The Scratching Log

Imaginator Press Paperback of Ratha's Courage

2008-08-12T16:10:00.000-07:00

Imaginator Press has been moving very fast to get Ratha's Courage into paperback for the October release date (Yay, Sheila Ruth!). Ratha fans probably noticed that Courage is back up on Amazon for pre-order, which is great. In the process of taking down the old Viking-Penguin page and putting up the new Imaginator page, the two early five-star reviews got lost. Luckily I had saved them. Usually I don't reprint reviews, as the Amazon Connect feature is not intended for that. When I asked one of the original reviewers to re-post on the new page, it would not accept the post, probably because the book has not been released yet. To help the book along and because it has had a rough road (undeserved) to print publication, I have decided to reprint the two five-star Courage reviews here so that they appear on my Amazon Connect feature as well as other sites that feature this blog.

(The new cover art is not yet up on the Amazon page yet, but as soon as it appears, I will add it to this post.)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Long Awaited and Well Worth the Wait, November 2, 2007

By	J. Feldes "CoyoteWoman" (Las Vegas, NV) - See all my reviews

I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of 'Ratha's Courage' and hope I can do it justice with my review! Clare Bell has been in hiding for many years now, but she has finally come back to her fans with "Ratha's Courage". It picks up where "Ratha and Tail-Chaser" left off, furthering the tenuous relationship between the Named and the communal followers of True-of-Voice. I was awed by the amazing twist the story took towards the end as the lines of friend and foe blurred into something altogether new and different. Ratha continues to mature as leader of her tribe of fire-wielding talking cats. Ms. Bell's time away from the unique feline world she gave us has not lessened her familiarity with the personalities of the individuals (most noteably Thakur, Fessran and especially Ratha herself) integral to the story line, and the continuity is fantastic - no plot holes here! The story line is somewhat more sophisticated than the original 'Ratha's Creature', and would probably be hard for young (under 8 or so) readers to follow, but any pre-teen or 'young adult' should be able to catch on with ease. As with all the books, there are some sexual overtones parents may want to watch for.
'Ratha's Courage' was definitely worth the wait, and hopefully there will be another adventure of the Named waiting in the wings.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Another Fantasy Masterpiece by Clare Bell, March 1, 2008

By	'The Virginiaprograsser' "Always Have a Song ... (Tidewater, Virginia) - See all my reviews

I was also fortunate enough to recieve an advance copy of Ratha's Courage. It is amazing how vibrant and alive Bell's characters continue to be after all this time has passed between her last wonderful Ratha novel (Ratha's Challenge) and this worthy successor. Time has in no way dimmed Bell's skill as a writer and Courage delivers in every way possible.

I may be getting ahead of myself here but I can't wait for the next installment of The Named series. Through the power of Clare Bell's writing you end up caring about Ratha and her clan that much...5 Stars.

:)Steve Sikes-Nova
Educator, Audio Journalist, Music PR
Tidewater, Virginia, USA

Thanks folks!

Imaginator Press to Publish Print Edition of Ratha's Courage

2008-07-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

Sheila Ruth of Imaginator Press and I ( Clare Bell, author of the Named series), have signed an agreement to publish a print edition of Ratha's Courage. Sheila also co-administers Wands and Worlds, a well-known teenage fantasy fiction fan site ( www.wandsandworlds.com). Agent Richard Curtis helped arrange the agreement. For more information and Sheila's announcement on WW, please see the link.

Ratha Returns with New "Courage", Part 1

2008-05-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

by Clare Bell

Ratha, the fire-wielding leader of the Named prehistoric cat clan, has, according to the recent VOYA review of the new Ratha's Courage, “a long and venerable history”. From the now-classic hardcover Ratha's Creature (Atheneum/Margaret K. McElderry/1983) through Clan Ground, Ratha and Thistle-chaser, to Ratha's Challenge, Ratha's prehistoric Miocene world fascinated readers. Now, thirteen years later, comes Ratha's Courage. Why has there been such a long gap after Challenge and why at last did I return to the series?

When Ratha sprang into print in 1983, she captured the 1984 IRA Children's Choice and jumped onto recommended teen book lists. CBS Storybreak adapted the book for a 1987 animated episode (see clips on MySpace TV and YouTube). After such an entrance, the series should have been commercially successful, but it wasn't for various reasons.

I mourned, and turned instead to my other love, electric vehicles. I became an EV journalist/editor for the Electric Auto Association, and later an
electric vehicle engineer.

In 2003 a call came from acclaimed Firebird Books editor Sharyn November. Sharyn interacts via Internet with teen readers and her young advisors suggested re-issuing my Ratha series. Would I write another book in order to pull the series back into print? Could Ratha, perhaps grown creaky from a 13 year sleep, handle another adventure? The answer came back in a Ratha-growl. Yes, of course!

Stay tuned for more!

CB

Ratha's Creatures - What Are the Rumblers?

2008-05-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

Ratha's Courage introduces several new creatures to the series, including a larger horse called a “striper” and the two “rumblers”, Grunt and Belch. Adopted by the herder Bundi, and his younger friend Mishanti while still small, these beasts have unexpectedly grown into behemoths greater than the elephant-like “face-tails”(based on American mastodons – see “What are the Face-tails” in previous blog posts) that the Named are still struggling to domesticate. Ratha, having been preoccupied with clan business, hasn't been paying much attention to Bundi and Mishanti's two pets.

Here is her encounter with Grunt and Belch from Ratha's Courage, Chapter 2:

“As Ratha came to a grassy clearing, the sound of splintering branches made her look up. The hair lifted on her neck and her eyes widened. The alert hunter within made Ratha take a quick step back before she caught herself.

Slightly embarrassed to be so startled, Ratha bent her head and gave her foreleg a quick swipe with her tongue. Then she looked again.
There was almost no word in the Named tongue to describe the two gray-brown beasts browsing in the treetops. They were mountainous. They even looked a bit like mountains, with backs sloping slightly up from rump to shoulders, extended necks increasing the slope and carrying the ascending line to huge, blocky, horselike heads.”

Though distantly related to horses, Grunt and Belch are not equine. Ratha's language may not describe them very accurately, but our language does. The rumblers are based on a fossil beast from the Oligocene and Miocene called Indricotherium (formerly Baluchitherium because its fossils were discovered in Pakistan). Indricotheres are gigantic hornless rhinoceroses, the largest land mammal ever, exceeding elephants and mammoths in both weight and height. At a shoulder height of about 20 feet, the ability to brows at 25 feet and a weight of 15 tons, no wonder they remind Ratha of mountains!

