The Flaming Torch - My Vote and Yours

Today I will be driving from my home in Patterson to Modesto. I will be carrying my absentee ballot, which I have completed, but did not have time to mail. My destination will be the country voter registration office, where I can hand my sealed ballot to an election official. Why am I doing that? To make sure my vote gets counted.

Why do I vote? Because there are people who don't want me to.

I am not going to name parties or names, but in the past and today, people and organizations have discouraged and prevented Americans from voting. Historically, neither political party has been exempt from these practices; ask any Civil Rights veteran of the 1960's.

A basic tactic of the power-hungry is to convince citizens not to participate in elections. If the majority in a country are economically beaten down, frightenened, discouraged and lied to enough, they cease to hope and they cease to vote.

An apathetic, powerless constituency will not challenge even the most insane of government actions. A democratic republic can degenerate into an oligarchy, where few rule and many suffer. Those who rule know this well. They depend on it. They do everything they can to alienate and discourage the electorate, enlisting cynics in the opposition who joining them in crying that voting is rigged, useless, and the only answer to social injustice is violence.

Does voting make a difference? Yes, voting makes a difference. Why else would those in power try to suppress it?

Denying people the right to vote is not just a tactic used in the 1960's South. This cruel and ugly beast reared its head in the last elections and is threatening this one.

It has struck In Ohio, where 200,000 new voters were nearly stricken from the rolls. In New Mexico, where private detectives hired by politicos intimidated poor and Hispanic voters (in their homes!) by asking them questions that intimated that they had no right to vote. In California, where phony petitions misled people into registering for the wrong party. In Florida (again!) where absentee ballots were thrown in the trash. In Virginia, where voters were given flyers telling them to vote on the wrong day.

And I am sure that before this election ends, there will be more. Much more.

That is why I am hand-carrying my absentee ballot to the Elections Office. I want it to be counted. Not lost in the mail, sent astray or thrown in the trash, but counted.

Not to vote, for whatever reason, is to say yes to those who would pillage our government and economy. Not to vote is to deny hope for change. Not to vote is to give in and say that representative democracy doesn't work and this great human experiment has failed.

To vote is to lift a flaming torch in defiance of those who would deny liberty, equality, justice, and hope.

Lift your flaming torch and VOTE.


P.S - Back from Modesto, mission accomplished, wearing an "I Voted" official sticker on my shirt pocket.

CB



KidLit Bloggers Blog The Vote: http://www.chasingray.com/archives/2008/11/blog_the_vote_2008.html

Ratha's Courage - Good Stuff Happening

Alien pipe-cleaner critter steals brownies while oblivious author signs Ratha's Courage at Northern California Independent Booksellers Association conference, Oakland, CA, Nov 5, 2008
Picture by JC Simmonds of Beagle Bay


Ratha's Courage has been making various appearances at different events and online sites. Previous posts on this blog have followed Courage's torturous road to publication and final and welcomed refuge at Sheila Ruth's Imaginator Press.

Sheila kindly invited me to attend KitLitospshere08 in Portland Oregon. This was a conference for children's and young adult book bloggers, including book reviewers, librarians, writers, illustrators and other publishing professionals. Since other KidLit08 bloggers have described the conference in detail and with greater wit than I could here, I'll just hit some of the personal high points. I had to scramble a bit to get all the arrangements in place and without conference organizer partner Jone McCulloch's aid in getting registered, it would have been harder.

I went up on the Coast Starlight Amtrak train and enjoyed the ride, especially along some of the inland Oregon coast, where I watched bald eagles soaring out over the estuary. As soon as I figure out how to get the picture out of my cellphone, I'll post it here. My clunky old road-warrior of a Sony Mavica digital camera decided to take a vacation, so the phone was a backup. I hope I can fix the Mavica or get it fixed. It has been a real workhorse.

Being a compulsive note-taker at conferences, I filled up several pages with notes on the sessions. I decided not to post them here. Instead they are in the Yahoo KidLitosphere group files, and are available to anyone in that group.

Just for the heck of it, I took along some stuff for display, including a pipe-cleaner alien critter that I made. I thought it would be an eye-catcher during the Meet the Authors event. Actually my little friend got more attention at the hotel bar. I suppose folks decided that they could explain it as a booze- induced hallucination. Here's Betsy Bird mugging with the critter, and a bit from her SLJ Fuse#8 blog (scroll down her blog page).

After the conference, I stayed in Beaverton, OR, spending a delightful few days with the family of a young Ratha fan who is a writer, photographer, and an artist, then returned home on the southbound Coast Starlight.

More good things continued to happen once I got back. Joan Druett, a New Zealand literary blogger, wrote about Ratha's Courage and the rough road to publication in a post called “Fantasies and Miracles”

I had sent Imaginator Press an article of how science fiction writer Andre Norton helped get Ratha's Creature published. Sheila and I decided to use it as a press release, and she sent it out. The result, among other things, was another Joan Druett post, “An Inspiring Story of Sponsorship”. Thank you, Joan!

