WOLVES AND THE PARANORMAL

The idea of werewolves has always disturbed me, but not because of the horror of such a belief, but because it instills in mankind a natural fear of the wolf and make him believe that wolves will actually attack and kill humankind. There has never been a proven event of a wolf attacking a human, nor carrying off our children.

Wolf Song is about a shape shifter who becomes a wolf. There are no werewolves in the story. I leave that to horror writers. The Cheyenne Wolf Song is only beginning to learn his trade, inherited from his grandfather. He's still a bit clumsy and often forgets to bring along his clothes when he returns to his man shape, thus making for some embarrassing moments. Walls are a problem for him too, but you can read the book to find out how he improves his inherited talent.

Katherine Ramsland, PH.D. wrote in The Devil's Dozen:
The belief in the possibility that humans could change shape has been traced to 600 BC when King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible thought he’d suffered from a condition that made him grow out his hair and romp around as a wild beast.  By the 1500s in France, lycanthropy was a diagnosable medical condition. An informative early book about the myths was The Books of Werewolves by Sbine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century archaeologist and historian. Shape-shifting ideas were traced from ancient times and across different cultures, with many accepting that man-beasts were the result of an encounter with the devil. As the myth goes, when they managed to make the change, they gained a period of complete abandon into blood and violence.

Barry Lopez wrote in Of Wolves and Men:
One of the songs of the wolf is the Invitation Song, the howl the wolf used to call coyotes, foxes
and magpies to the remains of his kill. Some Indian hunters sing a song to call the wolf to one of
their kills, a bear. They would take a bear’s hide, but believed that the bear did not wish to be
eaten by humans.

The Indian turned to the wolf as a paradigm, a mirror reflection. He believed the life of the wolf
resembled his own --hunting for himself, hunting for his family, defending his tribe against enemy
attack as the wolf protected the den against the grizzly. He wished for that power and imitated
him by wearing his skin. We can imagine him saying, Help me to fit, to be valuable in the world,
like the wolf.

To most tribes, especially Cheyenne, Sioux, Pawnee the wolf fulfilled two roles. He was a
powerful and mysterious animal and so perceived by most tribes, and he was a medicine animal,
identified with a particular individual, tribe or clan. The wolf was the one animal, that again, did
two things at once year after year: remained distinct and exemplary as an individual, yet served
the tribe. There are no stories among Indians of lone wolves. Cheyenne medicine men wrapped
wolf fur around the sacred arrows used to motion antelope into a trap. End of Quote

Many tribes and specific clans believed that certain of their members could actually turn into an animal, such as a wolf. Thus the idea of the shape-shifter for this story of evil deeds, love and redemption.

Wolf Song appears to help Olivia, a young woman who dreams of running with the wolves to escape a dark secret.

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DANG BURN IT, LET'S GO WEST

The trek West by wagon train is depicted romantically in movies and western romance
novels. But what was it like really, to spend months on end in a wagon or on foot? Braving the
elements. The sun didn’t always shine, and even when it did, dust hung heavy in the humid air,
kicked up by hundreds of wagons and horses. When it wasn’t dust it was mud that swallowed
half the wagon wheel, coated boots and splattered from the hooves of galloping horses.
Taking a bath most of the time meant washing off the top layer with a rag dipped in a pan
of water. None of those lovely clear ponds surrounded by flowers and thick trees that provided a
lot of privacy, like we see in western movies and read about in novels.
Wait a minute. Am I trying to ruin the romance novel lying open on your nightstand? Or
waiting in your Kindle? Certainly not. An editor once told me that I should leave out the bedbugs
and lice, and she was right. But realism in my westerns is required so that the reader gets the true
feel of things. One day fighting mud, another fighting bad weather, and yet another devoted to
other discomforts, that’s enough. Then we can move on to the romance.
It’s true that young women going west looked at it as a great experience. More like play
than work. It was the older women with children, possibly pregnant with another, who suffered
the most from the trek West.
Here’s an idea of what was carried in those overland wagons, smaller and lighter than a
Conestoga, and much preferred for the long trip. In 1845 it was recommended that each emigrant
carry along 200 pounds of flour, 150 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of coffee, 20 pounds of sugar
and 10 pounds of salt. In addition, supplies should include chipped beef, rice, tea, dried beans,
dried fruit, saleratus (baking soda), vinegar, pickles, mustard and tallow. Basic kitchen ware was
a kettle, fry pan, coffee pot, tin plates, cups, knives and forks.
And contrary to what we might believe, plenty of cash was needed for a successful trip.
Cash to replace stores, to pay the ferrymen at river crossings, to buy replacements for wagons
that had broken or oxen gone lame, to buy food through the first winter in the new lands.
But none of this would deter the frontiersmen and their families. Between 1841 and 1866
approximately 350,000 men, women and children emigrated to the Pacific Territories. A spike
from 4,000 in 1848 to 30,000 in 1849 and 55,000 in 1850 reveals the height of the gold rush.
Ordinary, everyday work for women included cooking in wind and rain and using weeds
or buffalo chips to make their fires. Often the plains offered not a stick of wood..
But hey, despite all the hardships, the loneliness of being separated from family, the heat
and cold and dust and wind, hail often the size of snowballs, nothing stopped the migration west.
For two decades the Mormon Trail and the Oregon Trail carried travelers, much like our
Interstates do today. Only difference, that overland journey that was 2400 miles from the
Missouri River to California,  took from April to October at best. Today that same trip can be
driven in three days.
Romantic or not, we like to think of the westward movement that way. And romance
novels will continue to satisfy that desire.