Although today's horses and rhinos look nothing like each other, they are both perissodactyls, or mammals with an odd number of toes. This group includes horses, rhinos and tapirs, who trace their ancestry back to recently described tapir-like animals called paleotheres. Eohippus, the “dawn horse” of our childhood prehistoric animal books, is now thought to be a small paleothere, like the early Paleotherium hassiacum. Paleotheres didn't remain small, either. The later Paleotherium magnum could browse branches 6 feet from the ground. It had a horse-like head and long neck, but the legs, although elongated like a horse's, were heavy; the feet had three toes with pads underneath. The limbs looked as though they belonged to a tall rhino.
Similarities between paleotheres, early horses and early rhinos have long confused paleontologists, and even now, they haven't yet got it all sorted out. Many early rhinos were small and slender, like the early horses. Many older books refer to them as “running rhinoceroses”, which may seem like a contradiction in terms. Others became the heavyweights similar to the species of rhinos we know today. One, in particular, grew to enormous height so that it could browse high in the trees where other mammals couldn't reach. Its size freed it from having to defend against predators, so it lost its horn and became Indricotherium.

Like the reader, Ratha is a bit baffled.

“She had no idea what these beasts were. Once she had seen a rhino, a low-slung leathery-skinned animal with a head that resembled those moving among the branches far above her. That animal had a horn on its nose. These didn't, just a bulbous swelling above the upper lip.”

She and others of the Named could have easily seen a rhinoceros, since they have existed in various forms for 40 million years, well into her time. The woolly rhino, Coelodonta antiquitas, lived into the last Ice Age and images of it survive on the walls of caves once inhabited by prehistoric humans.

Why do Bundi and Mishanti call the indricotheres “rumblers”? Here, Ratha discovers the reason.

“Her ears swiveled to the sound of drawn-out grinding and crashing. She narrowed her eyes. The beasts were not just eating leaves or twigs; they were crunching up whole branches. A substantial part of the tree's canopy was already gone. Ratha promptly changed her mind about the creatures doing no harm. If they kept this up, they might just eat the top off every tree in the forest.
"Don't be afraid, clan leader," came a yowl from above. "The rumblers are gentle."
Inwardly Ratha bristled at the slightly mocking tone but didn't let her tail even twitch.
One rumble-beast lowered its head to gaze at Ratha. It was still chewing. The mushy slurping sound made her put back her ears. It was as disgusting as any other herdbeast's chomping, and much louder.
The rumbler's eyes, however, were mild, unlike the rhino's red-rimmed, irritable stare.
"They may be gentle, but I still don't want to be sat on." Ratha reared up on her hind legs, squinting to find Bundi in the treetop. "Where are you, Bundi, you little son of a three-horn?"

Even as newborns, wouldn't the two indricothere calves have been too large for Bundi and Mishanti to tame? True, but if they had lost their mother, and were starving and weak, their condition would have made it much easier for the Named herder and his friend to “adopt” and feed them. And their behavior provided suitable names.
Grunt and Belch do provide some comic relief when they dismay Ratha and Fessran, but they also play a critical part in the story's climax. To find out how, read the book!
For an intriguing discussion of paleotheres, horses and rhinos, see National Geographic, Prehistoric Mammals, by Alan Turner, illustrated (gorgeously!) by Mauricio Anton.

CB

Ratha's Courage now on Fictionwise.com

2008-05-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

Ratha's Courage just went up as an E-book on Fictionwise.com.

I believe that it will also be updated on Amazon.com, with publisher listed as E-Reads/Fictionwise

It is still on Baen Books Webscriptions .

Things are rolling!

CB

Ratha Series recommended by Horn Book for Warriors fans

2008-05-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

In answer to the parent of a 4th grade Warriors fan, about other books to read,
Horn Book Magazine columnist Claire E. Gross recommended the Ratha series as a good follow-on for older Warriors fans.

Here's a quote from the May 2008 Ask the Horn Book feature:

"A: Two direct corollaries to the Warriors series come to mind (for those of you without pre-teens, the series is a multi-volumed, multi-tiered fantasy drama about sentient, heroic cats). There’s SF Said and Dave McKean’s two Varjak Paw books, about a street cat gifted in martial arts. And in a few years (the target age is a little older), try Clare Bell’s five-volumed Named series (beginning with Ratha’s Creature), about the epic struggles of giant prehistoric cats"

Here's the link:

http://www.hbook.com/newsletter/index.html

Thank you, Horn Book!

Do you folks review E-Books? Ratha's Courage could use a boost..

CB

Ratha's Creatures - What Are the Face-tails?

2008-05-01T09:53:00.001-07:00

You meet them in the first few pages of Ratha's Challenge, trumpeting, stamping and flapping their ears. Even a half-grown face-tail is too much for the Named and after the youngster launches the young herder Khushi into a thornbush, Ratha and the others give up, although only temporarily.
So what are these animals? In the book they are called mammoths, although the Named don't use that term. Actually, it is a bit of an author mistake. Creatures such as the woolly mammoth, the steppe mammoth, the imperial mammoth and others, didn't exist in the Early Miocene 20 million years ago. Although people tend to think that mammoths were ancestral to elephants, they were actually close cousins.
The family Elephantidae includes the African elephant, Loxodonta africana, the Asiatic elephant, Elephas maximus and the mammoths, Mammuthus. They all originated in Africa about 4 mya. The fact that mammoths died out relatively recently, a few thousand years ago, gives the impression that elephants are their descendants, but they evolved separately in parallel lines. The true ancestors of elephants and mammoths alike appear to be the four-tusked Stegotetrabeladon and the smaller Primelephas, who have the tooth structure that defines true elephants. Primelephas, like Stegotetrabelodon, had tusks in the lower jaw, but they receded, giving way to the two upper tusks of the elephants.
So, mammoths weren't around during Ratha's time. What then could the face-tails possibly be?

One possible proboscidean (trunk- or proboscis-bearing) candidate is Deinotherium, which looked a lot like an elephant, but its tusks originated from the lower incisor teeth. They grew from the lower jaw and turned downward. Deinotheres originated about 40 Mya and survived until 5 mya, so they span the required time period. However the series is set on the West Coast of North America, and all deinothere fossils found so far have been in Africa. This doesn't rule out deinotheres, however. There might have been some migrants and we haven't yet found their remains.
Another group of proboscideans called mastodonts originated later than the deinotheres and co-evolved with them. One mastodon family includes the American mastodon, confusingly called Mammut. Like the later mammoths, the American mastodon had a hairy coat and two upturned tusks rooted in the upper jaw. Mammut paralleled the mammoths but it was a distant cousin, with a separate 25 million year evolutionary history. Though the mastodonts gave rise to the elephants, Mammut and its kind were also a contemporary with the mammoths, disappearing with them in the Pleistocene extinction of mega-beasts. (Click the image to enlarge.)

