Kochininako, Yellow Woman, is the great heroine of Keresan storytelling, appearing across the tale cycles of Acoma, Laguna, and Cochiti more often than any other named human figure. Her name marks the color yellow and the direction north, and she is at once an individual and a recurring type, the young married woman who goes out from the village for water or wood and is drawn into the world of the spirit-beings. She is carried off, courted, or married by the Sun, by Buffalo Man, by Whirlwind Man, by Arrow Youth, and by the powers of the seasons, and she characteristically returns bearing something of value, be it game, rain, offspring, or the turning of the year. In the well-known Acoma and Laguna account of the seasons she is first the wife of Shakok, the spirit of winter, and is then won by Miochin, the spirit of summer, whose victory brings warmth and growth to the land. The twentieth-century Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko made her a central figure of her retellings.