Dogpatch Press

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Lost on Dark Trails, by Rukis. Illustrated by the author.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, January 2015, trade paperback $19.95 (312 pages), electronic edition $12.95.

This is a mature content book.  Please ensure that you are of legal age to purchase this material in your state or region.

This is the sequel to Rukis’ Off the Beaten Path, reviewed here in January 2015. It is also the middle volume of a trilogy, “The Long Road Home”. It begins immediately following the events in the first volume.

Shivah (bobcat), the narrator, is an Amurescan native “squaw” in an anthropomorphic world roughly similar to late 18th-century North America. She is searching — along with Ransom, a coyote trapper, and Puck (Puquanah), a blind silver fox shaman — for vengeance against Methoa’nuk (also bobcat), Shivah’s ex-husband, a cruel native warrior who has joined a band of raiders that have wiped out Shivah’s tribe and now threaten the Otherwolf colonies along the Eastern Seaboard. Shivah, Ransom, and Puck join a party of Otherwolf lawmen led by Grant Wickham (husky) who also search for the raiders, led by Rourke (otter). But in a bloody battle at the end of Off the Beaten Path, the raiders escape and Puck is apparently killed.

Lost on Dark Trails begins with Shivah nursing Puck back to health, while Grant has been fired for allowing the raiders to escape. Ransom, believing Puck dead, has left; the others fear to commit suicide. So Shivah (a “weak woman”) is alone and apparently sidelined with the blind and recovering Puck to support. Instead, she rallies Grant (and a friend) to join her and Puck in finding Ransom; then continuing (without the friend) unofficially after Rourke and his raiders. She and Puck join them as two of the new pursuers, rather than as Grant’s tagalongs. The surprise ending of Lost on Dark Trails wraps up most of the loose threads from Off the Beaten Path, but indicates that the conclusion of the trilogy, also titled The Long Road Home, will take an unexpected new direction.

Shivah has always been a strong protagonist, and by the end of this middle novel, everyone recognizes this.

“I smiled back, and tried to look confident for them all. I was rather liking being in charge, I was finding day by day. There had been so many times in the past I’d wanted to be the one to corral the chaos amongst my comrades, to ground the menagerie of rowdy, strange men who’d become a part of my life into something more orderly. And now I could.” (p. 43) Read the rest of this entry »