Half the horses were veterans of moose, caribou and bear hunts. The other six were 3-year-olds barely green broke. Wranglers Bryan Parker and Chad Bembanek, both young hands in their 20’s, and I split the colts among us to complete their training along the way.

Doc, my main pony, was a brown 10-year-old gelding with the personality of a wet blanket. My colts were War Paint and Blue Steel. Ride one, lead the spares daisy-chained behind.

The trail ended at an old gold-mining camp. From there on, we climbed through conifer timber as thick as dog fur, into the uplands, then across high-country tundra toward the Yukon River, which we planned to cross with rafts we built. A cold, wretched drizzle fell daily, soaking leather, clothing, skin and morale. In between rain showers, fog settled so densely that we appeared and disappeared in and out of the mist like ghost riders in the sky.

Moose and bear barely gave us a second look; chances were they’d never seen horses before.

While we were leading horses one at a time down a steep drop-off scabbed with dense timber, old landslides, and washouts, War Paint lost his footing. The two of us plunged to the bottom of a ravine. Paint’s iron-shod hoof came down on my foot in the melee to untangle ourselves. Only soft mulch prevented its being snapped.

At the Yukon, chaos erupted when Chad’s pale horse Dakota, Les’ Jasper and another colt broke loose in a plot to go back home. The trio stampeded along the rocky bank, leaped into the Tozitna River where it mouthed into the Yukon, and began swimming hard for the other side. We would be days combing them out of the bush—if the grizzlies didn’t get them first.

Wranglers vaulted astride mounts and rode beans for leather in an attempt to turn back the deserters. Bryan and his mount made a beautiful dive into the river. As the wrangler slid off into the current to let his horse pull him across, he lost his grip on the saddle and floundered in the icy water. A lot of Alaskans never learn to swim, Bryan among them.

Chad urged his palomino into the stream after Bryan. I hit the ground running and threw off my boots before I dived in. The water was so cold I thought I was having a heart attack. Les cast a long loop toward Bryan as, struggling and on the verge of being sucked under with the weight of his boots and clothing, he was being swept into the Yukon.

Chad reached the drowning man first. His palomino towed them both to safety on the far side of the Tozitna.

Camp that evening was wet. Steam hissed from saddles, pads, clothing and other gear arranged around a bonfire to dry. Although my old bones had taken a beating, I felt warm and at peace with the world.

Picketed horses rested at the edge of the firelight. Somewhere, a pack of timber wolves created original theme music for this wild and beautiful land. There are so few places left in the world where riders can take off through unspoiled country as our frontier forefathers had done in that other Old West a century ago.

Enter the drawing for a free signed copy of Charles W. Sasser’s A Thousand Years of Darkness, called by critics “the most important American novel since Atlas Shrugged.” E-mail entries to charlessasser@msn.com. Drawing will be held May 30.

I finally girted up enough nerve to saunter up to her. “Say, girl, you and me. We could show ’em something at the rodeo dance shindig tonight.”

“You ain’t been showing ’em much riding barebacks,” she said, turned in her little red skirt and walked off.

I was nothing if not persistent. I knew the girl liked me, other cowboys said so, but her papa thought I was just another circuit bum going nowhere.

Finally, I won Pop over. Linda and I made our first date for the dance after the Saturday night show in Moro, Oregon.

It was September, the end of the season, and starting to get cold. I drew a horse called The Mop, a name that turned out to be prophetic.

Barebacks are the first event of a rodeo. I was first rider out in the first event. It was spitting rain when I eased down into the chute on top of The Mop. The announcer was going through his spiel from above the chutes. I looked up as I pounded my gloved hand into the bareback rigging handle and winked at Linda where she was watching from the shelter of the announcer’s stand. She gave me the sweetest, most promising smile.

The chute gate swung wide—and The Mop mopped up the arena with me. That was one bucking cayuse. He threw me so high I got a nose bleed before I hit the ground. And when I did hit, ol’ Mop was waiting for me. He tattooed four hooves from my spurs all the way to my gloves.

