|  The ancient Pueblo vision of the world was inclusive. The impulse was to leave nothing out. Pueblo oral tradition necessarily embraced all levels of human experience. Otherwise, the collective knowledge and beliefs comprising ancient Pueblo culture would have been incomplete. Thus stories about the Creation and Emergence of human beings and animals into this World continue to be retold each year for four days and four nights during the winter solstice. The “humma-hah” stories related events from the time long ago when human beings were still able to communicate with animals and other living things. But, beyond these two preceding categories, the Pueblo oral tradition knew no boundaries. Accounts of the appearance of the first Europeans in Pueblo country or of the tragic encounters between Pueblo peoples and Apache raiders were no more and no less important than stories about the biggest mule deer ever taken or adulterous couples surprised in cornfields and chicken coops. Whatever happened, the ancient people instinctively sorted events and details into a loose narrative structure. Everything became a story.
— Leslie Marmon Silko There is nothing like a toothache to ruin a wilderness trip; an abscessed tooth can cause a potentially fatal systemic infection. A wilderness caregiver should know how to put in a temporary Cavit® filling and let a group member finish the trip in comfort; for more extended wilderness or survival situations, the ability to pull a tooth and treat an abscess may be just as important as being able to set a fracture. There is not a lot of helpful material out there, but the following are a good start.
 Murray Dickson, Where There Is No Dentist (Palo Alto, CA: The Hesperian Foundation, 1990), ISBN 0-942364-05-8. This book is part of the outstanding texts from the Hesperian Foundation designed for village health workers in Third World countries. There is no other book like this. The book gives detailed information, with lots of pictures, not only on dental hygiene and nutrition, but also on using dental equipment, placing fillings, and taking out teeth. Highly recommended for any wilderness or survival medicine library.
 Donald A. Falace, Emergency Dental Care: Diagnosis and Management of Urgent Dental Problems (Malvern PA: Williams & Wilkins, 1995), ISBN 0-683-03007-8. This is a book on emergency dentistry for dentists, and thus covers procedures you are not likely to perform, say, in the jungle. Developed from a teaching manual used by third- and fourth-year dental students during their rotation through the dental emergency clinic, it is intended as a convenient reference for dental practitioners in diagnosing and managing commonly encountered urgent dental problems, and possibly useful in general emergency rooms as well. While this is more dentistry than you are likely going to master, the sections on diagnosing the causes of toothaches in adults and children are invaluable.
 John Hawkesford et al., Maxillofacial and Dental Emergencies (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), ISBN 0192623915. This book is for trained dentists, but, despite its technical contents, it contains helpful discussions of dental pain, infection, hemorrhage, and trauma, including soft-tissue facial injuries and maxillofacial trauma and fractures.
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