I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down. He was, I’m sure, listening for the bear. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.’ So if we see the bear, I’m going to shoot him so he’ll attack me. ‘I just have the one that will make him angry. ” ‘I don’t have the gun with me that will kill a bear,’ he told me. “Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear’s still around.”

“It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, “That’s a bear footprint.

“My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun I was carrying the small bag of ducks. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children’s Home, where we lived. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we’d tied our boat. Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer…which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows: She has just published WARPAINT, the second stand-alone novel in her Cadence Drake series. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. I had my moment in the spotlight there and that was enough.Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won her the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. well, that takes more talent than I have, and I never wanted it enough to fight for it anyway. For the record, college is a good idea for most people, and if I still had my heart set on being a professional artist, it would have been important for me.

Which turns out not to have been the only stupid mistake I made in my life that turned out well. And in spite of the fact that I graduated in the top ten in my class (not top ten percent - top ten) and had taken all college preparatory classes, I believed them. My folks had spent most of their lives telling me that college was a waste of time and money, and that what I needed to do was get out of school and get a job. I got out of high school, and didn't go to college. And I can't say I made much of a go at that. I always wrote, you know, but it was just this thing I did what I intended was to become a terribly famous artist, perhaps with a stopover as a singer.

Mind of the Magic by Holly Lisle