The Mop moved on, kicking and bawling with triumph and passing wind every time his front feet hit the ground. I lay where I lay, unable to move. That beast had stomped both arms and both legs and I was paralyzed, couldn’t move anything except my head. I thought I was some messed up.

As they will, cowboys ran out and hoisted me up to take me to the waiting ambulance. One cowboy had one leg, another the other leg. That was when I noticed to my chagrin that my jeans were split open all the way at the crotch, exposing everything private or not. And Linda had climbed up on the fence gate as the cowboys carried me past—and the look on her face!

“Put my legs together!” I pleased, humiliated totally.

I ended up in The Dalles hospital, with bad bruises and no permanent injuries. And Linda. . .? I think she must have gone to the dance with a calf roper.

A Thousand Years of Darkness by Charles W. Sasser predicted the May Day violence. Want to know what comes next? Enter to win FREE signed copies of A Thousand Years of Darkness by e-mailing charlessas@msn.com. Drawing will be held on May 30.

“No 30-year mortgage on that masterpiece of modern architecture.”

There in the “tool shed,” as we called it, I would fulfill my dream of becoming a full-time freelance writer. The day before, I had been a big city police homicide detective. I quit cold—and now Kathy, our two-year-old son Joshua, and I began homesteading in the woods while I wrote.

Friends took a skeptical look at our home and exclaimed, “How can a family live in that closet?”

They were closer to the truth than they realized. The door was salvaged from a closet.

Decorating was in Early Poverty. A full-sized bed fit snugly across one end. Joshua’s smaller twin ran from the head of our bed along the wall opposite the door, which we had located on the long side facing sundown in the valley. A wire strung across the foot of our bed served as a closet. I arranged shelves between nearly every stud to hold our belongings. A kerosene lamp occupied a throne of honor below the window.

The “kitchen” consisted of a Coleman camp stove on a broad shelf next to the door, with shelves below to serve as a pantry and cabinet. We conducted most of our socializing, entertaining, bathing and dining outside al fresco.

My writing desk—a door laid across two file cabinets—took up one end of the shed. I constructed more shelves to contain essential books; the rest of my library remained in storage.

The three of us, plus a baby goat and a St. Bernard pup, slept, quarreled, loved and grew close in what our friends insisted on calling that “silly closet in the woods.” We had planned to occupy the tool shed for a maximum of six months while I built our real house using only hand tools. I got up at four a.m., lit the lamp, and wrote until noon. I spent the rest of the day working on the real house.

Six months stretched into nine. Failure was not an option. I wrote and sold dozens of magazine articles. My first book, a police novel called No Gentle Streets, was published. Copies of it, if you can find them, sell for more than $800 on the internet.

I even obtained an agent—and my career was off. We moved into the real house before winter, bringing with us a certain nostalgia for life in the tool shed.

Since then, I have published more than 50 major books and novels, written thousands of magazine articles and short stories, and been a full-time writer for 32 years.

And it all started in a tool shed in the woods—or at least this last stretch of it did. The first stretch began when I was seven years old and promised myself I would be a writer. I try to keep promises.

“If we understand the mechanism of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” From Charles W. Sasser’s latest novel, A Thousand Years of Darkness.

The Miami Herald ran a full page ad to recruit Miami cops. The city had the highest crime rate in the nation. Fighting crime and evil sounded like my kind of glamour job.

I took the Civil Service Exam and came out top of the list. Everyone at the Fowler House offered advice on passing the various boards and interviews that followed.

“Dress nice,” counseled Grace, the housekeeper. “Cops are conservative. Wear a suit.”

I had never owned a suit and I was almost broke. I went to the Salvation Army and bought one for two dollars. I selected a gray one, because Grace said gray was conservative. She made sure my borrowed tie was on straight.

The roomful of captains and majors and assistant police chiefs fell into a stunned silence when I walked in for my Board. They stared at me standing in front of them staring back. What was the matter? Didn’t all their applicants appear in business suits?

Finally, somebody cleared his throat so loudly I flinched.

“Boy, where’d you get that suit?”

It never occurred to me to lie. I was a mountain boy from the hills of Oklahoma and Arkansas raised to tell the truth, look a man straight in the eye, and keep your word when you gave it.

