The Named Are Being Twits Again...

For purposes of fun and silliness, I have given the Named clan cat characters the ability to temporarily teleport from their home in the California Miocene so that they can peek into the human world and remark upon what they see. This, of course is not to be regarded as 'canon', i.e. in the storyline of the actual books. Think of it as sort of an alternate universe version.

Of course, the main event recently, was of course, the election. I was and am, an unabashed (though some may yet wish to bash me) Obama supporter.

Please note that I have added one or two introductory Tweets. Also, the words prefaced by a '#' (pound sign) were used as Twitter search categories. For more (dis) orientation, see my earlier blog post, "Ratha on Twitter".

So, without more author blather, here are Ratha, Bira, Thakur, Cherfan, Thistle-chaser
and last, but certainly not least, the clan's fiesty Firekeeper leader Fessran. She would have the audacity to fall in love with the prez elect.

Cats don't tweet, but they do chirp. Let the Chirps begin:


Who is behind all this prehistoric cat stuff? http://bit.ly/2n88x4 5:17 PM Oct 24th from TwitWall

Trying Twitwall. The pic is what Ratha will be for Halloween... 5:21 PM Oct 24th from web

For #Halloween, Thakur wants to be ... Joe Biden! 5:34 PM Oct 31st from web

For #Halloween, Cherfan wants to be....Joe the Plumber! 5:44 PM Oct 31st from web

For #Halloween, Fessran says she doesn't know squat about the #First_Amendment and wants to be....#Sarah Palin! 5:57 PM Oct 31st from web

Now, back to our regularly scheduled (hah!) transtemporal broadcasting from the Miocene....Fessran says Obama is one hot cat! Prrrrr... 11:46 AM Nov 5th

ClanChirps - For the newbie whitetippers (nice followers), the Chirps are by characters in my Ratha series about big prehistoric cats. 12:05 PM Nov 5

ClanChirps - Ratha: "Fessran, get your tail back here! We have a story to finish. 11:48 AM Nov 5th from web

ClanChirps - Fessran: "I don't wanna come back yet. I'm in love with #Obama-cat. Quit pulling my tail, Ratha!" 1:20 PM Nov 5th from web

ClanChirps – Ratha: “C'mon, Fessran. #Obama-cat already has a mate. A good one. And cubs. The clan needs you back home.” 3:28 PM Nov 5th from web

Characters doing the ClanChirps reside in #Ratha's_Courage, my new #book about #prehistoric big #cats. http://www.rathascourage.com 12:28 PM Nov 6th from web

ClanChirps- Fessran:“I know you're going to light fires under some deserving tails, Obama-cat. I gotta go back and light fires of my own...” ... 12:32 PM Nov 6th from web

ClanChirps – Fessran “Farewell, love of my life! May you eat of the haunch and sleep in the driest den, you cool Obama-cat.” 3:58 PM Nov 6th from web

ClanChirps - Ratha and Bira together: "FESSRAN!" 12:14 PM Nov 7th from web

ClanChirps – Ratha: “Bira, you take Fessran's scruff and I'll grab her tail. All right, back to the Miocene!” * poof * 4:50 PM Nov 8th from web

OK guys, enough...

CB

Solo's Journey by Joy Smith Aiken

A few days ago, to take a break from the laptop, I picked up Solo's Journey. Intending to sample the first few chapters, I found myself drawn in to the story of Solo, a feral kit who loses his mother and has to find his own way in the feral cat colony. I don't usually read other cat fantasy books, since I write the Ratha series, and I like to keep my slate clean, so to speak.

I picked up Solo out of curiosity, but ended up devouring it in one evening. Gulping books is part of my pattern, since I'm naturally a fast reader. Not all books get devoured in one session, since life inevitably interrupts. Some books are consumed in multiple smaller gulps, but Solo's Journey shoved life aside temporarily. Good books do that.

Sometimes I regret that the hunger for narrative pulls me through the pages so fast, but I am also a re-reader, and sometimes after finishing a novel, I will go right back to the beginning and read it again, allowing me to savor the writer's skill.

Solo's Journey appeared in 1987, according to the copyright date in my hardcover copy, before the Warriors series made the concept of talking cats in feral cat clans wildly popular among kids. Both Solo's Journey and my own Ratha series were too early for this wave, and both suffered for it. However both were reprinted.

I greatly enjoyed Aiken's originality in portraying the feral cat society, especially in her use of invented onomatopoeic (sounds like what it means, at least to human ears) terms. The words also sound like feline vocalizations “Prill” for a female cat, “bard” for an intact male, “silt” and “siltaa” for solid and liquid waste respectively, and the honorific “Dom” for the dominant male tomcat.