It is too easy to confuse the American mastodon, Mammut, with its Mammuthus cousins, which is probably one reason for my mistake. I imagine that early paleontologists though Mammut was a mammoth, hence the similar name.
Mammut is probably the best candidate for the boisterous tusker who throws Khushi into a thornbush.
It existed at the right time and place. It was also smaller than its contemporaries, which would make it slightly easier for the puma- and cheetah-like Named to capture and manage.
Why did I describe the young face-tail's fur as orange? Because many of the frozen baby mammoths dug up in Siberia had remnants of orange-colored hair. At first paleontologists assumed that the hair had been that hue during life and that the baby mammoths had different coloration than adults.
However, later investigation suggested that the orange was a result of pigment loss during burial and that the original coat was a variation of dark brown. This was another case of paleontology outrunning the author.
By the way, it was Rudyard Kipling's “Two-Tails” the pack-elephant in his poem about British-Indian army animals, who inspired the term face-tails. A trunk looks very much like a tail, hence “Two-Tails”, which gave rise to the Named idea that these animals wear their tails on their faces, and the term “face-tails”.
CB

Ratha's Courage E-Released on Baen!

2008-04-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

This version is an electronic book, which means you purchase it, then download it into your laptop, Sony reader or other device. On sale now for $6.00.

To buy it from Baen Books, you need to get an account, which is free and easy.

Here's the link:

http://www.webscription.net/p-822-rathas-courage.aspx

Baen's homepage is:

http://www.baen.com

Baen will have an exclusive on the book during April, then Amazon and Fictionwise http://www.fictionwise.com will be carrying it.

If Courage does well as an E-book, the next step is print publication.

Eeeeyarooo!

The other books in the series are Firebird re-issues and are available through the net and at bookstores.

My deepest thanks to everyone who made this happen, including E-Reads, Baen, and my agent, Richard Curtis.

A Taste of Ratha's Courage

2008-03-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

Update 2: The book wasn't up as of 4/3. E-Reads has done the E-Book file, checked it and has sent it to Baen. As well as herding the book to E-publication, I am currently writing the kickoff announcement article that will appear on the E-Reads Blog (http://www.ereads.com).

Ratha's Courage to be released 4/1/08 on Baen Books (http://www.baen.com) along with E-Reads (http://www.ereads.com)

Ratha's Courage
by Clare Bell
Excerpt copyright 2007

Chapter One

A shiver of excitement went through Ratha. She began her stalk, belly fur brushing the ground. Grass whispered past her legs as she felt the slow controlled power of each muscle. Her tail-tip tingled with the urge to twitch, but she held it still.

The horse the Named called a striper tossed its head and flapped its tail, eyes widening. Ratha slowed her down-wind stalk so that she seemed nearly frozen, yet was still moving. The striper swung its neck around, jerking its head and ears back.

Ratha stilled until the herdbeast settled, then quickened her stalk, easing her weight from one foot to the next, placing each directly ahead of the one behind and moving so smoothly she felt as though she were flowing across and through the grass, a green-eyed river of tawny gold.

Nearing the striper’s dancing rear hooves, inhaling it’s sweat-sharpened scent, Ratha trembled with the impulse to dash, spring and wrestle her prey to the ground. She took a long slow breath, as the herding teacher, Thakur had taught her, mastered her urge and crept around the striper, circling in front of it.

Stripers were new to the Named herds. This horse was dun, with dark brown mane and tail. Ratha turned her head to bring her gaze down along its banded forelegs to the three-toed feet. These feet differed from those of the smaller dappleback horses that the clan had long tended. The striper’s center toe, sheathed in a single hoof, was larger, the side toes further off the ground. That hoof had far more power than the four and three-toed feet of the dapplebacks. Ratha had dodged it many times and other herders had been sent sprawling.

The striper grunted and whinnied, its nostrils flaring with her smell. From her crouch, Ratha lifted her chin and stared up at the horse, trying to catch and hold its gaze. As if sensing her purpose, the striper reared, its forefeet cutting the air, its tail whisking its flanks. She froze again; waited.

When the striper dropped down, she pounced on its stare with her own. Again it evaded her, closing its eyes and ducking its head, showing her only its bristling mane.

She knew the stripers were smarter than the dapplebacks; by now her stare would have a dappleback helplessly imprisoned.

Thakur had warned her that the stripers were clever; that the larger head held a more alert and cunning mind. Suppressing her frustrated growl, Ratha made several rasping snarls that were almost barks.

The sounds had the effect she wanted. The striper’s ears swiveled, the head came up, the eyes opened. Again her eyes sought the striper’s gaze and this time she captured it. The animal stiffened, as if about to fight, but snort and stamp as it would, the striper couldn’t break Ratha’s stare. It stilled to near-immobility, only its hide shivering.

Ratha felt triumph strengthen her heartbeat and deepen her breathing. She was so close; she could reach out and tap one of the horse’s forelegs with a front paw.

Again came the rush of desire that threatened to propel her up onto the horse’s shoulders, driving her teeth into its neck. In her imagination, she was already atop the striper, feeling the stiff upright mane bristle into the corners of her mouth. Part of her already felt the velvet-furred skin resist, stretch and then tear through beneath the points of her fangs, her neck muscles pulling and twisting in just the right way so that her fangs would slip between the neckbones and skillfully separate them while the prey’s blood flowed in pulses over her tongue. . .

Outwardly Ratha shuddered, yet kept her eyes fixed on those of the horse while inwardly she swiped the feelings aside. No, such a fevered attack was not the way of the Named. She had fought this internal battle many times before, when she trained as a cub under Thakur, and later when she began her duties as a herder. Even when she culled herd-beasts, she would not let instinct run wild.

Ratha used her frustration and desire, pouring them out savagely through her eyes. The horse was now as still as if it were already in her killing embrace. The muscles and tendons atop her forelegs quivered with the need to drive her claws out and deep into flesh.

She lifted out of her crouch, rearing up on her hind paws to lay one foreleg almost gently over the horse’s shoulders and up along the back of its neck. In spite of her care, the beast started, but before it could begin its escape flurry, Ratha slapped the other forepaw around the underside of its neck.

Now Ratha used her claws, but only enough to maintain her hold as she pushed backwards with her hind feet to unbalance the striper and pull it over. She was so close to the horse now that she couldn’t hold its gaze, but she no longer needed to. It was falling into the daze that doomed prey often assumed.

Instead of digging into the striper’s nape with claws and teeth, Ratha used the pressure and friction of her pads combined with her weight and her experience in knowing exactly how and where to push in order to topple the beast.

As if in a trance, the striper sank to its knees. Ratha climbed further onto it, using her weight to press the horse down onto its belly. She draped herself across the animal, one forepaw keeping the horse’s forelegs, with their dangerous hooves, at a distance. She wrapped the other forepaw around the top of the horse’s head, twisting it up so that the throat lay exposed.

