Tayo goes out drinking one night with some other war veterans to numb his pain. Tayo gradually gets better and starts to help Auntie’s husband, Robert, with the ranch work. When Ku’oosh leaves, Tayo is finally able to keep a meal in his stomach. Tayo realizes that he must do something to restore the damage the war has done to the world. Ku’oosh comes to Tayo’s sickbed, speaking only the native Laguna language, and tells Tayo that the world is fragile. Grandmother stops Auntie complaining about Little Sister (Tayo’s mother) sleeping with white men, and calls the medicine man Ku’oosh anyway. Grandmother wants to call a medicine man to cure Tayo’s illness, but Auntie thinks that a medicine man won’t be able to help Tayo because Tayo is not full-blood Pueblo. Auntie takes care of Tayo instead of sending him back to the Veteran’s Hospital, but Tayo knows that Auntie resents him as much as ever for his mixed blood.

The story moves back to the time just after Tayo return home from the Veteran’s Hospital. Thinking of Rocky makes Tayo fall off the donkey and throw up. As they ride the burro, Tayo thinks about his cousin Rocky, who joined the army with Tayo but died overseas. Tayo’s friend Harley, a fellow war vet, comes riding on a burro and convinces Tayo to ride with him to the nearest bar, even though Tayo doesn’t like to drink. Tayo thinks back to his return from the Veteran’s Hospital in Los Angeles where he felt like a white spirit and couldn’t keep any food down. Tayo tells a story about Corn Woman scolding her sister, Reed Woman, who then takes the rain away in her anger. The ranch where Tayo lives in New Mexico, unlike the wet Philippines, is suffering from a drought that came because, Tayo believes, he prayed for the rain to stop while he was in the jungle during the war. One memory in particular bothers Tayo – he was unable to execute a Japanese soldier in the Philippines during World War II because he saw his Uncle Josiah in the Japanese uniform. Tayo, a Pueblo man, wakes up in his spare ranch house, dreaming deliriously of different scenes from his life. Stories are the only way to fight off illness and death and stand up to evil.

The novel opens by describing Ts’its’tsi’nako, the Thought-Woman, who is telling this entire story.

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