House Made of Dawn

These past few days, I have been reading the novel House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, and I would like to share a fragment in here. I love the way the author portrays the natural world in the text. It feels so alive, as if Nature was one huge being with the ability to experience itself through out eternity; it's not just human, it is way bigger than that. With just one description, one can understand the notions of balance, dynamism, awareness of the world (both ancient and new) and the sense of communal living. It is so powerful.
Throughout the novel, I've also noticed the wariness which seems to be a part of the indian perspective, especially perhaps in modern times. The land itself is wary, as it is certain than even life at the peak of its existence will not last forever. There is always a struggle to be alive.

July 28 [Fragment]


There is a kind of life that is peculiar to the land in summer - a wariness, a seasonal equation of well-being and alertness. 
Road runners take on the shape of motion itself, urgent and angular, or else they are like the gnarled, uncovered roots of ancient, stunted trees, some ordinary ruse of the land itself, immovable and forever there. And quail, at evening, just failing to suggest the waddle of too much weight, take cover with scarcely any talent for alarm, and spread their wings to the ground; and if then they are made to take flight, the imminence of no danger on earth can be more apparent; they explode away like a shot, and there is nothing but the dying whistle and streak of their going. Frequently in the sun there are pairs of white and russet hawks soaring to the hunt. And when one falls off and alights, there will be a death in the land, for it has come down to place itself like a destiny between its prey and the burrow from which its prey has come; and then the other, the killer hawk, turns around in the sky and breaks its glide and dives. It is said that hawks, when they have nothing to fear in the open land, dance upon the warm carnage of their kills. In the highest heat of the day, rattlesnakes lie outstretched upon the dunes, as if the sun had wound them out and lain upon them like a line of fire, or, knowing of some vibrant presence on the air, they writhe away in the agony of time. And of their own accord they go at sundown into the earth, hopelessly, as if to some unimaginable reckoning in the underworld. 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.