The Wolf and the Willow

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Description

Brimming with adventure, romance and the peaks and valleys of the human spirit, “The Wolf and The Willow” is a historical novel of first contact between Indigenous peoples and Spanish conquistadors. The book is the prequel to Windigo Moon, Robert Downes’ 2017 novel of the Anishinaabek.

Willow, a house slave of Black and Arab descent is swept into the 1528 expedition of conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez, who hoped to colonize Florida and find native cities brimming with gold. After a disastrous journey through the New World, she encounters Wolf, a trader, storyteller and spy for the shamans of the Ojibwe people. Wolf is on a mission down the Mississippi to find a mythical animal for his uncles among the shamans.

Together, Willow and Wolf must overcome their brutal captors during a voyage through the vibrant Indian civilizations along the Mississippi, searching for a golden empire amid the ancient ruins of Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis.

The Wolf and The Willow offers a glimpse into the culture of many tribes, including the Anishinaabek, Tionontati, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Dakota Sioux, Mandans, Caddo, and the Mound Builder civilization of the Mississippi River Valley. Life among the Ojibwe in the Upper Great Lakes is a key element in the story. The story also delves into the pre-Colombian Indian city of Cahokia, home of the largest earthen pyramid in North America.

Readers will experience in a very vivid way the spectacular Indian civilizations which existed for thousands of years before European armies and diseases swept them all away.

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In a thimble, my interests are cycling, travel, reading, playing guitar,  writing books and cavorting with my lovely wife, J’nette.

Here are a few things I’ve seen and done:

  •  I like to write at the library or at local coffeehouses. Several of my books have been completed on a iPad while wintering in the tropics.
  •  Themes that seem to recur or matter to me in my books include obession, unrequited love, the balance between justice and revenge, and adventure (a euphemism for getting into a nasty jam and figuring a way out of it).
  •  Born in Grand Rapids, MI in 1952, I earned my BA in journalism from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1976, with a minor in photography. I’m sure my college journalism department would have voted me least likely to succeed.
  •  After a stint as a newspaper reporter and editor in the metro Detroit area, I moved north to Traverse City, MI, creating a variety of publications and fielding media relations for Munson Medical Center in the 1980s.
  •   In 1991, my best friend George Foster and I launched the alternative Northern Express Weekly, which we ran for 23 years. Our first issues were created in my  kitchen on a primitive 30-meg Mac Plus computer. The Express went on to become northern Michigan’s largest weekly newspaper with a readership of 75,000 covering a radius of more than 150 miles of the region. We sold it in 2013.

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