The narrator of the story is the woman who follows a strange man from another community into the hills and spends a few days and nights with him. She does not know him, yet she wanders away with him and is sexually intimate with him, even though she is a married woman with children and responsibilities at home. The question the reader ponders throughout the story is, why did she do that? The narrator is clearly wondering the same thing throughout.

The best explanation that the story provides is the link to the cultural mythology of her people (Pueblo Indian). The narrator herself seems to stay for reasons she doesn't fully understand, as she vacillates between knowing that this man is just a man and probably not a safe one to be with and, on the other hand, feeling drawn to stay with him, as though there is a greater meaning to their encounter.

This greater meaning comes from her cultural connection to the spirit world. In essence, her confusion represents the state of many North American Indian peoples whose cultural beliefs seem to be something lost in the past yet remain in their memory. She constantly refers to her grandfather, who was still connected to their cultural history and had no doubt about the truth and meaning of the stories of spirits like Ka'tsina ,who came and kidnapped women from the village. Unlike the narrator, her grandfather did not live between competing realities of Indian and European cultures.

The narrator is drawn by these stories, and this confusion about which world she is in is what draws her to stay longer, even when she feels the desire to escape and return home. The grey area of uncertainty she is in, torn between cultures, is revealed in a moment of dialogue between the two.

"I don't believe it. Those stories couldn't happen now." She tells him, when he insists he is a spirit. He replies, "but someday they will talk about us, and they will say, 'those two lived long ago when things like that happened.'"

The story reveals the experience of being pulled apart by competing cultural realities and perhaps the challenges of belonging to a culture that has almost disappeared. Yet, the meaning of this culture and its stories continues to impact the narrator, such that she is drawn to do something "irrational" to the modern world yet very logical in a sense to her own cultural past.