“Salvation Army, sir.”

There I was, a skinny kid with short, curly hair, a big honest backwoods grin, and a gray zoot suit that had somehow survived the Roarin’ Twenties in somebody’s closet. It had shoulder pads that filled a doorway, lapels the size of desk tops, and baggy trousers with big pleats.

Everyone laughed so hard the secretary from next door stuck her head inside the room to see what was going on. She looked at me and laughed too. I laughed along with them, although I wasn’t quite sure why we were laughing.

The Oral Board was supposed to take fifteen minutes; I was in there for an hour telling stories about my various travels on a motorbike across the U.S. I knew I had passed.

Years later, after I had moved on, the Miami Police Academy was still telling recruits the story of the hillbilly kid who arrived in Miami on an 80cc Yamaha motorbike, lived on skid row, and came to his Review Board wearing a zoot suit. The entire Fowler House of drunks, ageing retirees, day labors and assorted other riff-raff showed up for my graduation from the police academy. Chief of Police Walter Headley made a special point to shake hands with each of my unorthodox guests. It was truly the first time Skid Row ever came to a police graduation ceremony

I traveled for a year living in a tent and working odd jobs. People asked me where I was going.

From here to there, I replied.

In Idaho, a cowboy on a bay horse rode up to my tent and dismounted to roll a smoke.

“The West ain’t gonna be like this much longer,” he said.

Some drunks near Salt Lake City ran me off the highway. I fry-cooked at a greasy spoon until I earned enough money to repair Odyssey.

In June, I lived on the Navajo Indian Reservation at Four Corners, in a two-room adobe with a family of eight. George Rose was the Indian father.

“There ain’t no place anymore for Indians,” he said bitterly. “By God, Indians owned this country first.”

I traveled throughout the South all fall. One freezing night in Arkansas, I came upon an old-time tent revival in a field. The country preacher’s fiery words slashed through the dreadful night.

“The Lord is comin’! It wouldn’t surprise me if he comes walking right through that door tonight!”

With my helmet, goggles and coat crusted with sleet and ice, I walked through the door like some unexpected Ice Age monster. There was a long silence.

Black sharecroppers in Louisiana found me camped in the cold and took me home with them, to a four-room shanty with a yard full of kids and chickens and an old tire swing.

“Gran’pappy was a slave right down yonder at the ol’ place,” Papa Lee Henry said.

A hurricane menaced New Orleans. An old girlfriend from Seattle and I motored Odyssey up and down Bourbon Street leaving pools of water on dance floors.

In Mississippi, I camped in the yard of an abandoned church. Soon, a threatening mob of locals headed my way while a giant hog rooted around nearby for hickory nuts.

“Boy,” said the most surly of the lot,” that old sow could eat you up tonight and nobody’d ever know what happened to you.”

Afterwards, I learned federal agents that night arrested a sheriff and others in nearby Meridian for the slayings of three Civil Rights workers. Folks in front of my tent thought I might be another Civil Rights protestor.

“Son,” attested a fat woman in Georgia, “in all your travels you should take the Holy Ghost with you.”

I had been on the road a year when I reached Florida. The Yamaha was starting to smoke and show its miles. I stopped at every tourist trap along the way for free orange juice. Limping my way across the Everglades, I arrived in Miami with eight dollars in my jeans.

I rented a skid row room and paid a student Cuban barber fifty cents for a haircut. He promised such a splendid cut would surely get me a good job after my long and brave odyssey from the farthest northwestern corner of the country to its opposite southeastern corner.

He was right. I became a Miami cop.

***

New Books here of coming this year by Charles W. Sasser: THE WAR CHASER (thriller, Deadly Niche); BACK IN THE FIGHT (Iraqi war, St. Martin’s); SANCTUARY (SciFi, Mischievous Muse); A THOUSAND YEARS OF DARKNESS (Deadly Niche). 

Don’t land in the ocean—sharks. Nor the trees—the jungle was brittle and would impale.

Wind filled with rain blew off the land toward the ocean. ODA-213′s DZ lay just off the beach.