Feeling the striper's heartbeat thudding through its ribs and into her own body, Ratha bent her head, jaws starting to open. The heart’s beat was strong in the creature’s neck, visibly jolting the skin over the great vessels and releasing a deep temptation in Ratha to bite deeply and hard.

Instead she opened her mouth to its full gape and set her teeth in position for the instinctive throat bite. With the horse’s sweat-smell hot in her nose, she squeezed her eyes shut with the effort not to bite, feeling the jaw-closing muscles beneath her eyes and on the sides of her forehead tremble with the strain.

The onlookers, Thakur and the young cubs learning herding from him, had grown quiet, as if they sensed the conflict within her.

Slowly, deliberately, she pulled her head up, feeling the skin of her muzzle slide
back over her teeth as her mouth closed. She swallowed the saliva that had flooded her mouth, staying atop the striper while the youngsters shrilled their praise and Thakur added his deeper note. Their cries sounded strangely muted to her, as if they were distant or her ears muffled...

(End of excerpt)

Courage galloping toward 4/1/08 release

2008-03-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

My agent, Richard Curtis, has just confirmed today that everything is on-track.

Courage will be released on 4/1/08 as an E-Reads/Baen Books selection.

Baen's website is www. baen. com. (Note - you can buy individual titles as well as the subscription.) E-Reads is www. ereads. com.

After all this time and grief, it really is happening.

Yarrrooo!

"Get the blood off the book. You can leave the sweat and tears..."

Ratha's Courage to appear on Fictionwise and Amazon

2008-02-13T11:36:00.000-08:00

I got an email from my agent Richard Curtis that Ratha's Courage: the Fifth Book of the Named, has completed processing as an e-book and will be appearing on Fictionwise and Amazon in a few weeks.
I haven't been posting much lately, due to weather, infectious bronchitis, and waiting for the book to come out. I'm much better now, and feeling more chipper, since Courage is actually going to appear soon.
Look for more "Ratha's Creatures" explorations in the critters of California's Miocene period.

Thanks again to all my fans and blog readers for all your support during a difficult time.

Clare

Ratha's Creatures - What is the Blubber-Tusker?

2008-01-22T12:15:00.000-08:00

VOYA Review of Ratha's Courage! VOYA is Voice of Youth Advocates

Before our little heroine in Ratha and Thistle-chaser meets Splayfoot the seamare, Newt/Thistle encounters another sea-beast that puzzles her. This one actually helps Newt, although she doesn't realize it at first, and probably wouldn't admit it later. By stealing this animal's leavings of clams and other shellfish, Newt learns to eat seafood. So, what is this creature who unintentionally aids her survival?

Here's some description from the book (page 10):

It looked immense, whiskered and blubbery. Creases formed in the rolls of fat around its neck as it swung its head from side to side. Its muzzle was wide and pushed in. Short but massive tusks protruded from beneath a loose, slobbery upper lip.

In Newt's mind, the creature becomes the “blubber-tusker”. Here's a bit more from pp. 10-12 of Ratha and Thistle-chaser:

With a startled grunt, the blubber-tusker heaved itself upright and stared at her with eyes spaced so far apart they seemed about to fall off the sides of its pug-nosed face.

She had almost reached the shell-bed when the creature bellowed and wriggled toward her, its heaving motion sending ripples through its blubber.

An elephant seal? That description could fit the huge California pinniped. However, recall from the previous installment that most seals and sea-lions were still pretty small. Enaliarctos, the “barking raider” and a very early sea-lion, was still in the otter-like stage. However, one branch of the family rapidly achieved heavyweight status, namely the walruses.

Paleontologists now think that sea-lions and walruses descended from a canid (dog/wolf) ancestor and seals from a mustelid (weasel/otter) ancestor. Sea-lions and walruses evolved in the Pacific Ocean while seals originated in the Atlantic and migrated to the Pacific. Walruses made the trip the other way, from Pacific to Atlantic. Then they became extinct in their original home and a branch migrated back to the Pacific to fill the walrus vacancy there.

Is Thistle-chaser's blubber-tusker the long-tusked whiskered gentleman we know from Lewis Carrol's poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, namely a modern species? No. Thistle's animal is a very early walrus which still has some of the characteristics of its sea-lion ancestry. It's canine teeth have developed into tusks for raking shellfish, but they have not attained the length of the modern species. Certain aspects of its skull are very sea-lion-like. Paleontologists who study this creature's fossilized bones have named it Aivukis, and it really was grunting and and wriggling around on the beaches of the California Miocene.

I made one semi-deliberate goof when I portrayed Aivukis as being contemporary with the early sea-lion, Enaliarctos. In truth, Aivukis appeared later. Walruses (family Odobenidae) developed from the early sea-lions (family Enaliarctidae). The first walrus was an animal that was larger than the early sea-lions, but still had sea-lion teeth, a creature called Neotherium. I used Aivukis since it looked and behaved differently from Enaliarctos. One might call this a bit of poetic license, although the fossil record isn't exactly a time machine. No one knows exactly happened back then, which makes it a fun playground for a series.

Below is artist M. R. Long's interpretation of Aivukis (from Savage and Long, Mammal Evolution: An Illustrated Guide - 1986). This book was a real source of inspiration for the beach setting of Ratha and Thistle-chaser. It deserves to come back into print.)

Whether or not Aivukis ever involuntarily shared its dinner with a limping little feline can't be told from fossils, but it might have happened!

This artist's re-creation of the creature helped inspire my description (“eyes so wide apart, etc.”)

Next up – Ratha's Challenge and the face-tails.

Clare

Ratha's Courage - Hope Burns Brighter

2007-12-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

Author interview webcast with webjay Steve Sikes-Nova premiers tomorrow (Friday)!
To find out when it airs:
http://www.live365.com/stations/virginiaprograsser/schedule

To listen:
http://www.live365.com/stations/virginiaprograsser
Feedback: ratha13@earthlink.net

Dear patient and devoted Ratha fans,

I am pleased to announce that Ratha's Courage will be released, both as an E-book and a physically published print book. I got some projected dates from my agent, Richard Curtis, in an email this morning.

Courage will be available for download on www.fictionwise.com and other retail sites by the end of the year. The print edition is scheduled to appear by or before February. Amazon will be carrying both. I will be posting more details as I get them.

Viking-Penguin decided to cancel their hardcover and apparently didn't tell Amazon. They also did not respond to my queries about what was happening with the book. The only notification I got was a series of short emails. For that reason, my agent and I decided to move the book to another publisher.

It has taken a bit of time to make all the arrangements, but things are sufficiently in place so that I can now make this announcement.

This has been a difficult interval for me, as you can probably imagine. Instead of crawling into a black hole after I got the cancellation email, I decided to continue publicizing the reprints and working with Richard Curtis to get Courage published. I was determined, and still am, to make sure that everyone who wants a copy of Ratha's Courage can get one.

