I am not alone in having to guess: as I read what experts had to say about this particular era, I was struck by how current theories attract consensus and controversy, and how some dogma, accepted in the past, has fallen into disfavor. If you asked me to examine a skull from thousands of years ago and come to a scientific conclusion, the best I could do would be to say, “I think this dude is dead.” But through a lot of hard work by dedicated men and women, we have very complex explanations for a lot of the fossil puzzles from long ago. Explanations which are, of course, impossible to prove.
If you are one of these scientists, I hope you’ll understand that I took artistic license in pursuit of the story I was writing. We cannot for sure identify the diet of every tribe that was wandering Eurasia at that time—in my telling, the Northern Tribes have not yet managed to successfully hunt horses, as an example, though other humans were certainly living on horse flesh. I took a lot of today’s generally accepted theories about early humans in general and adapted them to a story about a very small number of people in particular. I will cheerfully admit I am far more likely to have committed errors in this regard than might have been the case if I had first pursued a doctorate in paleontology. Of course, I’m not bright enough to get a PhD, so the story of The Dog Master would have been put on indefinite hold while I kept flunking my dissertation.
But, as anyone who has ever read A Dog’s Purpose knows, I am rather fond of our four-legged friends, and I’m pretty enamored with the idea that if it hadn’t been for them, we might have entered the Ice Age and not come out the other side.
(I know that technically we are still in an Ice Age, but I went to Hawaii on my honeymoon and can state rather confidently that some areas of the planet have fully recovered.)
Finally, my attention is very much grabbed by the question posed by Professor Morby in the epilogue. The stage has been set, the players are in position, and the most dramatic and challenging time in the entire history of our species is about to commence.
What did happen next?
W. BRUCE CAMERON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
None of the characters in this book are based on real people, I promise. I don’t personally know anyone from the Upper Paleolithic, though I did have a coach in junior high that we were all convinced was a Neanderthal.
At the end of this section I’m going to list some of the books I used in my research, but I need to especially thank John F. Hoffecker, author of many publications on the archaeology of people in cold environments, including Desolate Landscapes: Ice-Age Settlement in Eastern Europe. Mr. Hoffecker very patiently answered my questions about what life was like for humans and other animals back 30,000 years ago, steering me away from some of my misconceptions—an early draft of The Dog Master, as an example, had packs of hyenas running around everywhere, instead of being the nearly extinct creatures they would have been. I was also persuaded that people didn’t have iPods—those would come later.
To learn about wolves I studied my dog Tucker, from whom I concluded that wolves prefer to sleep in the sun all day and bark at the UPS man. Thank you, Tucker, your fierce attacks on your squeaky toy gave me real insight as to the savagery of your lupine ancestors. I also spoke to some people who own wolves as pets to learn what it is like to live with them. The people requested their names not be included here, but I appreciated them sharing their experiences. My opinion: wolves are wild animals and should only be domesticated if injury or other circumstance makes such an arrangement unavoidable. It’s better to just get a schnauzer. And it’s amazing how much one can learn about wolf puppies just by watching videos on the internet, though usually after an hour I’m wasting time laughing at cat videos.
Some key people assisted me with writing this novel. Connection House, which administers my Web page, also provided research into such things as “what kind of birds were living in cliffs back then? Where did people go to get a latte?” My son Chase Cameron helped me track changes when I did a massive rewrite on the fifth draft. And Cathryn Michon, who I tricked into marrying me a few years ago, suspended work on the most recent movie she directed (Muffin Top: A Love Story, still out on VOD if you’re interested) to read draft after draft, providing her notes and ideas and insights. She probably married me just for the experience of doing all the extra free work.
Thank you Kassandra Brenot for providing translation so my characters spoke French and not Google.
Tackling such a huge issue as one of the most pivotal events in human history not only requires a lot of stamina in the writing, but the editing process is Herculean as well. Kristin Sevick did a great job staying on top of the details through each rewrite.
Thanks to the people at Forge who are all lined up behind my novels. It’s a huge team, but I want to specifically thank Tom, Karen, Kathleen, Patty, and Linda for everything they’ve done to support my work and my career.
Thanks, Scott Miller at Trident, for fighting the forces of evil and for being my literary agent.
Steve Younger, Steve Fisher, Steve Iwanyk. Thanks for making it so easy to remember your first names. Oh, and also for seeing to it that my works get sold to Hollywood, where they are very, very slowly being made into movies. Very slowly.
Gavin Palone, thank you for bringing sanity to an insane process.
Monica Perkins, thank you for all the coffee and for keeping so many things on track. I get that people have to grow, to move on, to try new things, I just never wanted that to happen with you.
