House Made of Dawn

by N. Scott Momaday

Clouds build on the northern ridge Where the shades of night grow pale And there comes a slow, smoky rain. The mountains loom and recede. And Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide. There the distance of time runs out, And the mind extends beyond itself. I have seen in the twist of wind The landscape severed and heard The brazen cries of streaming hawks. First light is a tapestry on canyon walls, And shadows are pools of illusion. I am a man of the ancient earth For I have known the desert at dawn.

It is said that hawks, when they have nothing to fear in the open land, dance upon the warm carnage of their kills.

Coyotes have the gift of being seldom seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.

Great golden eagles nest among the highest outcrops of rock on the mountain peaks. They are sacred, and one of them, a huge female, old and burnished, is kept alive in a cage in the town. Even so, deprived of the sky, the eagle soars in man’s imagination; there is divine malice in the wild eyes, an unmerciful intent.

He had at last begun to sense the rhythm of life in the ancient town, and how it was that his own pulse should eventually conform to it.

Daddy peyote is the vegetal representation of the sun.”

Kneeling, he bruised a tuft of sage between his palms, inhaling deeply of the scent, and rubbed his hands on his head and chest, shoulders and arms and thighs.

all the celebrants ate of the peyote buttons, spitting out the woolly centers.

He had always been afraid. Forever at the margin of his mind there was something to be afraid of, something to fear. He did not know what it was, but it was always there, real, imminent, unimaginable.

There were people all around; she knew them, worked with them—sometimes they would not leave her alone—but she did not talk to them, tell them anything that mattered in the least. She greeted them and joked with them and wished them well, and then she withdrew and lived her life. No one knew what she thought or felt or who she was.

There are things in nature which engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devils Tower is one of them. Man must account for it. He must never fail to explain such a thing to himself, or else he is estranged forever from the universe.

when the weight of age came upon her; praying. I remember her most often at prayer. She made long, rambling prayers out of suffering and hope, having seen many things.

I did not always understand her prayers; I believe they were made of an older language than that of ordinary speech. There was something inherently sad in the sound, some slight hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow. She began in a high and descending pitch, exhausting her breath to silence; then again and again—and always the same intensity of effort, of something that is, and is not, like urgency in the human voice.