The first Chapter Law is, “Don’t spend much time on it. You’re going to have to rewrite it.”

The red light changed the color of her shirt, and her faded jeans, and her face. Her hair was disheveled, her expression intent, and, taken all together, she looked absolutely beautiful to Jim Chee. It would be a lot better, he thought, if friends didn’t look like that.

Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry.

By whiteman’s standards, Leaphorn thought, Bowlegs had a net worth of maybe one hundred dollars. The white world’s measure of his life. And what would the Navajo measure be? The Dinee made a harder demand – that man find his place in the harmony of things.

Beyond meeting simple immediate needs, the Navajo Way placed little worth on property. In fact, being richer than one’s clansmen carried with it a social stigma. It was unnatural, and therefore suspicious.

Don’t think a man don’t care about one goat because he’s got a thousand of ’em,” Hosteen Nakai would say. “He’s got a thousand because he cares more about goats than he cares about his relatives.

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were.

I hear you’re a medicine man. I heard you are a singer of the Blessing Way. Is that right?” Chee looked slightly stubborn. “Yes sir,” he said. “I would like to ask you to sing one for me,” Leaphorn said.

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, and then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.” – Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993.

Leaphorn didn’t comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.