
As silences pervade the firmament,
And wind wavers on the radiant rime.
Here is the house where wilderness resides.

In the dense growth of the bottomland a dark drift moves on the . A spider enters a small pool of light on Rainy Mountain Creek, and downstream, at the convergence, a Channel catfish turns around in the current and slithers to the surface, where a dragonfly hovers and darts. Away on the high ground grasshoppers and bees set up a crackle and roar in the fields, and the s and scissortails whistle and wheel about. Somewhere in the maze of gullies a calf shivers and balls in a tangle of chinaberry trees. And high in the distance a hawk turns in the sun and sails.