How does Leslie Marmon Silko use imagery in The Man to Send Rainclouds?

The author sets the story on a Pueblo Indian Reservation very much like the one on which she was raised so her intimate knowledge of the landscape and the scenery make for spare but poignant descriptions. The pictures he author paints with imagery are almost as real as if she had provided a painting of the big cottonwood tree and the Blue Mountains still in snow.

The big cottonwood tree stood apart from a small grove of winterbare cottonwoods which grew in the wide, sandy, arroyo. He had been dead for a day or more, and the sheep had wandered and scattered up and down the arroyo.

But high and northwest the blue mountains were still deep in snow.

He paused and watched Ken throw pinches of corn meal and pollen into the wind that fluttered the small gray feather.