Since pipe-cleaner critters were part of the story, here is another pic of the little brownie raider in closeup. He's not a kitty, but a strange little beastie called a "chumat", which is sort of the alien equivalent.


I knew that since Courage appeared this year, the book was eligible for the kidlit blogging community's Cybil awards. Scarcely had nominations opened, and before I could wonder if Courage would be chosen, a devoted Ratha fan had dashed in (at a speed that would make Thakur the Named herding teacher dizzy), to nominate it in the Science Fiction category. I think more than one reader wanted to name it, but the Cybil rules say one nomination per book. Even if Courage just makes it to the Cybil short list, I will be very pleased, and if it gets a Cybil, I will be knocked over backwards and all the Named clan cats will have to lick my face to revive me. There are so many other deserving books out there, but one can always hope!


CB

The 6th Ratha Tale and Brightspirit

The 6th Ratha tale - Idealism and its Discontents

Back in the days when all was rosy, Courage was written, turned in, eagerly accepted, and the Named Series appeared to be on the verge of a boom that could rival Harry Potter or Warriors, Sharyn November asked me to do a Ratha short story for her Firebirds Soaring anthology. So, I did. And she liked it and bought it. Firebirds Soaring will be out in December, and in it you will find, among many fine tales by Firebird Books authors, one called "Bonechewer's Legacy".

Actually, "Legacy" should be called the 4 1/2th Ratha tale, because, time-wise, it takes place after Challenge (#4) and before Courage (#5).

Why Bonechewer? I mean, he's long gone, since he died in the first book. But he was such a strong and unique being ("character" doesn't sound like the right word - as if I pasted him together out of construction paper and popsicle sticks) that Ratha can't forget him and I can't either. He was possibly my best creation in all the books, described by reviewers as as "brilliant", "irreverent", "flip", "sardonic" and unforgettable. So I decided to have some fun with him before I finally let him go, and the result is "Legacy".

I got the advanced reading copy of Firebirds Soaring a few days ago. After a brief worry-flurry about whether my emailed corrections ("Bonechewer", not Bone-chewer") got in (they did, thank you, Sharyn), I checked out how "Legacy" looked in print. The accompanying artwork by Mike Dringenberg brings out the spirit of the story and is just plain beautiful, so thank you, Mike. I've seen Dringenberg's work in the various Neil Gamen "Sandman" comics and compilations, and admired it, but never thought that one of Mike's illustrations would grace one of my stories.

Though I am not new to short stories, most of my works are novels. I have had short non-Ratha tales in such collections as Tales of the Witchworld ("The Hunting of Lord Etsalian's Daughter") and Catfantastic ("The Damcat", "Bomber and the Bismarck", "A Tangled Tahitian Tale"). Putting the world of the Named clan-cats into a shorter format was a challenge. Luckily I already had a theme in mind based on some recent rough times in my life. I won't name the individuals or companies who gave me the bumpy ride, but their efforts to dishearten me ended up inspiring me. (Note: these guys were not in the publishing industry.) Funny how that works, isn't it?

I was raised as a progressive idealist and I have been one all my life. As a youngster, I went to the early 1960's anti-war marches with my then-stepfather Donald Stewerd. I now consider him to be my real father, and his ideas about peace, social justice, non-violence, and conflict resolution influenced me then and still do. The upside to being an idealist is that doing what you think is right for the world generates a sense of purpose and a huge amount of energy. I got a real high out of marching in the anti-Vietnam War Moratoriums, "bird-dogging" for peace candidates, such as Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern," and being professionally employed in developing various electric vehicles, such as the Think and Corbin Sparrow.

The down side of being an idealist is that other people see that energy and think only "how can I harness that to benefit myself and my company?" They will, and have, taken advantage of an idealist's good nature and tremendous drive. However, if idealism and money clash, you can bet who loses. "It will only take a $50 per car investment to make sure that the customer doesn't get a 156V DC electrical shock? No, I'm sorry. That will cut too far into my profits and my $100 bottles of wine at dinner."

Having been seduced down that road too many times, I quit the field and turned my experiences into themes in my fiction. Ratha is becoming a visionary, starting to look beyond the immediate needs of the Named. Instead of meeting the UnNamed or other outsiders with the fierceness of fire, she wants instead to extend friendship. It is her dream to gather in the struggling and suffering and become a benevolent leader who is loved instead of feared. That makes her (as it made me) vulnerable to exploitation by others who care nothing for her vision and want only to manipulate and destroy her.

Being victimized in such a way makes the wounded idealist think that his or her dedication was misguided. Depression, retreat and cynicsm follow. How does one recover and find the enthusiasm once again? Many never do, and their talents are lost. This is tragic, considering how badly such people are needed, especially now.

When someone else grabs you by your dreams and throws you into a pit, how do you struggle out? Read "Bonechewer's Legacy" and let me know what you think of the story.