Some of the novel's power may come from real-life experience, as the dedication hints. Aiken mentions a real Solo, and implies that the book may be an apology for an act she regrets. It makes me want to know the real Solo's story, though perhaps it is a sad one.

Although Solo's Journey describes battles between clans in adjacent territories, it moves beyond those conflicts. The inside jacket text says that the book was inspired by Watership Down, and like the rabbit tale, involves destruction of the cats' home ground and a quest to discover a new home. During the journey, however, Solo rises to leadership, finds his gifts, and discovers a new and inspiring purpose. I won't reveal what it is for fear of spoiling the book, but I do urge readers who have enjoyed both Warriors and my Ratha series to go along on Solo's Journey.

CB

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

ClanChirps - Ratha on Twitter

Twitter, according to many Internet experts, is the next hot item for promoting people and their creations, including books. Twitter is a microblogging service that limits posts to 140 characters, thus challenging its users to generate intriguing and provoking messages within that format. In that aspect, it resembles short forms of poetry. In answering the question, "What are you doing right now?" Twitter lets users give peeks into their lives and engages them in what kidlit blogger Mark Blevis (http://www.JustOneMoreBook.com) calls "short, snacky conversations".

I was peripherally aware of Twitter, but most Tweets (Twitter posts) I'd seen seemed to be either totally obscure or completely boring. Sheila Ruth of Imaginator Press (publisher of Ratha's Courage!) and Wands and Worlds told me she was using Twitter, so, encouraged by her example, I decided to give it a whirl. Hearing that another writer had given her characters Twitter identities and had them Tweet each other several times a day, I thought it could be fun to have Ratha, Fessran, Thistle-chaser and the rest of the Named gang make their little snacky comments about their world, our world and each other.

So why ClanChirps? Well, for one thing, I hadn't quite figured out how to make multiple user identies on Twitter, and I wanted to get going, so I just decided to preface the clan cats' Tweets with a word that would distinguish theirs from mine. Cats, however, don't tweet, which is one reason why the Twitter logo is a bird. Cats make lots of other sounds, however, and they use short high calls that are described as chirping or trilling. Yes, cats can chirp. Listen to a mom kitty calling her babies. Big cats do it too. As Bira says in one of the earlier posts, " Ask any cheetah."

So, once given Twitter access, the Named have left their tracks all over it. From Ratha's first online chirp in response to the care of monarch butterfly caterpillar waste removal ("Can't you teach your caterpillars to use a litterbox?" ), through a clan variation of a 4th of July barbeque:

ClanChirps - Mondir: "Why are we dragging this toward the firepit? You aren't going to throw it in and let it burn up, are you?" 06:06 PM September 01, 2008

ClanChirps - Cherfan: "That's what a barbecue is, dung-for-brains! You grab the meat out before it burns. Makes it tastier..." 06:12 PM

There's Fessran's garbled attempt to participate in "Talk Like a Pirate Day", and baffled feline comments on human election year politics:

ClanChirps - Ratha:"I'm peeking into the future human world. What's a 'sarah palin'?" 01:44 PM September 15, 2008 from web

ClanChirps - Fessran: "I don't know, but I see a really scary thing called a 'mccain'. Poor humans." 02:05 PM September 15, 2008 from web

ClanChirps - Fessran: "I don't think the sarah palin would like me. I'm in a book, I'm sexy, and I think I'm in love with Ratha... 02:16 PM September 15, 2008 from web

Fessran: "I'm not really. I just wanted to claw-poke the palin, who doesn't think us females should love each other." 02:56 PM September 15, 2008 from web


As you can see, the Named have been romping around, making absolute Twits of themselves.

The Chirps also include a little ongoing tale, done in dialog, which is a prequel to Ratha's Courage. Featuring Bundi, from Clan Ground, and Mishanti, from Ratha and Thistle-Chaser, this little Twitter-playlet relates how the rumblers (indrotheres) Grunt and Belch came to be among the clan's herdbeasts and how they got their names. Composed directly on Twitter, this Named Twit-improv (Twitprov?) is coming directly from the kitty's mouth, so to speak, and not even the author knows what the Named will do or say next.

Mishanti, warning Bundi to be careful while getting a threehorn milch-doe from the herd to provide milk for the rumbler babies:

ClanChirps- Mishanti: "Not get kicked in head, else you talk like me and Thistle. Kicked in furry butt, maybe OK." 10:18 PM September 04, 2008 from web



Join me (Twitter ID"rathacat") and the Named bunch and "whitetip" (follow) us through the interlinked paths of the Miocene and the present day.

As Ratha says, "Yaaaarrr! Chirp!"

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

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)

Courage galloping toward 4/1/08 release

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 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