Ratha and the Named

The Scratching Log

Blog for Ratha series home-page website. Posted by author Clare Bell.

Monday, October 20, 2008

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

Labels: animal fantasy, big cats, cat fantasy, cats Clare Bell, Cybil Awards, KidLit08, prehistoric animals, prehistoric cats Ratha's Courage, sabertooth, The Named

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• Ratha's Creatures - The Named clan cats



• Imaginator Press Paperback of Ratha's Courage



• Imaginator Press to Publish Print Edition of Ratha...



• Ratha Returns with New "Courage", Part 1



• Ratha's Creatures - What Are the Rumblers?



• Ratha's Courage now on Fictionwise.com



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Sheila Ruth of Imaginator Press and 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:

Ratha's Courage publication announcement

http://wandsandworlds.com/community/node/5276

I am really pleased that Sheila is going to publish the Ratha's Courage print edition. Yeeearooo!

And I really appreciate the support of all the LJ fans and friends.  Thanks!

CB

Ratha Returns with New “Courage”

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) to Ratha's Challenge (MKM/MacMillan/1996), Ratha's prehistoric Miocene world fascinated readers. Throughout four books, she and the Named grew and developed.

In Ratha's Creature, she learned how to herd three-horn deer, discovered the truth about the supposedly witless UnNamed raiders, tamed her “creature”, the Red Tongue (fire), and led a blazing revolt against Meoran, the short-sighted, tyrannical clan leader. In Clan Ground, she fought down the challenge to her leadership by the orange-eyed demagogue Shongshar, who tried to turn the Named into a fire-worshiping hegemony. In Ratha and Thistle-chaser, she struggled with the daughter she wounded and abandoned. In Ratha's Challenge, she led the Named in a mystifying encounter with True-of-voice and the Song-entranced mammoth-hunting cat tribe.

Now, thirteen years later, comes Ratha's Courage: The Fifth Book of the Named. Why has there been such a long gap after Challenge and why at last did I return to the series with Courage?

When Ratha sprang from the pages in 1983, she created a whirl of excitement. She captured the 1984 IRA Children's Choice and the PEN Los Angeles awards. She became a regular on recommended book lists for teens and was hailed as an instant classic. CBS Storybreak not only optioned the book, but made an animated episode, which aired in 1987 (and is in clips on MySpaceTV and YouTube). She and the Named were on their way to recognition and popularity, like the kind accorded the present-day Warrior Cat series. .

Then time blew the dazzle away, like so much dust. I began to see the realities of the publishing world. Glowing reviews and awards, but low print runs. Praise by schools and libraries, but no shelf space in bookstores. British editions and paperbacks on Ratha's Creature and Clan Ground, but not on Thistle-chaser or Challenge. Invitations for author appearances and readings, but little publisher support. Finally, after 1996, the series sank out of sight in the mass grave of “Out of Print”. Getting back the rights loomed as an impossible or at least a formidable process. I didn't pursue it.

I mourned, tried to put Ratha behind me, even though it was hard to see old copies at used bookstores reminding me of might have been. I turned instead to my other love and vocation, electric vehicles.

In 1991 the First Gulf War sparked me into building an electric VW conversion from a kit.(The black Porsche 914 EV pictured on the site was my later car, “Black Magic“.)

Next - An Invitation and Writing Ratha's Courage

CB

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 mya 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.

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
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)

Comments welcome!

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..."

Here's some description from the book:

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

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.

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 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 and other sites 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

5:37 PM PDT, September 6, 2007

 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 lemurs 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

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

If you like this post, please bookmark it

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. It is also too small in comparison to the Named, who are puma and cheetah-sized.
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

Ratha lives on the Earth of 20-25 million years ago, a period in prehistory called the Miocene.  It lasted from 25 MYA to 5MYA.  Climate change shaped the Earth in the time of the Named just as it is doing so now.  The period called the Oligocene  preceded the Miocene, and had a warm, wet climate that encouraged heavy forests.

 Toward the end of the Oligocene and into the early Miocene, continental drift affected rain patterns all over the planet.  The Earth became drier.  The moisture-loving forests that had dominated the continents could no longer flourish.  They retreated, giving way to grass and shrub, which are better adapted for a dry climate. 

As the forest shrank, its animals crowded together, competing intensely for food and territory.  Some, including our own ancestors, ventured out on the grasslands.  Our early upright walking may have helped us look over the high grass and spot enemies before they saw us.

Ratha and the Named clan cats are caught up in this shift from forest to grassland, although it so slow that it has taken many of their lifetimes.  They experience more droughts than their ancestors did, and struggle to find water, as portrayed in Ratha and Thistle-chaser. They have adapted as we have, becoming more intelligent, herding the three-horn deer and the dapplebacks (forest horses) they once hunted, as we domesticated plants and animals.

 Because their forest is slowly shrinking, they have started to tame creatures of the open plains, such as the face-tails (mastodons and mammoths) seen in Ratha's Challenge and the larger horses introduced in the forthcoming Ratha’s Courage. The Named call these horses “stripers” and they are based on the early hipparion-type three-toed equids. These horses still have three toes, but the center toe dominates.  The stripers can run faster and kick harder, as the Named herders soon discover.   Ratha’s people must use their intelligence to discover new ways of managing them.

    Overhead, the clouds grumbled and the rain began.  At first it was light and helped by softening the ground so that the work went faster. As it grew into a pelting downpour, the bottom of the trench became a bog. The diggers fought to keep their footing on the slick clay and frequently fell into puddles or accidentally spattered each other with the  pawfuls of mud they flung aside.  Their small companions began to look less like treelings and more like soggy  mudballs.

At the end of the day, Ratha would crawl shivering from the trench,  her coat soaked, her underside and flanks grimy with  clay and gravel.  Once she was under shelter, Ratharee made an a determined attempt to groom her, but the treeling often so exhausted that she fell asleep when she had barely begun.  Ratha was so tired that she didn't care.

The work grew more difficult and task seemed endless.  Sometimes Ratha, in her haze of fatigue, couldn't remember what the purpose of it was.  She felt as though she had spent her life scraping away at this wretched hole and would do so for the rest of her existence.  When at last Thakur leaned down into the trench again and cried "Stop!," she paid no attention to him and kept on digging mechanically until water began seeping through gravel and soil at her feet.

She felt Thakur drop into the ditch beside her, seize her scruff and shake her.  "Ratha, stop!  We're finished.  If you go any farther, the water-path will flood before we're ready."

She blinked, trying to pull herself out of her daze.  She scrambled out of the trench after Thakur and saw that he was right. Only the remaining thin wall of earth held back the stream.  When the time came, they would dig at the embankment to weaken it until it broke, sending the flow down the spillway, into the hollow and down the cracks that vented the cave below.  The cave-fire would perish in a rush of water, and those who tended it would be swept away.

Despite her exhaustion, Ratha felt a surge of triumph.  She was ready.  Now all that remained was to wait.

(end of chapter 18)