In other news...

Please visit the Brightspirit Disaster Relief Fund Auction, which is being held in memory of the Warrior fan and Wands and Worlds member, Brightspirit,
Emily Cherry. She and her parents were both killed in a tornado and her grandmothers are honoring her with this event. The Erin Hunter authors of the Warriors series have donated many items to this auction. Other authors have also contributed. Here's the link:

http://brightspirit.cmarket.com .

I've donated a set of the Named series novels (signed and kitty-face doodled) to the auction and the direct link to those items is:

http://www.cmarket.com/auction/item/Item.action?_sourcePage=%2Fitem%2FbrowseImage.jsp&id=73969825


Check out the auction, do some good and get some neat books!

CB

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

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!

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.

CB

A Taste of Ratha's Courage

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)

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

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 Creatures - Did They Really Exist?

Readers ask if the various creatures in the Ratha series really existed. The answer is yes, they are based on real fossils, but a few have been slightly modified. Keep in mind that I began the series in 1983 and wrote it until the mid 1990's. Paleontology has made huge leaps since then, finding many new prehistoric species and making new discoveries about old ones.
The three-horn stag that Ratha encounters in the first page of the first book is based in part on the Miocene proto-ceratid ("before deer") species Synthoceratus. This animal had a y-forked nose-horn, but a very un-deer-like snout and little horn-stubs instead of true antlers. To make the creature more appealing (to me as well as readers), I added the branched antlers and the more elegant face of later deer species.
Originally the dapplebacks were based on Hyracotherium, a fossil better known as Eohippus, "the dawn horse". Their dappled backs came from a painting in a paleontology book, showing the little proto-horses browsing in a leafy forest.
Now researchers have decided that the "dawn horse" really isn't a horse ancestor at all; it more closely related to the hyrax and the elephants.
In my mind, the dapplebacks are still horses, perhaps early versions of forest-browsing Miohippian proto-ponies that later gave rise to the main branch of horse evolution, the hipparions, with their enlarged center toe of three. Not the modern horse Equus? No, actually Equus was a side branch. Hipparion and its relatives formed the main trunk of the horse-y tree.

The “shambleclaw” that Ratha sees in the forest is a giant American ground sloth. Not monstrous, like Megatherium, but not tiny either. The name attempts to describe how the creature might have shambled along awkwardly, hampered by the huge fore claws it used to dig up termite mounds and strip leaves from trees.

Young Ratha almost becomes bird food when she confronts a huge flightless “terror crane” based on the species Diornis, with a bit of Teratornis added in. After the dinosaurs vanished, mammals remained small and had to contend with feathered avian dinosaur descendents that resembled the recently extinct moas of New Zealand. The birds had a head start on the furries, and grew huge, dominating the forests and plains of the periods preceding the Miocene, the Eocene and Oligocene. They may well have hung on until the Miocene

In the 1980’s, Diornis and Teratornis were thought to be carnivores, due to their huge hooked beaks. Now paleontologists debate that image, pointing out that the heavy beaks could have cut through vegetation as well as flesh. But mammal is still on the bird menu in the Ratha books, although the mammal in question manages to escape.

CB

What inspired me to write the Ratha series

The wonder, majesty, and terror of Earth's life, as embodied in cats, both large and small. The flashing beauty of the cheetah in the chase, the arch of the mountain lion's spring, and the quivering of flesh as two huge male lions rebound from each other in a fight. The fossils that speak of cats and cat-like creatures millions of years dead, yet alive and stalking in human minds. The small cats in my life who bring the jungle into the living room, who stalk and pounce on my emotions and deliver an alien but deep love.

The human minds who have created and recreated cats in words and between pages, fiction and non-fiction. Joy Adamson's Elsa and Pippa recline beside Bagheera, Kipling's great black panther. I wanted so badly to be Mowgli, who was privileged to rest against that velvet side and hear the deep rumbling voice, so fierce and so wise.

Even more, I wanted to be Bagheera, to escape the Bandar-log taint of the human world. To swipe it away with the stroke of a paw, to yawn at it with curled tongue and white shining teeth, and then pad away like a mystery, leaving awe behind.

That was a child's dream, with a child's anger. That child grew up to become part of the human world and the anger became an energy directed at changing the bad things about it, such as war, starvation, hate, greed, cruelty, despoiling and destruction. Perhaps some of that energy did actually cause some small changes.

I can't say exactly what created Ratha and her world. I walk inside her skin, look out through her eyes, feel the muscles that retract and extend her claws. I live her struggles with the tyrant Shongshar and she lives with mine against an unfair and unjust Iraq war and those who grow fat on it. She tries to befriend Thistle-chaser and I try to do the same with an uncertain and equally prickly young stepchild. I stroke my kitty Athena and she nuzzles Ratharee, her treeling.

And if readers can experience Ratha as I have, it is a great joy.

Stay on this trail -- there will be more.

CB