It’s particularly fitting (although I didn’t plan it this way) that the final manuscript for my greatly expanded edition of LET NO DAY DAWN THAT THE ANIMALS CANNOT SHARE should be 100% ready for submission to KDP TODAY, which is Deaken’s birthdate. He was born on May 16th, 1979 and lived until September 11th, 1996.

Deaken has been a part of my heart forever since the day I saw him in his denbox with his mom, Rhodesia (Dea). His father was named Kenya, so I made his name out of their names: Deaken, to honor his parentage.   But so many other critters have nestled in there, too, and I wanted to share as many as I could before I’ve gone kaput, taking my memories out of the reach of mortals. These creatures all deserve some sort of eternal afterlife.

Thank you, Samoel Black, for doing the heaving lifting with numbering the pages, and thank you, Lisa Twining, for creating a cover that perfectly expresses the hearts that beat inside this new extended version, which is four times the length of the earlier versions. There are no additional poems, but there’s a cornucopia of essays and pieces curated from my three blog posts and from scans of an article  about one of my exploits that made it into the news.  And that reminds me, there might be something online more about the beaver rescue (and a grizzly bear cub rescue!) that I undertook as Field Service Director with the Animal Protection Institute in the early and mid-1980’s. If I find more, I will post them here in a future blog.

This is what the final cover will look like except that the word VERSION will be replaced by EDITION

I hope you will buy and enjoy the book yourself so much that you’ll decide to give additional copies as gifts to other animal lovers you know far in the future. It has beens o much fun resurrecting these reminiscences for you.

Update: Found a grizzly account of what happened to the beavers we didn’t get out in time in the beaver ranch bankruptcy matter.(We only had something like a five-day window to make anything happen for the beavers, as I recall and we had just a couple trucks to haul the beaver families in.) The 200 beavers that were rescued were rescued by us (API) and THE FUND FOR ANIMALS. I was front and center bulding the transport cages and driving them to the ranches and releasing them into the wild. The article on our rescue efforts is in this extended edition of LET NO DAY DAWN.