This was taken in our pasture when I went home on Easter break in 1969. The handsome fellow drinking from the buffalo wallow (that pasture never was plowed and was filled with what I was told were buffalo wallows from a century and more ago) was Windigo, a four month old German Shepherd who spent the next ten years as my best friend. The picture gives a nice feel for the flat earth of central Kansas, and its immense sky. I think my grandfather planted the cottonwoods in the background. The evergreens were spreading on their own--arborvitum had been brought in to make thick windbreaks around houses and yards. In the far background, are hedge rows--Osage orange trees planted as windrows along the edge of fields and roads.

Click on the pictures or the archers below for a tour of some of the places and events that shaped my novels.

Take a walk with me through my worlds...