Firebird Books is still handling the reprints and they have plenty in their warehouse. E-Reads will be doing a promotion that will launch Courage. I know it was hard to wait, but E-Reads has acted very rapidly to get everything set up.

I deeply appreciate your loyalty, patience and understanding during this time.
Because of you, hope burns brighter, both for me and the Named.

May you get your heart's desire and find delight.

Clare

Ratha's Creatures - What are the "barking raiders"

2007-11-30T14:17:00.000-08:00

In Ratha and Thistle-chaser, Book 3 of the Named, Newt (later called Thistle-chaser), fights a brief but intense battle with a pack of "barking raiders" who attack Splayfoot, the seamare (Paleoparadoxia - see previous post.) What are these creatures? Are they also based on fossil animals or is the author making things up?

Like all the other creatures that appear in Ratha's world, these yelping raiders also existed in the early Miocene. Those readers who put things together quickly, i.e. a beach dwelling animal, bulging eyes, a swimmer, barks, has flippers, etc. have already guessed that these animals are seals or sea-lions. Good call, except that seals and sea-lions as we know them today hadn't yet evolved 20-25 million years ago. However, their precursors did exist. When Newt rushes down onto the beach to defend Splayfoot, she encounters Enaliarctos, the early ancestor of the present California and Pacific Coast sea-lions.

Here is the begining of the scene from the book (pp. 36-37):

On the beach in the cove below, she saw Splayfoot
with her two seafoals huddling at her sides. Five
small animals with sleek, wet pelts and sinuous
shapes surrounded and menaced the family. These
small sea-lions reminded Newt of the otters she
had seen in the ocean, lolling in wave troughs.
The otters swam with webbed toes and long, powerful
tails, whereas these animals had clawed flippers
and much shorter tails. Their ears were small and
lay close to their heads, and their eyes bulged.
Their muzzles were tapered, with powerfuljaws
and teeth.

Of course, sounds don't fossilize, but being a sea-lion ancestor, Enaliarctos probably made the unique (and loud) sea-lion bark that echoes from many Pacific beaches and sea-washed rocks.

"Newt's opponent barked at her with a blast of fishy breath, then scooted free to bite her on the tail."

Ouch! She's lucky she didn't get an infection in the wound, since seal and sea-lion teeth can carry some nasty bacteria. Pinniped hunters and handlers, if not careful, often develop a stubborn inflammation called "seal hand".

From careful study of Enaliarctos fossils, paleontologists have developed a description of a creature that looks and lives a lot like an otter, although probably a descendent of the amphocyanid "bear-dogs" (see Ratha's Creatures - Bristlemanes). Serum albumin (protein) studies have placed sea-lions slightly closer to the bear Ursus, and seals slightly closer to the California sea-otter, Enhydra. Other studies indicate that the pinnipeds (seals, sea-lions and walruses) are more closely related to each other than any non-pinniped carnivore family. One depiction of pinniped family relationships shows seals descending from otter-like mustelids (weasels) while sea-lions arose from dog- and bear-like ancestors.

Below is an artist's interpretation of the animal (painting by M.R. Long in Mammal Evolution, by Savage and Long. This is an excellent book, though hard to find. It deserves reprinting.) This image influenced my description of the "barking raider" in the book; another instance of how art and writing interact.

The study of pinniped evolution also shows a split by location, with each side dominating their own ocean. Sea-lions, and their close relatives, the walruses, took the Pacific, while the seals made the Atlantic their own swimming pool. Later, some walruses crossed over to the Atlantic and some seals entered the Pacific.

Eniliarctos' head in particular, resembles a modern-day sea-lion's, with large eyes and enlarged nasal passages (to enhance inhaling and breath-holding for diving). Although external ears don't fossilize (although evidence of ear-moving muscle attachment points might be found on fossil skulls), Enaliarctos may have had small sea-lion-like ears. It also shows a modification of the cerebral circulatory system to impove drainage of blood from the brain while diving. This is also found in present-day sea-lions.

Enaliarctos had an otter-like body, with a reduced tail, as the creature was starting to shift from an otter-like swimming mode (using the tail) to a sea-lion mode (using the rear feet as sculls and the forefeet as flippers).

It still had rear legs that were more otterlike, so that it could bound along on land. Like the short-legged otter, it probably increased its stride by arching and flexing its back.

Next on stage - the blubber-tusker!

Ratha's Creatures - What Are Seamares?

2007-11-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

You thought you knew all the prehistoric creatures, even the really strange ones. And then, up from the pages of Ratha and Thistle-chaser pops an real oddball.

Not Thistle herself, though she definitely has her quirks. What on (or off) Earth is Splayfoot, the seamare? This critter has got to be a made-up beastie, a major authorial indulgence. A horse-like head, including ears, a short horse-y neck and pony body, but legs and feet that don't work at all like a horse's, feet with webbed toes, and to top it off, the critter has tusks, swims, and eats clams?

As Ratha says to Thakur, when he returns from a scouting expedition to the seacoast, "Fat, tusked dapplebacks with short legs and duck feet? And they swim in this great wave-filled lake you found?" (On page 70 of Ratha and Thistle-chaser.)

Naw..Thakur must be having delusions. Maybe he ate some fermented fruit. Or did he?

In the 1960s while excavating for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the particle beam research facility that runs as straight as a laser through the hills west of Palo Alto, California, a construction crew found some very weird fossil bones. They even baffled Stanford University paleontologists; so much so that they bestowed upon the 20 million year-old remains the name "Paleoparadoxia", or "ancient puzzle". The discovery held up work on SLAC while the experts removed and preserved the fossils, which now reside in SLAC's Visitor's Center. Oddly enough, this find happened only about 10 miles from where I was living as a kid and I wasn't even aware of it until later. I think I did know vaguely that something prehistoric had been discovered at the new SLAC project, but not the details.

(Even stranger was that I had already made a toy "sea-horse" creature. As a child, I used to make animal figures from pipe-cleaners and later, telephone wire. I wanted critters I could pose and this was long before "action figures".( Actually, I think mine were better, since these animals would bend all over, not just at certain joints. Yes, there was Gumby, and later Pokey, but I found them boring.) The animals were mostly horses, but I had other creatures, such as cheetahs. Some were horse-derived, such as the sea-pony I made. He had a horse head, short neck, chunky body and webby feet with toes. I also stuffed a cork in him so that he would (semi-) float in the bathtub. I did him in two versions. The first was with pipe-cleaners, but when he got wet, the steel-wire stems rusted and he fell apart. The next version, done with scrap telephone wire from a Stanford office installation, was truely aquatic, due to the plastic insulation on the wire. He worked much better, but didn't float as well, being heavier.)