Green lights above the door flashed on with terrible presence. Twelve men disappeared in a shuffling rush out the doors into the black wind. It always stunned me how fast a stack of paratroopers exited an airplane.

I hurtled earthward through wet darkness so complete I heard the rustling pop of a parachute opening near me, but could not see it. My ‘chute ripped from its pack and jerked me up hard in the wind, snapping my legs. An angry flash of lightning blinded me momentarily.

Hanging in the wind, feeling the slash of rain, I waited for the next blaze of lightning to reveal the DZ. I glimpsed a small grassy clearing surrounded by high black hills and jungle on three sides and abutted on the fourth by ocean whitecaps. Howling winds pushed me tracking at full speed toward the sharks.

Another lightning strobe revealed the swarm of my teammates’ parachutes around me, like a bed of flying mushrooms searching for a way out of the dark. All were tracking toward the sharks.

I climbed my front risers like a monkey to spill air out the canopy’s back side and push me against the wind. The parachute lost lift. I hurdled through the air, coming in hot. It was my only chance of hitting the DZ and avoiding a swim with fish.

I sensed rather than saw ground rush. Having yanked toggles almost to my knees, I snapped them free at the last instant. The ‘chute grabbed air before dropping me into a drainage ditch that cut around the perimeter of the DZ. It was almost waist-deep full of water.

Inflated with stormwinds, the parachute became a runaway horse. It dragged me spluttering and coughing through the water-filled ditch.

Unable to gain my feet because of the ‘chute at my head and my heavy ruck dragging from its lowering line, I fumbled with wet hands for the parachute quick releases.

Just as I released the left riser to collapse the runaway parachute, a Panamanian from the reception party somehow grabbed it and held on. The strong wind dragged us both. He was drowning me.

“Turn it loose!” I yelled between gulps of water.

He wrapped the riser around a passing tree. It jerked me up like a roped calf. I scrambled to my feet in water up to my belt.

“Adonde fue el pajaro?” I asked in disgusted Spanish, giving my rescuer the pass phrase.

Lightning rippled. The Panamanian looked sheepish. A howler monkey roared from the top of a jungle giant; he sounded like a jaguar.

ODA-213 was on the ground.

“If we understand the mechanism of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.”A THOUSAND YEARS OF DARKNESS by Charles W. Sasser

One night when we were working a rodeo, a cowboy got down. Gerald made his pass, darting between the helpless cowboy and the bull’s horns to attract the animal to him. He stiff-armed the bull’s head in passing. Swamp Rat, the bull, threw up his head and knocked the clown flying. Before I could get to him, Swamp Rat hooked Gerald once in the butt, followed by a short cross to the belly, then landed a knockout punch that sent the clown plowing across the arena. By then I was there to draw the bull away.

Other than working the bull riding, clowns also keep the audience lively and entertained. We had a monkey puppet controlled by wire. It drank beer, break-danced, and lay out in the arena and twitched whenever a bull ran over it. You always heard gasps from the audience.

“Did you see what they did to that poor monkey?”

At one show, during a bull ride, Barnhart ran up behind me with his broom and propped me up with it. I went along with the gag.

“Don’t move,” he whispered.

The bull was Old OO. While he always ran at our dummy in the arena, he had never hit it. So, I stood there like a fool leaning back on the broom with my arms stuck out. Old OO ran at me. Then he swerved aside.

“Hey-y-y, Wayne,” Gerald called out to the announcer. “Did you see that? I got me two dummies.”

We used the act from then on with Old OO. It always set spectators on the edges of their seats.

But always behind the jokes and antics, the baggy pants and the grease paint of the rodeo funny man is a serious side—the “cowboy saving” bullfighter who takes his lumps to keep fallen riders from taking theirs.

One night during a lull in the action Gerald was telling a joke about a bull being Mexican since it looked like he had sat down in guacamole. About that time the bull exploded into the arena. He was a spinner. There was a wreck and the bull jumped into the middle of the hapless cowboy.

Gerald made his pass to distract the bull. I made my pass. I could smell the bull as he got off the cowboy and began passing back at the clowns. I was going to grab his tail. Later it dawned on me. Say you grab a 1,500-pound bull by the tail, what do you do with him then?

