Louisiana Voice

If you like to get away from the stress-inducing news of the day (and who doesn’t like to do that these days?), there’s a very good book by a retired Ruston pathologist that I would recommend very highly.

Shadowshine: An Animal Adventure (Guernica World Editions, Toronto, 2019), is a novel by Dr. Johnny Armstrong (whom, despite his being from my hometown, I have somehow never met face to face).

SHADOWSHINE

Dr. Armstrong defines the word Shadowshine as “illumination, usually in the form of moving spots in a shaded background, created by the reflection of light from ripples on the surface of water.”

And while it is not an official word in the English language, the definition is certainly one with which most of us can identify, especially if we’ve ever taken the time to just relax and watch that wonderful creature called nature.

Shadowshine, is what I would describe as a story akin to Watership Down, The Hobbit, or Homer’s Odyssey-lite.

It’s a delightful story about Zak a possum who has a bit of trouble maintaining his train of thought. Orphaned as a baby and raised by squirrels, he is unique in that he is bi-lingual, speaking the language of both rodents and the other animals of his community.

As if that’s not confusing enough, Zak is initially unaware that he is a possum and instead, considers himself a poet.

But don’t ever make the mistake of confusing him with Walt Kelly’s Pogo: he doesn’t have the philosophical mind of Pogo, though like Pogo, he is a friend to (nearly) every creature he meets.

But he and an odd collection of cohabitants, including a vegetarian wolf, a skunk, a mastodon, caribou, bobcats, an owl and a mysterious, mythical-like black panther, among others, come together in a joint effort to save themselves—and a curious tribe of strange creatures who walk upright and have cleavage above their back legs and who don’t appear to be very intelligent—from a marauding evil-doer named Mungo, who likes to burn villages and destroy all who stand in his way.

To do this, he must travel far to the north, away from his friendly environs, to sometimes hostile territory where the weather is bitterly cold and unfriendly. Still, he perseveres in his efforts to gather valuable information about Mungo to bring back to his community.

Without fully realizing it, he is protected along the way by that black panther, Moksoos, who moves in mysterious ways like some kind of Deity, which he most surely must be. But to explain how would be to ruin the story.

Instead, I would like to lift a brief passage from the book that quickly became my favorite quote from Sir Sark, the 800-year-old mastodon he meets during his journey. It’s Sir Sark’s treatise on life and death in the animal kingdom—a lesson we humans would do well to learn:

“Life and aging and their implications have little to do with death. Old age and death are merely a part of the progress of life from the viewpoint of the individual bubble inside the foam on the great wave. And that view can be described as a floating awareness on a river of time. It can peer up and down and out both sides and backward. But it cannot see forward.

“You see, possum, it seems that in one’s youth, one is floating in a broad river that moves so slowly it looks as though it is almost stagnant. Though the river itself is attractive, one might say gorgeous, for some reason the scenery on the shore doesn’t quite meet the river’s standard, so one’s attention is drawn to one’s self and to the water and to how to get it to move along faster.

“But eventually, one looks around and notices that the river really has begun to speed up its flow. And strangely, the shore is now quite beautiful and so fascinating that one wonders why one had not studied it more early on and what one must have been missing while studying one’s self and the water.

“As a little more time goes by, the river begins to move quite rapidly and is becoming narrow and the shore is becoming more and more interesting. The objects on the shore are becoming so attractive that one reaches out to touch them, but it is difficult because the river is moving swiftly as if in a narrow canyon, so the objects get left behind. Objects now so beautiful that they have stolen one’s heart go right by and are gone forever. And as faster and faster rolls the river, more and more objects come up into view that are now alive and have become dear friends and a part of one’s own life, but they are so quickly ripped away that a part of one’s own life goes with them.

“Now as narrower and faster yet goes the river, more and more precious become the friends on the shore. At this point, they are going by so rapidly that one hardly has time to focus before they are gone. And if one so much as even tries to focus on a friend as it goes by, then a whole row of friends who come after it will be, ever so painfully, completely overlooked!

“It is all quite confusing and frustrating, but I suppose one has to accept one’s lot. It could be worse. One could be a possum and miss it all but perhaps a little stagnant water and flotsam.”

This book would make a great animated feature movie and I hope some astute script writer stumbles across it and sees its potential.

You can order the book from Amazon by clicking HERE. The book is $25 and the Kindle edition is $10.99—both well worth the price. Or you can pick one up soon at your local independent book store.

Book signings by Dr. Armstrong will be announced here as they are scheduled.