The text described Paleoparadoxia as "pony-sized" and "horse-like" with short, stout limbs and large,wide four-toed feet with "hoof-like nails". It also had some endearing oddities. On the forelimbs, the ulna and radius ( the two forearm bones) were fused so that "the foot could not be turned without rotating the whole leg". A drawing of the skeleton had a caption that described a "peculiar stance with inturned feet". According to this book and others, this peculiarity may have been an adapation for walking on unstable river or ocean bottoms, or in rough, shallow water. It also said that Paleoparadoxia moved on land "in the manner of sea lions" and that the tusks might have been used to "prize off food, be it seaweed, seagrass or even mollusc.".

(The word "desmostylian" comes from the creature's unique tooth structure. Each tooth is formed by a chain of upright tubes, linked together, forming a chain. "Desmos" is chain, "stylos" is pillar.)

Splayfoot leaped out at me from that picture and description. Perhaps my imagination added the webbing between the toes, although the feet do look somewhat webby in the painting.

Illustration by M. R. Long from Mammal Evolution: An illustrated Guide

Why did I choose the name 'seamare'? Well, first off, 'seahorse' already referred to a fish. Also the creature was female. Maybe I could have called her a 'sea-pony', but 'seamare' had a nice smooth sound to it. The name 'Splayfoot' came right out of the picture, especially the right fore-foot.

So here she is, confronting Newt/Thistle-chaser at the beginning of the story. (The "blubber-tusker" is a short-tusked Miocene walrus. The POV is Thistle's)

"Peering up the beach, she saw a natural jetty of gray sandstone thrusting out to sea beneath a cliff. on the promontory, gray and black shaped sprawled in the sun. At first she thought these animals resembled the blubber-tusker, but their broad bodies were less blubbery and more compact, slate-colored on top and cream below. Chunky fore- and hindlimbs folded back against sleek sides as the creatures lay on their bellies. Their heads were long and tapered, reminding Newt of the muzzle of a forest dappleback rather than the snout of a blubber-tusker. They also had leaf-shaped ears that swivelled and twitched."

"It grunted to itself as the waves washed its sides."

"...Newt saw the elongated muzzle, resembling that of a dappleback, but instead of a rounded nose and chin, the creature had a tapered snout with a pronounced overbite. It yawned, revealing downward-pointing incisors in the upper jaw and a cluster of tusks thrusting from the lower."

"With splay-toed webbed fore-feet, the creature hauled itself onto the beach, jaws wedged wide open by a huge, muck-covered shell."

"The beast seemed to ignore its hind legs, letting them drag behind while it humped and heaved along on belly and stout forelegs."

"For an instant the two confronted each other. With surprising speed, Splayfoot humped herself toward Newt, swinging her tusks. The seamare's anger propelled her up onto her rear legs, and Newt discovered that they weren't as useless as they had first appeared."

"Newt hadn't expected the seamare's sudden transformation from belly-dragger to walker. Splayfoot had a clumsy gait, with out-thrust elbows and turned-in feet, but it served well enough."

"The seamare's black forepaws, with their wide tapering toes and the webbing between, were nothing like the flippers of the blubber-tusker..."

"The seamare gave a bubbling roar and knocked all the remaining shell fragments away with a powerful sweep of her foreleg. She opened her jaws and waggled her head, giving the lurking meat-eater a good look at her tusks and teeth."

(quotes from pp. 32-36)

For more, get Ratha and Thistle-chaser! Or read the first chapter at http://www.rathascourage.com/.

This (as far as I know) was the first time Paleoparadoxia came to life in published fiction. The "huge shell" is the California "horse-neck" clam, also known in Washington as the geoduck. Yum! (Not really. Humans don't eat them much today. Too rubbery even with cooking. )

Interestingly enough, later depictions of Paleoparadoxia were much dumpier and far less charming (though probably more accurate). Since poetic license allows me a little leeway, I've chosen the image I like best.

CB

Choose interview questions for webcast!

2007-09-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

We interrupt the regularly scheduled "Ratha's Creatures" blogging to make an announcement and invite fans to get involved in a special project.

Steve Sikes-Nova, "Newgrass" webcaster, educator, social worker and all-round neat guy wants to interview me on his show and ask questions about Ratha. Here's more info about what he does.

Station Manager/Webjay ‘Newgrass, Prog & More!’ Web Radio & Music Interviews 2,000 Progressive and Eclectic Listeners Worldwide Since 2003 http://www.live365.com/stations/virginiaprograsser http://www.live365.com/stations/virginiaprograsser/schedule http://www.myspace.com/virginiaprograsser 2006-7

Senior Program Coordinator for theONE.tv (http://theONE.tv) "For Real Music – On Real TV – In Real-time Worldwide!" Studios in London UK http://www.myspace.com/theonetv

http://www.myspace.com/tuxedocatmusic (He does a pretty mean rendition of "Memory" from the Cats musical)

Here are some possible questions. If you don't like these, make up your own. Send the ones you like or your own to me at ratha13@earthlink.net.

Why did you start writing?

Where do you get your ideas?

What other authors inspired you?

Was there any visual art, such as paintings, illustrations, film or video that inspired you?

Music?

A striking feature of this series is that the reader really experiences what it is like to be a big cat. How did you manage to put yourself (and the reader) inside Ratha’s skin and look out through her eyes?

You used various characteristics and behaviors of big cats such as cougars, lions, leopards, and cheetahs. Which ones did you choose and how did you use them?

Did you do a lot of research for the series? How?

Did you have any direct experiences with big cats? (Yes, I met a cheetah!)

What was that like?

Do you have little cats?

Did watching them help develop the idea for the books?

Do you consider them to be “co-authors” of a sort?

When you think of a story or scene, what comes to mind first? Words or pictures?

CS Lewis, when he wrote The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, said that the story started when he began having dreams about lions. What kind of mental picture started Ratha?

Was Ratha’s Creature your first novel?

Was it your first professionally published novel?

How and when did it get published?

Was there a “lost chapter” from the book? Why was it removed?

What personal experiences did you transform into themes or scenes in the first book and the others?

What happened with the original MacMillan hardback editions and the later Dell paperbacks?

Was the series published outside the US? (Britain)

What brought the series back into print?

Why do the Named look like cheetahs on the reprint covers?

After many years away from writing, what made you write the new novel, Ratha’s Courage?

About Ratha’s Creature:

What species are Ratha and her clan?

What is the setting (time and place) for the series?

Did your concept of Ratha change through the years? How?

Why did you choose to base your characters on real fossil species?

How close are your creations to what is known about these creatures?

Many animal stories humanize their characters to the extent of having them walk on two legs, wear clothes, etc. You chose not to. Why?

How did you develop the clan’s herding society and the idea of the herding teacher, Thakur?

How did you come up with names for Ratha, Fessran, Thakur, Bira and the others?

