Harrison Houk is a former cattleman, a pillar of the Mormon church, former member of the legislature, holder of Bureau of Land Management grazing permits across southern Utah canyon country, and a legendary shrewd operator.

Actor Peter Fonda first appeared on Broadway in 1961 as the earnest Private Ogletorpe of Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole. He made his feature film debut in Tammy and the Doctor (1963) and subsequently appeared as a rebel biker in Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966). However, his second picture with Corman, The Trip (1967), would lay the groundwork for filmmaking history, introducing him to Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper. Co-written by Fonda, Hopper (who also directed and co-starred) and Terry Southern, Easy Rider boasted a great soundtrack of late 1960s rock music and featured a 16mm LSD sequence. Hailed by critics, Easy Rider shook up Hollywood and opened the stage door to a new generation of filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Fonda himself turned to directing with the offbeat Western The Hired Hand (1971), the sci-fi Idaho Transfer (1973), and Wanda Nevada (1979), in which he worked with his father. Fonda returned to the spotlight with the leading role in Victor Nunez's Ulee's Gold (1997), in which he starred as an emotionally crippled beekeeper raising his granddaughters and experiencing romance with a divorcee (Patricia Richardson). Fonda drew rave reviews, reminding people of the kind of decent yet stoic loner often played by his father. He followed this success with a star turn as a man blinded by sorrow over the death of his wife, in "The Tempest" (1998), a Civil War-era take on the Shakespeare classic, and gave an Emmy-nominated turn as the pitiful spouse of Ayn Rand (Helen Mirren) in Showtime's The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999). Fonda teamed with fellow 1960s icon Terrence Stamp in Steven Soderbergh's revenge thriller The Limey (1999). He will next be seen in the independent film adaptation of JT Leroy's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and with Blythe Danner and Faye Dunaway in a television adaptation of Anne Tyler's Back When We Were Grownups.

In Hillerman's Words:
"At first Leaphorn thought that Houk, like the pink sandstone of his house, had been proof against time. Despite the cane, his figure in the shadow of the porch had the blocky sturdiness Leaphorn remembered. There was still the round bulldog face, the walrus mustache, the small eyes peering through wire-rimmed glasses. But now Leaphorn saw the paunch, the slight slump, the deepened lines, the grayness, the raggedness of the mustache which hid his mouth."

A Thief of Time, Chapter 8