Leslie Marmon Silko Saw It Coming

When I called the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, in January, to arrange an interview, her son answered the phone. His mother was tending to a bird emergency, he explained. The next day, Silko told me, digressively and with relish, what had happened. She has a number of macaws, and she’d been nervous that one of them had suffered a stroke and was going to die. She brought the bird inside and propped him up on her bed, with the aim of giving him a dignified death. But the bird was . . .