The Passage
Scott Hawkins | Blacktail | Fantasy | Ep. 19
Scott Hawkins reads from Blacktail , a dark fantasy in which a wolf seeks revenge on humanity for the death of his house dog mate. In this episode, we unpack a passage from the opening chapter, told from the perspective of a lynx, that sets up our introduction to the book’s titular character. Scott chats with Jon and Cory about: Writing from the perspective of animals The multiple scrapped projects he wrote between his debut novel, The Library at Mount Char , and Blacktail His wife as his trusted first reader The checklist he created and reviews drafts against The 80,000 words he spent trying to crack the first chapter of Mount Char that ended up on the cutting room floor The storyline Mount Char borrows from The Godfather (as well as King Lear ) His time at the Taos Toolbox writing workshop with Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams Scott's passage, from Blacktail (sorry, the whole passage wouldn't fit so it was edited slightly for length): The snow stopped shortly after dawn. The sky remained gray, though. A faint disk of white sun glowed behind towering clouds. Hate didn’t mind. He liked things gloomy. He hadn’t gone far before he encountered the first of the scent poems that marked the boundary of the wolf lands. He sniffed it idly, sighed. When marking his own lands he would usually keep it simple, something like “Mine. Leave or die.” The damn wolves, though . . . they always had to make a production of everything. It was even worse than their singing. This one said: White-Eye forgotten daughter alone and childless mate of none claims these lands. None other may hunt here. Yup, Hate thought. That’s wolves for you. Why just get to the point if you can whine first? He sniffed closer. This mark was old—last winter or thereabouts . Last he’d heard, White-Eye was still mateless. But she had borne a litter in the spring, a male and three females. That, in no small part, was why Hate had not been sleeping well, why he had been looking up the mountain when the gunshots rang out. White-Eye alone was bad enough. But with a pack behind her . . . a young pack . . . [...] When Hate first came to this patch of forest, he was young, cocky. Not content to take his share of the rabbits and leave well enough alone, he challenged White-Eye for the mountain one fine spring day. White-Eye subjugated him, leaving a shredded right ear that flopped when he walked. For a while he thought he might lose an eye as well, but in the end it healed. Sometimes, on cold nights when he couldn’t sleep he lay and wondered about that day. Why had she not killed him? He didn’t know. At any rate, he had not tried her again. Instead, he comforted himself with the knowledge that White-Eye was the last of her kind around here and, for all he knew, everywhere else. She would not live forever. He could afford to be patient. He had guile, and Guile as well. Eventually the mountain would belong to them, to their kittens. But now . . . it seemed he had miscalculated the degree of White-Eye’s desperation. The rumor was that she had lowered herself to mate with a house dog, some mongrel slave who’d been drawn to the wild lands by the scent of her estrus. As far as he knew, though, no one had ever caught scent of the father. [...] Alone, White-Eye could live well enough off the meat that dwelled on her hill. She had no reason to challenge him. But with four more mouths to feed it was inevitable that she invade Hate’s valley. He remembered her tooth shredding his right ear, the sting of it. Hot murder boiled up from his belly. His claws thrummed.