“There’s a squall coming,” I said.

The other boats started coming in ahead of the squall line. My reel in its boot gave a few ticks.

“It’s the seas pulling it,” I said.

Ten feet or so of line ticked off the reel. The line traveled slowly across the water. Gubbins held onto the side of the boat and his eyes followed the line.

“It’s not the seas,” I said.

I set the hook, put everything I had into it. The relentless speed of the line through the water did not change.

“It’s not very big,” I said.

Gubbins said, “I don’t think it knows it’s been hooked.”

Suddenly, the heavy rod bent like I had just roped and goosed a Texas steer. The weight of the shark almost jerked me overboard. Females were bigger than males.

“I was wrong,” I said. “It’s big.”

I fought the fish. The muscles in my arms and legs trembled. I pumped when the shark slacked and gave her line when she ran. I grabbed for things to keep from being pulled overboard.

“Hurry,” Gubbins said. “The squall.”

The squall loomed on the horizon, rain in dark slanted lines with wind. I fought the big shark still deep and unseen in the ocean.

“We’ll have to cut the line if the squall keeps coming,” Gubbins said.

“Don’t cut the line,” I warned.

I felt a drop of rain. It felt like a shard of ice on my skin.

“Twenty minutes,” Gubbins said.

“Thirty minutes,” he said later.

The squall rose off the port bow, blotting out the sun. It made the water dark. The shark rose out of the depths like a great gray-winged shadow.

“Holy. . .” Gubbins said.

He leaned out across the gunnels with .357 pistol in hand. The fish sounded. I brought it back to the pistol. It always seemed unfair to end a fight like this.

Rain. A blinding deluge. Gubbins cursed into the howl of the storm.

“Get it near the boat,” he yelled.

“You’ll shoot the boat!”

“Bring her close or I’ll cut the line.”

“Don’t cut it, Gubbins.”

The pistol cracked.

“Missed her. Rain in my eyes.”

“She’s coming back.”

I strained on the rod to lift the tired shark’s head. Jaws snapped open and you could see the vicious rows of teeth and eyes like a dead cobra’s. Rain pelted the seas. The seas crashed across the stern and for a moment we were knee deep in salt water. I thought we were sinking.

“Don’t cut the line.”

Gubbins slung water from his pistol barrel.

“Gubbins, shoot her! Now!”

He thrust his pistol at the shark and shot her in her small brain.

She went mad. I strained hard on the rod against the last of the shark’s fight. Her tail thrashed and she tried to dive through a wave tinged with her own blood. She turned belly up. The storm thudded her against the side of the boat.

“Not since Atlas Shrugged have I been so captivated by a novel with political overtones.” Hollywood Star about Charles W. Sasser’s A Thousand Years of Darkness.

Foolish, old-fashioned, or whatever I might be, the way I see things is that any knight who would slay dragons and save maidens and brings along a GPS, satellite telephone or IPerp is hedging his bets. He’s not really pitting himself against the elements, testing himself, if he can call for help when things get tough. What maiden would want to be rescued by so faint-hearted a hero?

Adventure is my business. As a fulltime freelance writer for over 30 years, I have sailed the Caribbean in a 17-foot day sailor, set a world’s transcontinental flight record in an ultralite aircraft, floated the Amazon River, dived for pirate treasure. . . I had rather die while living, on my own terms, than to simply fade away.

Now I was lost in a wild wonderland, a silent, hidden world where the grandeur of the Pacific meets centuries-old rainforest coastline. Snow and ice coated the towering peaks of mountains whose shoulders plunged to the tide line. Sea otters floated on their backs like fat old men in a Miami Beach pool. Harbor seals snorted. A whale rolled. I scanned timber near the mouths of streams, hoping to glimpse a rare white-coated Kermode bear.

I wore a full-body diver’s wetsuit against sea water cold enough to chill exposed flesh. The wetsuit served a secondary mission as a “scare bear.” After a few days of sweating in it, it stunk like the meanest human in the North Country. I hung it with arms and legs spread to block any likely avenue of approach to my tent while I slept. I don’t know whether bears simply ignored it or laughed, but I felt a lot safer in my sleeping bag.

