We live in strange times. Turn on the TV and scroll through the channels, and you’re likely to find, at any given hour, a “reality show” based on the premise of someone surviving in the outdoors. From Survivormanto Naked and Afraid to Man vs. Wild to the grandaddy of the genre, Survivor, we are awash in spectacles of a kind heretofore unknown in history. Until recently, surviving the elements was the daily preoccupation for most humans. We are the first people to have turned that struggle into a passive form of entertainment.
As detached as we are from experience, it’s no wonder that much of what we “know” about wilderness survival is wrong. The endurance events on television are largely staged, and even the actual experts are filtering their knowledge through a medium that prizes amusement above all else.
To be clear, I enjoy a thrilling tale of survival as much as the next person! But as someone who has spent a rough-and-tumble life in the Maine outdoors and survived my share of ordeals, from a lightning strike to hypothermia to broken bones, I am a stickler for accuracy. One of the reasons Jack London’s masterful short story “To Build a Fire” remains so gripping is because every reader who encounters it senses that it could only have been written by someone who experienced -50˚ F temperatures firsthand.
Which brings me to the book before you. No one knows more about the Maine outdoors than its game wardens. The first line in their job description is a readiness to retrieve the lost, the injured, and the dead from the state’s most remote woods and waters.
DEAD BY DAWN is the twelfth in my series of novels about Maine game warden Mike Bowditch, and from the start of the saga, I knew that I would write a book that put my protagonist to the ultimate test. Mike has rescued others from the elements in prior installments — now the person he must save is himself.
And he must do it while being pursued by an unknown enemy who refuses to show himself (or is it herself?). Someone wants Mike Bowditch dead, enough to effectively run him off the road and into an icy river. His only chance of surviving the night is to deduce not just who is after him but why.
As I was considering the best way to tell this story, I decided to use what is, for me, a radically new structure. The chapters alternate between Mike’s present predicament — as he tries to endure the elements while outwitting his opponent — and the increasingly tense hours leading up to his fateful plunge into the frozen Androscoggin River. The true identity of his enemy and the solution to the mysteries plaguing him can only be found in the interactions he had that day, reviewing a cold case that was assumed to be an accidental drowning but which he now realizes had to have been murder.
In this novel I have done my best to tell a survival story grounded in reality, and I have mined not just my own experiences (although I have not suffered all Mike’s challenges, I am happy to be report) but the experiences of actual wardens. I have also drawn heavily from what I consider to be the best nonfiction book on the subject, DEEP SURVIVAL: WHO LIVES, WHO DIES, AND WHY by Lawrence Gonzalez. It is no coincidence that Mike uses every inner resource Gonzalez identifies as common to survivors.
I am not ashamed to admit that I also drew from the wit and wisdom of our reality television experts—primarily the wit. Former Green Beret Mykel Hawke who co-created Man, Woman, Wild for the Discovery Channel offers some particularly good aphorisms: “Everything you plan and pack will be lost in the event that causes the survival scenario” and “When you think you got it all handled, you’re in the biggest trouble.” That sounds about right to me.
I don’t think I‘m spoiling anything to say that at one point in this book, a freezing wounded Mike Bowditch wonders how he ended up in “the most f@$%ed-up Jack London story of all time.”
I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it.
