Unit 8: Vocabulary from Readings 3,

A room of wily hush somewhere within.

At a distance in July or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire.

She had lived to be very old and at last infirm.

But warfare for the Kiowas was preeminently a matter of disposition rather than of survival, and they never understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry.

When the Kiowas came to the land of the Crows, they could see the dark lees of the hills at dawn across the Bighorn River, the profusion of light on the grain shelves, the oldest deity ranging after the solstices.

Not yet would they veer southward to the caldron of the land that lay below; they must wean their blood from the northern winter and hold the mountains a while longer in their view.

However tenuous their well-being, however much they had suffered and would suffer again, they had found a way out of the wilderness.

In order to consummate the ancient sacrifice—to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the medicine tree—a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd.

The windowpanes are black and opaque; you imagine there is nothing within, and indeed there are many ghosts, bones given up to the land.

Some of them painted their faces and carried the scars of old and cherished enmities.

There were frequent prayer meetings, and great nocturnal feasts.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.