Elliott Crowe does most of the work I am supposed to be doing as producer of independent movies like the aforementioned Muffin Top and the soon-to-be-released Cook Off. It gives me more time to write and also means things get done correctly, which I so appreciate. If you try to quit, I will hunt you down like an animal.
Thanks Fly HC and Hillary Carlip for wbrucecameron.com and adogspurpose.com, both beautiful sites.
The coolest part about being an author is that I get to meet other writers. No, seriously, to me, writers have always been like rock stars. Claire LaZebnik and Samantha Dunn and Jillian Lauren and Andrew Gross are not only cool people, but they like me, they really like me! Nelson DeMille told me many, many years ago that he would help me with my career, and he’s still at it—he blurbed my novel The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man. So did Lee Child, known in the literary world as one of the nicest writers alive. I’m really grateful.
My award-winning teacher sister Amy Cameron wrote the study guides for Emory’s Gift, A Dog’s Purpose, and A Dog’s Journey. I’m going to see if I can talk to her about doing one for The Dog Master. They are excellent, took a ton of work, are written to Common Core standards, and are available free on my website.
Thanks to Tom Rooker. What, exactly, are we doing?
Thank you, Carolina and Annie. You can stop growing up now.
When I started writing The Dog Master, my father, William J. Cameron, MD, was still alive and gave me insight into the sorts of dumb questions writers ask doctors, such as, “what does it feel like to give birth?” (Even though he was a gynecologist, he told me to ask my mother.) Sadly, my father passed away before ever reading even a draft of The Dog Master, which I consider the most ambitious work of my career. I am grateful to him for many things, of course, but one of them is being my official advisor for medical topics. That duty has passed on to my sister Julie Cameron, MD, who puts up with my queries even though she’s a bit busy saving lives. I am so grateful to have this resource in the family, as asking hypothetical questions about fictional situations usually isn’t covered by my health insurance.
My whole family supports everything I do, even though Eloise and Gordon are too young to know or care much about it. Thanks to Chelsea, James, Georgia, and Chase, and especially thanks to my Mom, Monsie Cameron, who forces everyone she knows to buy two or three copies of each of my books and will boycott any store that doesn’t sell my novels, even the gas station.
If you’ve slogged your way through all of this, you probably read the bo
ok as well, and I want to thank you for that. Without you I wouldn’t have a career, and all of my stories would remain trapped in my head. I feel so lucky to have your support.
W. BRUCE CAMERON
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bahn, Paul. Journey Through the Ice Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Barry, Scott. Wolf Empire: An Intimate Portrait of a Species. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2007.
Bickerton, Derek. Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. New York: Hill & Wang, 2009.
Brantingham, Jeffrey; Steven; Kuhn Kristopher Kerry. The Early Upper Paleolithic Beyond Western Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Busch, Robert. The Wolf Almanac: A Celebration of Wolves and Their World. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2007.
Cooper, Margaret. Exploring the Ice Age. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2001.
Cunliffe, Barry. The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Daniels, Edwin. Wolf Walking. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1997.
Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
Finlayson, Clive. The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hoffecker, John. Desolate Landscapes: Ice-Age Settlement in Eastern Europe. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Klein, Richard and Edgar, Blake. The Dawn of Human Culture: A Bold New Theory on What Sparked the “Big Bang” of Human Consciousness. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. (ed.). Hunters, Farmers and Civilizations—Old World Archaeology: Readings from Scientific American. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1979.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre. The Hunters of Prehistory. New York: Macmillan, 1989.
Lopez, Barry. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
Mellars, Paul. The Neanderthal Legacy: An Archaeological Perspective from Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Morey, Darcy. Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Roberts, J. M. A History of Europe. New York: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1996.
Sharp, Robert. Living Ice: Understanding Glaciers and Glaciation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Stringer, Chris. Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013.
Upper Paleolithic. Memphis, TN: Books LLC, Wiki Series, 2011.
Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. New York: Penguin, 2006.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. BRUCE CAMERON is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of A Dog’s Purpose, A Dog’s Journey, and The Dogs of Christmas. He lives in California. You can sign up for email updates here.
BY W. BRUCE CAMERON
Ellie’s Story: A Dog’s Purpose Novel
The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man
The Dogs of Christmas
A Dog’s Purpose
A Dog’s Journey
Emory’s Gift
8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter
How to Remodel a Man
8 Simple Rules for Marrying My Daughter
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Present Day
Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Present Day
Book Two
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Present Day
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
By W. Bruce Cameron
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE DOG MASTER
Copyright © 2015 by W. Bruce Cameron
All rights reserved.
Map by Jennifer Hanover
Cover art © Shutterstock
Cover design by Jeff Miller, Faceout Studio
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-7463-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-4297-7 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466842977
First Edition: August 2015
The Dog Master: A Novel of the First Dog Page 43
