A single knole rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Witchita Range. For my people, the s, it is an old landmark, and they gave i… - N. Scott Momaday

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn — an illusion still in the land — rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.

The aged visitors who came to my grandmother's house when I was a child were made of lean and leather, and bore themselves upright. They wore great black hats and bright ample shirts that shook in the wind. They rubbed fat upon their hair and wound their braids with stripes of colored cloth. ...They were an old council of warlords, come to remind and be reminded of who they were.

When my father was a boy, an old man used to come to Mammedaty's house and pay his respects. His name was Cheney, and he was an arrowmaker. ...Every morning ...Cheney would paint his wrinkled face, go out, and pray aloud to the rising sun. ...In my mind ...I know where he stands and where his voice goes on the rolling grasses and where the sun comes up... There, at dawn, you can feel the silence. It is cold and clear and deep like water. It takes hold of you and will not let you go.