Tides can rise thirty or forty feet. At low tide one evening, I discovered a grassy knoll that appeared safe for camping. Lapping sounds awoke me. I scrambled from my tent to discover the tide had isolated me on my patch of land. Rising water was within a foot of my tent. A seal in the dark snorted at me. Lightning flashed in a bank of dark clouds to the west. A bear rummaged around on the island to which my pinnacle was attached at low tide. When I solo-canoed the Yukon Territory, I threw stones at nosy black bears to scare them away. This guy didn’t appear the timid sort.

I hurriedly packed for a quick departure, water nipping at my feet, dreading being alone on the water in the middle of a black night, and perhaps in a storm. Suddenly, the tide began to recede. With a sigh of relief, I shooed off the seal, ignored the lightning, made truce with the bear and went back to bed.

After all, an old guy needs his sleep.

“. . .After this election, there will be no further elections in which the outcomes are in doubt. We will control voting—or at least the counting of votes. . . It’s our destiny.” From Charles W. Sasser’s latest thriller A Thousand Years of Darkness. Available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and fine book stores nationwide.

Even USS Abe Lincoln would have pounded against the 20-foot seas we encountered after leaving port. The crew: Tim Albin; Gregg Merrell; Morris Mauney; our token female Stephanie Hurd; Captain Darrell Moody; and myself. We watched with growing apprehension as the sea turned gray against an overcast sky and mare’s tails began kicking up. Spray washed over the decks. Mountainous rollers tossed the Catalina around like a toy sailboat in a flooded storm sewer, lifting it on liquid peaks to the teetering point before dropping it into the following troughs with a resounding crash. More mountains of water as high as two-story buildings hovered out of the depths.

Everyone except Stephanie came down in acute seasickness, with predictable results. Moving about on the boat proved all but impossible, even though you had to try to reach the railings before you blew lunch.

Morris lost his grip while fighting his way to the head below and got slammed against the corner of a bunk, sustaining a black eye and a mild concussion that left him wild-eyed and temporarily disoriented.

Returning topside, he froze in the hatchway, staring at our dingy’s outboard motor attached to the railing.

“It’s a gargoyle!” he shrieked.

It did resemble a crouching medieval gargoyle in the blackness of night with sea spray blowing around it. Only Satan rising out of the depths brandishing Neptune’s trident could have completed the scene.

Morris needed a doctor, but there was no chance of that until we reached Belize. Most of us were so sick we didn’t care if we lived or died. The boat sailed on sheer willpower; we anticipated being sent to Davy Jones’ locker sooner or later.

Captain Darrell intended putting in at Ambergris Cay off the Belize mainland in order for us to SCUBA the Blue Hole made famous by Jacques Cousteau. However, weather and shallow water made the approach suicidal. We changed course for Belize City.

Shortly after dawn, Jolene’s queasy, drenched and sea-bedraggled crew maneuvered the sloop past the protective rip-rap of the capital city and into the harbor. No one was permitted to leave the boat until we were thoroughly and expertly shook down by the authorities. Belize is one of the most corrupt governments in Central America.

Four officials wearing smiles of anticipation and determination marched in lockstep toward us, clipboards at the ready. One was skinny, one was fat, one was in-between, and the fourth was a young woman in-training. I felt like odd pig out at a luau.

They were all good at boodle, having perfected it to an art form. By the time they finished, we had shelled out a few hundred bucks America. Under the transom, so to speak, in order to “facilitate” our entry and avoid “complications.” At least the woman in-training had the decency to blush like a dark tomato.

“Welcome to Belize,” they said as they took off for the nearest pub with our money.

“There go the gargoyles,” I whispered to Morris.

“Evil is congregating in the Butterfield Mansion,” he said in a voice edge and so hard and sharp that it made Judy tremble. “It’s the evil behind… what’s happening all across the country. There has to be a first shot fired to let them know Americans will fight when they’re cornered. I don’t know how it’s all going to end. All I know is that if we give up now, there’s no place to escape to.” (From Charles W. Sasser’s newest thriller A Thousand Years of Darkness. Available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and fine book stores nationwide.)