Book Three
With their numbers increasing, and with forage at a premium, they were wont to wander outside the park's borders. They were slaughtered by livestock ranchers in the region who viewed them as competitors for their own economic survival.
I felt that this was a perfect way for my two main characters and their friends to contribute to the environmental movement by doing something profound when federal and local authorities seemed unable, or unwilling, to do anything else to save these magnificant creatures who had been here first, likely even before the native humans of the region began to utilize their anatomical beneficence to survive and thrive in an otherwise hostile ecosystem.
For humans of superior ability would certainly, in my estimation, be tree-huggers or, in this case, bison huggers. And, furthermore, what was happening to the bison was a metaphor for what had often happened to GLBT's over the years: get out of line or get out of place or announce your presence to the world and you may risk certain death.
The cover photo, taken by the same photographer who captured the images used on AUTUMN SAGA, is of a bison in Yellowstone Park. Anita Kocourek, beginning with AUTUMN SAGA, would create my book covers for the rest of the series.
I also cannot overstate the advantage I had of driving back and forth to work for so many miles over so many years. It gave me plenty of time to think about my books and my characters, especially if I were stuck.
In the very first volume, A MILE-HIGH SAGA, I got my two main characters into a very tough spot, physically and personally. I put them there and I had no idea, one day when I left work, how I was going to extricate them. Suddenly, on the way home, I had the solution; but I still had many miles to go before I could write. I had to keep the solution in my head, repeating it over and over again. Then, when I got in the door of my apartment, I had a phone call. I was desparately needed to referee indoor volleyball games, NOW! I had to get dressed, grab some scraps of paper and a pencil, and leave, the solution to the dilemma still not written down. As in the line from THE SAND PEBBLES, it isn't history unless it's written down. This solution wasn't down on paper yet and I feared that I might lose it. So, inbetween keeping score during several games, I scribbled down on those scraps of paper how the characters were to overcome their nemesis and save the world from nuclear destruction.
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