What fossil animals are the dapplebacks based on? The three-horn deer?

What about other creatures, such as the giant bird that almost eats young Ratha and the shambleclaw that she sees?

Where did you get the idea for Ratha’s taming of the Red Tongue and its effects on her and her clan?

What is your favorite scene in the book?

Can you tell us about the Storybreak episode (animated adaptation of the book) that was done in the 1980s.

What did it feel like to see Bob Keeshon (Captain Kangaroo) walk out on the set with your book in his hand, saying your name?

In Clan Ground:

What species are the treelings?

How are the treelings named?

What kind of creature is Orange-Eyes/Shongshar?

What species are the “bristle-manes” that attack the Named herds?

Why does Ratha dream of the “Firecat”?

Why did you have Shongshar create a fire-religion?

How did he “seduce” the Firekeeper leader, Fessran?

In Ratha and Thistle-chaser:

Did you use personal experiences to develop the character of Newt/Thistle-chaser?

Why does Newt have visions of the Dreambiter? Who is the Dreambiter?

Where is the beach where Newt lives?

Is the scene based on a real location that you have visited?

Were the sea-mares based on a fossil species? Which one?

How about the other animals that inhabit Newt’s beach?

In Ratha’s Challenge:

What are the face-tails? Why are the Named trying to tame them?

What inspired the creation of True-of-voice and his people, the “dream-stalking” face-tail hunters?

What does “True-of-voice” mean? Is it a name or a title?

How does True-of-voice communicate “the song” to his people? Telepathy?

Did some readers think that the book got a bit too mystical and psychological?

Are the face-tail hunters the same species as the Named?

Why are they so dangerous to the clan?

Why does Thistle-chaser become the “ambassador” between the Named and the face-tail hunters?

Isn’t it unusual for big cats to make what amounts to a “non-violent” choice, which Ratha does when she decides to rescue True-of-voice? Why did you have her do it?

About the new Ratha’s Courage:

Was it difficult to return to the series after being away from it for 13 years?

What sort of difficulties did you have?

You based the series on real fossil animals. Since you wrote the series, much of the information about these creatures has changed and paleontologists have made new discoveries. Did this cause problems? If so, how did you resolve them?

When you wrote Ratha’s Courage, did you decide to return to the strengths of the earlier books, especially Ratha’s Creature?

You didn’t change the original books, did you? (No, I wouldn’t dare!)

How did the Named change in Ratha’s Courage and why?

What kind of creature is the “striper”?

Is the strange appearance of Night-who-eats-stars based on any living big cat? (Yes!)

Do you think readers will have trouble with the terrible forest fire scene, where Ratha experiences the true destructiveness of “her creature”, the Red Tongue.

What themes in Ratha’s Courage came from your experiences while you were away from writing the series?

Why did you stop writing in the 1990’s?

What did you think when your husband Chuck found out that Ratha was still alive on the Internet, with role-playing sites, fan fiction, used copies on Amazon, reviews on Amazon, etc.

How did you react when Firebird editor Sharyn November contacted you and asked you to write a new Ratha?

About the future:

Do you plan to keep writing the Ratha series? (Yes)

Are there more Ratha stories in the works (Yes)

Do you have any plans for another animal series? (Yes)

Do you think that your other books will be re-released?

Do you think there might be a movie based on the books?

If the books became as popular as Warriors or Harry Potter, what do you think might happen?

If your dreams could come true, what would they be?

Others?

Ratha's Creatures -- Treelings, Part 2

2007-09-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

So, to what species do Thakur’s little friend Aree and Ratha’s little companion Ratharee, Thistle-chaser’s Biaree, Bira’s Cherfaree, and other treelings in the clan belong?

Some readers have guessed a squirrel or other type of rodent, perhaps a kangaroo rat. Others have guessed some early member of the raccoon family, Procyon, or a flying squirrel or sugar glider. Still other readers, perhaps more astute, have placed their targets in the primate family; say, an early monkey. The big-eyed tarsiers and bush babies comprised other speculations. Or maybe the author just made up the creature. Authors do, and often get away with it!
Many readers, after studying Aree’s description in Clan Ground and other treelings in Ratha and Thistle-chaser and Ratha’s Challenge, have narrowed their primate choices down to members of the lemur family, the relatively long-snouted (for a primate) long-limbed ring-tailed climbers that bound from tree to tree as if they were flying. Those folks are right. Aree and the others are members of the lemur tribe, probably descendents of the early North American lemur Notharctus. Their appearance is drawn from the ring-tailed lemur of Madagascar, and some of their behavior from the sifaka, also from that island.
How do treeling names work? Well, when Aree had young and members of the clan adopted the little treelings, they were called Ratha’s Aree, Bira’s Aree and so on. These got shortened into Ratharee, Biraree, etc. “Biraree” was hard to say, so Bira turned it into “Biaree”. Thakur just kept the original “Aree” name for his treeling.
(In the early part of Clan Ground, Aree is called “he”, since Thakur doesn’t know that Aree is female until the treeling has babies.)
Other clan members who get treelings will follow the same pattern, so we may get Fessaree, Dranaree, Bundaree, Misharee (from Mishanti, the cub that Thistle rescues and adopts) and so forth.
Hey wait a minute! Why then does Thistle-chaser have Biaree and Bira has Cherfaree?
In Ratha’s Challenge (which will soon be released), Bira gave her treeling to Thistle for a special task. Biaree and Thistle developed a strong bond, so Bira kindly gave the treeling to Thistle. Bira got another from Aree’s next litter. She named this one Cherfaree, after Cherfan, the big herder that she likes and sometimes teases.
I made one goof with the treelings, or maybe I can just attribute it to poetic license. In Clan Ground, I depicted Aree with a prehensile tail, like a New World monkey. I had a scene where Aree carried a lighted torch by curling her tail around the shaft. I might add that Thakur quickly put a stop to that so that the treeling would not burn her back! In fact, today’s lemurs do not have prehensile tails. That scene was why some readers guessed that the treelings were something like squirrel monkeys.
One could argue that in the millions of years that lemur-like primates have existed, from the Eocene to the present, at least one could have evolved a monkey-like prehensile tail. After all, the New World or American monkeys may have evolved from lemur-like primates. Interestingly, many Old World, or African and Asian monkeys do not have the prehensile tail of their New World cousins.
Many creatures, including domestic cats, have a surprising ability to coil their tails around things, including human legs and fingers. My little silver kitty Athena, moves her tail with amazing sinuosity and grace so that it almost looks prehensile. But I never have, and probably never will, find her hanging from her tail on the shower curtain rod when I come home.
Perhaps, if cats survive and/or succeed humans as masters of this planet (as in Andre Norton’s wonderful novel Breed to Come), evolution will grace them with a prehensile tail to serve instead of hands. Or, they might just domesticate the remaining lemurs or other primates as Ratha and the clan do in the books. Who knows; maybe the Named will live in the future as well as the past.