How Women Won the West
Read my Montana Trilogy on Kindle for $2.99 each
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A WRITER'S CHRISTMAS

We writers are an unusual, if not slightly strange bunch. We live mostly in other worlds with fictional people who seem so real to us we might be dangerous at times. We are the only people who can hear voices and not be considered crazy. Though, occasionally people look at me as if I were. Crazy, that is.

It was October, 1994 when my first of six western historical romances was released by Topaz. That Christmas I almost forgot to shop I was so excited. And you've got to know that our family is very big on Christmas. We pile gifts up around the tree until you can hardly get into the room. It takes hours with breaks for coffee, chocolate and milk and cookies to finish the opening task. We go around the room, one by one opening one present at a time and oohing and aahing over it before moving on to the next. Even the children realize the need to take part in this ritual, rather than ripping into their gifts with great abandon.

So you can see that my nearly forgetting to buy gifts was a really big deal. I felt terrible as I rushed around trying to find the just-so-right gifts for each family member. We are a small family, so each makes sure we buy something the other wants. There's no buying ten pairs of gloves or fourteen scarves to pass around. No. Grandpa has to have those furry house slippers and a new wallet and belt, wool socks, his very favorite tools that he's lost or worn out are replaced with glee. A longed for book, a music CD of his favorite tunes. And so it goes around the room.

Yet, there I was left with little time to shop--a chore I hate any other time of the year--and very special gifts I wanted to buy for each and everyone.

I remember when my two children were small, I'd go to the nearby Woolworth store in late September and put special toys on layaway. We had very little money, so it wasn't like it is today, with gifts galore. One  really special item from Santa, a couple of smaller gifts from Mom and Dad. Over the years things changed, and so I was met on this late October in 1994, with a long list. Wal Mart was not then what it is today, but there were other stores in town as well. A K Mart, Sears and Pennys. Woolworth had long disappeared. Online shopping was a thing of the future, though catalogs were a favorite of mine.

I don't recall the gifts I bought that year, and probably no one else does either, which might say something about worrying so much about getting just the right thing. But I did make it without spending Christmas Eve trolling through leftovers. I vowed, that no matter what was going on in my writing life, that wouldn't happen again. And so, each year, deadline or no, book release or no, blog to write or no, I finish my shopping around Thanksgiving. Thanks nowadays to Amazon and other online stores.

This year I've uploaded to Kindle not only that long ago book that was first published in 1994, but three others, all available for gift giving this Christmas by simply hitting a couple of buttons. Family members with a Kindle will be delighted and so will you. Books that were originally $6.99 in 1994-1998 are now $2.99. That's quite a bargain when you consider inflation rates today.

MARRIAGE AND ROMANCE OUT WEST

Though I write romances that take place in the historical West, it doesn't take long to learn through research that romance often took a back seat to more practical considerations. A woman considered herself lucky to snag a man who was prone to work hard. It was important that a man provide a living? Women seldom worked away from home. Her back breaking chores provided more than enough to keep her busy. So how did these two carve out the time to make their marriage work?

Chances are, they weren't conscious of doing so. It was just a given that once married, one remained that way till one or the other, or both died. In some cases, that meant a short marriage. The median age either one might reach in the 1800s was around 45-50, younger if they went West.

Consider the marriage bed. Often not much wider than our twin bed of today, it consisted of corn husks bundled and laid over rope laced into a form of springs, and covered by a quilt. If there was money to be had or the couple owned a large farm and raised a variety of birds that included geese, they might have a goose down mattress. In the winter the house grew frigid before the night was over, so that would have been conducive to cuddling. In the summer there were no fans, the only air conditioning was to open or uncover windows that had no screens and often no glass either.

Need became more important than love. A man who'd lost his wife often had several small children and would court the first available woman he found, marrying her so his children would have someone to raise them. The same was true in the reverse for widows left with children. All he or she cared about was that they could get along reasonably well.

Too often the bride and groom were teenagers, a term that hadn't yet been coined. It was common for the man to be 16 or 17 and the woman 14 or 15 when they spoke their marriage vows. Because of a lack of birth control methods, children came along every year or so, with miscarriages in between. If a couple had eight to ten children, they were lucky to raise half of them to adulthood when living on the frontier.

Considering all of this, romance soon took a backseat. But that's not what readers want when they read romances. An editor once told me to leave out the bedbugs and lice, no one wanted to read about that in a romance. She was right of course, and in presenting life on the frontier, the writer also sugar coats the hard stuff.

In reading diaries written by women who went West, we find the younger ones looked upon the trip as a great adventure, while those who were either pregnant or already had young children, saw it as drudgery and sometimes committed suicide. But again, readers expect exciting, happy stories from their romances, and so that's what we writers give them. We leave the unhappy endings for literary writers.

So enjoy Montana Promises, Montana Dreams and Montana Destiny for their strong and gentle heroes and tough but giving heroines. And join my part-Cherokee heroine in Dream Walker. That's a trip you'll enjoy. Find them all here.