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“Where do you get your ideas?” people often ask. I wish I knew! Writing’s a spooky business. For instance, I didn’t know that Renn is the best shot in the forest until the moment when she stepped out from the undergrowth with an arrow nocked to her bow, and pointed it straight at Torak. “Of course,” I thought, “that’s who she is.” But I hadn’t known it beforehand.
Sometimes, though, you know exactly where the ideas come from. I’m thinking of the bear.
It was a few years before I wrote Wolf Brother, but even now, if I shut my eyes, I can see every detail, sharp and clear. Fear does that to you. Do you remember the part in Chapter One, when Torak knows the bear is close, and his mind goes white with terror? Well, I know what that’s like, because it’s happened to me….
I was hiking alone in a remote part of King’s Canyon National Park in southern California. It was a beautiful sunny day, with jays chattering in the pines as I followed a trail by the side of a busy little creek.
Suddenly, everything changed.
On the other side of the stream, I spotted two boulders. Except they weren’t boulders. They were two bear cubs. The next second, I spotted the mother: a great big female black bear, moving down the slope with awesome grace to drink beside her cubs.
My heart began to pound. In England we don’t have bears, but I knew enough to be certain that this wasn’t good.
An old rancher in Wyoming had warned me that a female bear with cubs is at her most dangerous. If she thinks you’re threatening them, she’ll attack. He’d also said, that as bears can’t see too well and hate surprises, it’s vital to make a noise to let them know you’re there: his tip was to whistle or sing.
Well, I can’t whistle, so I didn’t have much choice. And although the bears weren’t far away, I could tell from the way the mother was nosing around that she hadn’t yet spotted me. My way home led right past her. I thought fast. It would be a really bad idea to try to sneak by. She’d think I was hunting her. I had to tell her I was there.
I took a deep breath and launched into an old Irish song, “Danny Boy” (shakily, and without the words!). Instantly, she swung around: ears pricked, all attention on me. And she couldn't have liked my singing, because instead of turning and going away, she started purposefully across the creek—toward me.
That’s when the fear really kicked in. That’s when my mind went white. For a few seconds I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything. If I made a wrong move, she would attack.
Standing there, facing her, I realized just what a puny thing a human being is. I had no defenses. I couldn’t run faster, or climb higher than she could. She could snap my neck with one swat of her paw. All I could do was try to speak her language, and somehow get across that I was neither a threat to her, nor something that she could eat.
By this time she’d stopped in midstream, just a few feet away. She was so close that I could see the pale fur inside her ears. And she was really agitated: hissing and huffing, and rocking from side to side, as if thinking about rising up on her hind legs and attacking me.
For several horribly long moments, we looked at one another. Then—very, very slowly—I began to side-step past her; not showing her my back, and talking quietly, to calm her down. At least, that’s what I was trying to do, but my voice was shaking so much that I don’t think I did much good.
Still rocking, she watched me go; never letting her eyes off me. Finally—after a lifetime—my path dipped out of sight, and I ran like crazy.
That was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had in my life. But it also felt, weirdly, as if I’d been back in time. In those moments when I was facing the bear, thousands of years of civilization vanished like a puff of smoke. She didn’t care who I was, or where I came from. I was in her world, not my own. I could have been a person from Torak’s time—except, of course, that if I had been, I would have known a good deal more about bears!
I never forgot what it felt like to face that bear, and a few years later, when I was thinking about writing the story of Torak and Wolf, the memory came rushing back. “The Stone Age,” I thought, “of course! Torak lives in the Stone Age!”
Writers don’t often get that bolt-of-lightning feeling, and when it happens, you pay attention. I dropped everything, and started to write. Chronicles of Ancient Darkness was born.
Strangely enough, meeting that bear hasn’t deterred me from heading off into the wilds whenever I can—even though, since then, I’ve had a few more close calls. Like the time when I was researching Spirit Walker, and went swimming in a remote Arctic fjord with a pod of wild killer whales….
But that’s another story. |
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