A life’s journey is a marvelous thing - bookended by confusion and disorientation - yet between those awesome extremities there are abundant opportunities for clarity and comprehension. The true blessing is that those chances are legion. The most important residuals of having lived are those times when life comes into sharp focus and, within a broader nature, begins to make a bit more sense. Before you are born and after you die you will not be not here - the opportunity to live and experience is not yours.

In those decades between however, there are the opportunities to experience life and its meaning in all its various implications. This is the living time between "all that might become" and "all that might have been" - between the blind hope of youth and the melancholic regrets of old age.

For those of us who can write or read books such as this one, that time is still very much our own. This is a book about that time and those opportunities. You are about to enter a world in which all the characters are animals. But these are not cartoon characters, team mascots, or anthropomorphic manifestations of human tendencies – they are potent spirits in their own right. Animals to be sure - but animals of a very special sort. They are derived very loosely from Native American mythology - particularly that of the Tlingit natives of southeast Alaska - but only very loosely. In a fundamental way they have created themselves.