Dean Rader is Assistant Professor of English at Texas Lutheran Univerity in Seguin, Texas. In the following essay, Rader uses the importance of the number 4 in Navajo culture to offer four different interpretations of Silko 's "Four Mountain Wolves."

In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," Wallace Stevens suggests there are numerous ways (in this case thirteen) of looking at the world around us. In the poem, he creates a kind of trinity among the speaker, the landscape, and a blackbird to show the multiple options for interpreting one's relationship to nature, the imagination, and the self. The number thirteen is a somewhat random number for Stevens—the poem could just as easily have been about twenty-two or seven ways of looking at a blackbird—but that's not the case for the number four with Leslie Marmon Silko. In her poem "Four Mountain Wolves," Silko grounds...