I finished the first draft a few days ago, and I would like to celebrate by sharing a short excerpt here.
This scene finds Liam, a historian and writer with a penchant for stirring up troublesome old secrets, at the beginning of a quest that takes him along the shores of Lake Champlain:
…The morning brought good omens for my excursion up the lake in the Sea Nymph. They were bird omens, pretty much my favorite kind.
Three massive great blue herons pterodactyl-ed over me in the silver-gray mist down at the marina in the quiet morning— the first herons I’d seen all season.
A few minutes later, with the fourteen-footer and 50-horse Evinrude outboard chugging out into the smooth and silver lake passage, the mist breaking up to reveal a soft summer-blue sky above, I spotted an osprey, the mostly white fish hawk patterned with dark brown--massive, crook-winged, and powerful-- winging directly overhead.
Both the heron and osprey feel like familiars to me, and sometimes they seem like guides in my line of work as a historian, writer, researcher.
The heron knows how to hunt wisely and calmly: waiting and waiting in stillness at water's edge, then grabbing its prey decisively when the moment arrives.
The osprey is always in motion, seeking its meal from a long view high above, then-- after finding it-- diving suddenly, explosively, into the water’s surface tension; grabbing with sharp talons and pulling up the dripping, struggling prey.
I’ve found that both methods can work well when investigation and exploration—-the finding of lost things, lost stories— is the mission at hand....
- excerpt from THE ISLAND OF ANCIENT LIGHT, a novel in progress by Kevin Macneil Brown (Coming in autumn of 2016.)
The Liam Dutra Series is available in print and kindle editions at amazon.com:
Kevin Macneil Brown's Author Page
