At the hogan of Hosteen Tso, at 3:17 p.m., it gusted and eddied, and formed a dust devil, which crossed the wagon track and raced with a swirling roar across Margaret Cigaret’s old Dodge pickup truck and past the Tso brush arbor. Over the arid immensity of the Nokaito Bench it filled the blank blue sky with a rushing sound. Two hundred vacant miles to the north and east, it sandblasted the stone sculptures of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park and whistled eastward across the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. “The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopovi and Second Mesa. Take the opening passage of Listening Woman (1978), for example: You know how you’re always advised as a writer to start a mystery/suspense novel fast, pull the readers right into the plot, avoid undue description of weather, landscapes, and the like? Hillerman ignored that advice all the time, because to him the weather and landscapes were integral to the plot they were living, breathing characters just as much as any of the people.
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