The Dark Wind (1982)

A long-eared mammal known for its prominent front teeth and powerful hindlegs, with which it hops and leaps rather than runs. The most common rabbits in the Southwest are desert cottontails and mountain cottontails. The mountain cottontail often is associated with thickets, sagebrush and cliffs, while the desert cottontail prefers open plains, foothills and low valleys of the arid Southwest.

Although jackrabbits are also common throughout the Southwest, they are not really rabbits. Instead they are considered hares and prefer semi-open, grassy plains and deserts as opposed to higher, rougher country.

A Native American building form found along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and west as far as the Hopi mesas in Arizona. Pueblos are clustered, modular structures traditionally built of adobe, although pueblo buildings in more arid areas, like Chaco Canyon, have been built of unfinished sandstone blocks. Pueblo architecture is a fundamental synthesis of spiritual, social, and material sustainability. The block-like rooms, constructed of local materials, are typically built around one or more communal spaces called plazas, and are often terraced in rising and receding stories that create an open-air amphitheater around the plaza below. Although the interior spaces of pueblo structures are functional, they serve more as storage space rather than living space, because most traditional activities occur in the plaza or on the terraced patios created by the stepped nature of pueblos' aggregated stories. Few windows or doors penetrate load-bearing walls, so ventilation and access occurs through the ceilings into the rooms below. Descending into the darkened and enclosed space of a pueblo interior from the ceiling above is an enactment of returning to the womb and sacred space of Mother Earth, while climbing up out of these spaces functions as a reenactment of the Pueblo peoples' birth, or emergence, into the current world from the underworld.

Although contact with Europeans over the past five centuries has altered superficial elements of the pueblo building style, including its romanticized appropriation in the Spanish Pueblo Revival style popularized by U.S. architects during the 1920s and '30s, pueblos retain much of the same functionality and significance today as they did to the Pueblo communities who lived in them prior to European contact. Several pueblos have been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, which speaks to the resiliency of pueblo architecture as both a building form and as a social and spiritual practice.

Prayer plumes are feathers that are attached to prayer sticks for a variety of rituals, ceremonies, and devotions specific to a number of pueblo and Southwestern tribes, including the Zuni and Hopi. These feathers are usually fastened with cotton string to a short stick, ranging between 6- and 12-inches in length, that is also painted with very specific patterns and colors depending upon the ritual or prayer being performed. The prayer sticks, decorated with their prayer plumes, can be placed to mark a sacred site, or are left as offerings and signs of appeasement. Sometimes, the term "prayer plume" is used interchangeably with the term "prayer stick" and its Hopi translation, "paho."

Porcupines are large herbivorous rodents with a coat of sharp spines, also known as quills. These quills are actually strands of hair coated with layers of keratin, a form of protein found in skin. The quills function both as camouflage but also as protection, as the hard sheath of keratin tapers into barbed points, making the porcupine appear sort of like an elongated pincushion.

Unless stated otherwise, Hillerman's use of "pollen" refers to yellow corn pollen (or tádídíín in Navajo), which is a sweet tasting, yellow-colored powder that is collected from the tassels of mature corn plants. Because corn, or maize, has traditionally been a life-giving staple of indigenous groups throughout the Americas, the pollen, which is necessary for corn's own survival via pollination, has attained a sacred, life-giving status of its own. Often kept in small leather pouches, corn pollen is used in ceremonies as a blessing and offered in prayer.

An architectural feature found in the built environments of many cultures around the world, plazas are open spaces for public functions around which structures form an almost amphitheater-like setting. In Native American traditions in the U.S. Southwest, plazas are created by the terraced clustering of a pueblo community around usually one of several open spaces significant to the community. The early Spanish explorers in the region believed that they recognized in these open spaces the plazas of their own secular and religious built environments, and therefore called them plazas, which is the term still in use today. Puebloan plazas have social, secular, and spiritual functions, and are oriented in space to accommodate seasonal and diurnal solar patterns, as well as the ceremonial needs of a linked system of spiritual fraternities. Plazas are often associated with prominent kiva societies and ceremonies; because of this, the Catholic church appropriated Puebloan plazas as locations upon which to site their mission compounds as they evangelized the northern perimeters of New Spain in the Americas during the sixteenth, seventeenth , and eighteenth centuries. Over time, Puebloan plazas came to accommodate both indigenous and Catholic practices, revealing the syncretic use of space still in practice today in many Pueblo communities.

An elevated, fairly level expanse of land raised sharply above adjacent land.

A mixture of lime or gypsum, sand, and water that is applied to the walls of structures as a sealant. In the Southwest, many pueblos are made of adobe, which comes from the Spanish verb adobar, meaning “to plaster.” Part of the annual maintenance cycle of pueblo structures can include the ritual of whitewashing, or plastering, interior and exterior walls with a local derivative of plaster.

A pistol is a firearm, or gun, that can be used with one hand, leaving the other hand free for defense or the use of another weapon. There are two main classes of pistols: revolvers and automatics. Revolvers are multi-shot firearms, meaning individual bullets are encased in a revolving element. Automatic pistols are more modern and involve multiple bullets stored in a magazine chamber just below the barrel of the gun.

A popular pistol that is known for its high accuracy in precision shooting. The .22 refers to the barrel's internal diameter, or the diameter of the bullet's cartridge. In this case, the .22 rifle fires a cartridge that is twenty-two millimeters in diameter.