CB
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Ratha's Creatures - Bristlemanes

2007-08-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

What are the bristlemanes?

In Clan Ground, a pack of savage creatures attacks the clan’s herds. These raiders are not the UnNamed and are not cat-like at all. The Named call them “belly-biters” since they attack a prey beast’s vulnerable abdominal area. Several readers have asked what these prehistoric animals are. Based on the description given in the book (heavy bristling neck fur, black jaws, bone-breaking teeth, longer snouts, sloping backs, and a cantering gait), at least one reader guessed that the bristlemanes are a species of early hyena. There were several candidates, including Pachycrocuta, Thalassictis, and the American hunting hyena, Chasmaporthetes.

When I wrote Clan Ground in 1983-84, that was exactly what I had in mind. However, this is a case of history (or, rather, pre-history) outrunning the writer. And, I admit, that in the excitement and pressure of writing a sequel to Ratha’s Creature, maybe the writer didn’t do quite enough background research.

When I returned to writing the series, I found a lot more information about prehistoric hyenas than I had known in 1984. One dismaying fact was that hyenas appeared later than I had assumed. In Ratha’s time, 20 million years ago in the early Miocene, hyenas were still small mongoose- or at best, jackal-sized creatures.

Time-wise, a better candidate is the amphicyonid “bear-dog”. It resembled a lightly built bear with a wolfy face and jaws. Amphicyon and its relatives appeared and diversified in the early Miocene. They included fast-moving meat-eaters as well as scavengers and some species may have resembled present-day spotted hyenas in appearance and behavior.

Another possibility is that the bristlemanes are creodonts; an early and now extinct order of carnivores (Creodontia) separate from the living Carnivora (dogs, bears, raccoons, weasels, and cats). The name of one family, the Hyaenadontidae, when translated, means “hyena-teeth”. Though hyaenadont creodonts reached their peak in the Oligocene, they hung around until the early Miocene. That was long enough for them to be a threat to Ratha and her clan.

I’ve decided to base the bristlemanes on Amphicyon and its kin, since they are the best fit time- and size-wise.

There are other prehistoric beasties in the Ratha books. Which ones do you want to know more about?

Please see the MySpace Spotlight on the series at http://www.mypace.com/myspace_authors

I am updating and adding to my website, http://www.rathascourage.com
Ratha is also on LiveJournal, Friendster, Facebook, Bebo, Eons and LibraryThing.

CB

Ratha's Creatures - Shongshar

2007-08-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

Ratha’s Creatures

What is Shongshar? A sabertooth cat?

In Clan Ground, Ratha admits Orange-Eyes, an UnNamed stranger, to the clan. Later, when Ratha angers him by taking away his cubs by Bira (since they lack the Named “light” in their eyes), he becomes the fierce and arrogant Shongshar. He drives Ratha out of the clan and nearly kills Fessran with his long fangs.

Some readers think that Shongshar is based on the sabertooth cat Smilodon, a different species than Ratha’s kind, who are based on the cheetah-like nimravid, Dinaelurus. Smilodon, however, evolved millions of years later than Ratha’s people, appearing in the Pleistocene. The Miocene nimravids, on which Ratha is based, had both sabertooth and “conical tooth” species. Barburofelis, a distant Ratha relative, out-sabered the later Smilodon. Barburofelis had huge fangs that were so long they needed to be protected by a large bony flange on the animal’s jaw.

Even the more cat-like “conical tooth” nimravid species, such as Nimravus and Dinaelurus, had longer fangs than many cats. Nimravus, being more like a leopard or a clouded leopard, had longer fangs than Dinaelurus. Clouded leopards have the longest front fangs in the modern cat family for their size. The whole nimravid family had strong sabertooth tendencies. I often compare Ratha’s kind with the modern cheetah, but fossil Dinaelurus skulls have longer and sharper front fangs than do cheetahs. (See my reconstruction of a Dinaelurus crassus skull in clay).

Saberteeth have arisen in many mammalian lines. Creodonts, which were early, less specialized carnivores that arose long before cats were even a thought in Nature’s mind, had weasel- and martin-like forms with saberteeth. Nimravids gave rise to Dinictis, often called a “dirktooth” cats and Homotherium, known as the “scimitar-tooth” cat. Many of Ratha’s relatives are known as “false sabertooths” to distinguish them from the later “true sabertooths” of the Smilodon line.

Sabertoothed forms also arose among marsupials (kangaroos, opossums and other pouched mammals. Thylacosmilus, a lion-sized South American fossil marsupial carnivore, would have given Barburofelis competition for the nasty-saber award.

Saber-like teeth have emerged in many species, including primates. Some male baboons have fangs that make leopards think twice about attacking.

So, back to old Shongshar. What is he? Well, all of the UnNamed and the Named are the same basic species, although the Named have branched off in their own direction. Dinaelurus and the more leopard-like Nimravus were close sister-species and might have been able to hybridize.

As stated previously, all the nimravids had a tendency to develop saberteeth and Shongshar was an extreme case. Or he is a hybrid between Dinaelurus and Nimravus.

(Or he is a Smilodon that time-traveled back from the Pleistocene to the Miocene – no, just kidding. Or you can write that story.)

When you first read Clan Ground, what did you think Shongshar was (other than a big pain in Ratha’s tail)?

Comments?

CB

Ratha's Creatures - Treelings

2007-08-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

What are the treelings?

In Clan Ground, the herding teacher Thakur (pronounced Ta-KOOR, since it is a Bengali word meaning “teacher”) literally runs across a small furry creature and accidentally injures it. His first thought is to eat it (he is a cat, after all), but he becomes intrigued by the little fur-ball. He calls it, Aree, based on the sound it makes, and decides to keep it as amusement and as a companion. Aree has hand instead of paws or claws, and uses them to climb trees, pick fruit, throw things, and pick ticks out of Thakur’s coat. Thakur discovers that Aree can do many other things, including some that influence the clan’s use of the Red Tongue (fire).

Once he convinces the clan that Aree is more useful than tasty, Ratha and the others accept Thakur’s odd little pet, letting the treeling groom them. When Aree turns out to be female and has babies, Ratha and other clan members adopt little treeling companions.

What kind of prehistoric creature is Aree? Readers have made many guesses, including monkey, ape, squirrel, raccoon, lemur, tarsier (bush baby), other type of primate, other type of rodent, other member of the raccoon family and totally made up by author.

Here’s a hint. I made one mistake in describing Aree, enabling her to do something that the real prehistoric species probably couldn’t.

Any ideas? Many readers already know, but I’d like to hear some guesses.

Next up in the Ratha series guessing game. What is Shongshar, the clever tyrant who uses the worship of fire to take over clan leadership?