How did Michelle set about creating Torak's world? Six thousand years ago (i.e. after that Ice Age but before farming) the people of northern Europe lived in small clans, hunting and gathering their food. Michelle wanted the reader to be there in the Forest with Torak and Renn and Wolf: to experience the sights, smells, sounds, and feelings of the adventure. To recreate this almost-vanished universe, she decided to track down the last remaining traces of this way of life. This is how she did it...

For WOLF BROTHER, I rode a total of 300 miles in the forests of north-eastern Finland and northern Lapland. Among other things:-

• I slept on reindeer skins in a traditional open-fronted Finnish shelter called a laavu (surprisingly warm, despite a ground-frost!).
• I ate elk heart, reindeer, forest berries and spruce resin (which in the Stone Age was used as a kind of antiseptic chewing-gum; I can confirm that it tastes like cough medicine).
• I studied traditional Sami (Lapp) methods for preparing reindeer hides, including learning which parts of the hide are best for making different kinds of clothing (eg shin-hide for boots).
• I picked up forest beliefs and customs from people who've lived there for generations, such as how to carry fire in a roll of bark.
• I tried out a traditional birchbark horn (and was told that my attempt sounded like an angry elk).
• I peered into the mouth of a very large brown bear to find out what colour it was (a dark greyish purple - and that wasn't because he'd been eating blueberries!). But I admit, the bear was behind a fence when I did this.
• I had my first sight of the Aurora borealis, which I found every bit as awe-inspiring as Torak and Renn.

At times, some of this research was very far from comfortable, but even the uncomfortable bits - for example, getting freezing hands and feet on one dismal, sleety ride in Lapland - were crucial, because they impressed on me the importance of keeping my hero warm and dry!


For SPIRIT WALKER, much of which happens by the Sea, I made a number of trips in the summer and autumn:-

• To get ideas for what the Seal Islands might be like, I went to the Lofoten Islands of north Norway, and stayed in a rorbu (a fisherman's hut built on stilts over the water). I was there at the time of the midnight sun (when the story takes place), and spent several days roaming the hills and beaches, travelling the sea by small boat, and imagining Torak and his friends there too.
• I saw white-tailed sea-eagles wheeling above the cliffs, and hiked at midnight (in the blazing sun) to a cave containing 5,000-year-old rock paintings.
• In Trømsø, north Norway, I studied five delightful bearded seals, and learned from the researchers who look after them what it's like to be a seal.
• I also travelled to Greenland, to learn how the Inuit people traditionally built and handled kayaks, hunted seals, and made their clothes, weapons and shelters out of whale-bone, seal-hide and birdskin.
• I discovered that hiking alone in Greenland can be scary - as when I saw a polar bear in the distance, and made a dignified retreat!
• I learned from a Greenlandic girl that Torak means "perfect" in Greenlandic!
• I ate some of the Inuit food: raw whale blubber, seal (including raw seal liver and blubber), seaweed, and fish eyes. Some of it didn't taste too good (at least to me), but it's what Torak eats in the book, so I had to try it. (NB: the Greenlandic and Danish Governments are strict about conservation, and Greenlanders respect what they eat, and don't waste any part of a kill. For these reasons I thought it appropriate to sample these foods.)
  

• In November 2004, I travelled to the remote region of Tysfjord in north Norway to study the killer whales who congregate here in extraordinary numbers to feed on the herring. I witnessed close up the killer whales' unique "carousel" mode of feeding on the herring - accompanied by a screaming tumult of white-tailed eagles and gulls.
• I also swam with the killer whales in the fjord! I admit I was a bit apprehensive beforehand, but as Torak was going to do it, I thought I should too. I'll never forget the feeling of snorkelling in a dry-suit in the second deepest fjord in Norway (900m of water beneath me!), with one of the world's top predators feeding a few feet away. I could clearly hear the killer whales whistling and clicking to each other underwater - and the highlight was when I saw a huge male killer whale swimming at incredible speed about 20 feet below me. Luckily, he was far more interested in the herring than in me.
• Also in Tysfjord, I clambered up the rocks to study the Dyreberget, or Animal Rock: a fantastically atmospheric collection of ancient rock carvings (said to be 9000 years old, although no-one really knows) - which gave me the inspiration for the Crag in the book.

For SOUL EATER, Torak must journey in winter to the frozen wastes of the Far North, where the Ice clans teach him vital secrets of snow survival. To research it I made the following trips in the winter of 2004-5:-

• I travelled to the mountains of Transylvania to experience the snowbound Forest in winter, and to study the tracks of both hunters and prey in the snow. I was guided by a wolf and raven biologist who is also an experienced tracker, and with him I studied the tracks of wolf, lynx, fox, badger, weasel, deer, boar, and many more.
• I also went to Greenland in winter and to north Norway, to study snow survival among the Inuit and Sami peoples - and picked up tips on husky-sledding and winter seal-hunting.
• I watched icebergs calving, and listened to the mysterious sounds of hammering and cracking from inside a glacier.

Miscellaneous trips: in addition to the above trips which I made specifically to research the books, I have over the years made many trips which I have used in writing the books.

• The Shetland Isles: in 1988 I rented a remote cottage on Unst, the northernmost island in the British Isles. My notes on the seals, seabirds and scenery were very useful in writing SPIRIT WALKER.
• The Hardanger region of Norway: in 1988 I spent two weeks in an isolated cottage on the Hardangerfjord. Again, I've used my notes of that time in writing the books.
• Iceland: in 1992 I spent two weeks riding Icelandic horses across the north-west part of the island. Again, I have used my notes of this trip, and will do so for future books in the series.
• The Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada: In 1997 I took a year's sabbatical from being a lawyer, and made two six-week solo trips to the US, hiking alone in the National Parks. I picked up the atmosphere of the forests, and sighted elk, moose, mule deer, opsrey, and porcupine. I also had my encounter with the bear (see below), and made a kind of "tree pilgrimage" to see the giant sequoias and redwoods in California and Oregon, and the world's oldest living organisms, the bristlecone pines, in the Sierra Nevada (some are 7000-8000 years old).
• The Chihuahua Desert of northern Mexico, and the American South-west: on a five-day horseback ride across the desert I studied Native American uses of desert plants, while in the South-west I visited Anasazi ruins, and gained a strong impression of how the resourcefulness of indigenous.
• The foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Poland: I hiked alone in some very wild forest. By day I found fresh wolf tracks, and also, one unnerving occasion, a large, steaming pile of droppings (I wasn't sure if they'd been made by a bison or a bear!). By night I heard the unearthly bellows of red deer in rut, and once, memorably, the faraway howls of a wolf pack...

WOLF RESEARCH

In addition to location research, I had to do lots of research for Wolf. How does Wolf's world differ from Torak's? What is the common ground? What are the unbridgeable differences? For me, writing the parts of the story from Wolf's point of view was one of the most enjoyable things about WOLF BROTHER; and it's clear from the many letters I've received that both children and adults love this aspect of the story - perhaps because it makes them see their own pets with new eyes.

But how did I go about writing from Wolf's point of view?

Since I was a child, I've read everything I could find about wolves, so I know a fair bit about them. Thus the wolf talk which Torak uses is as close as I can get to real wolf talk. For example, when he asks Wolf to play, or muzzle-grabs him, that's how a real wolf might invite play, or discipline a pesky cub.

But as regards the language that Wolf himself uses, that came to me by knowing something about how wolves perceive the world, and then by imagining how Wolf would think, and how he would experience the Forest. In other words, I had to get inside Wolf's mind: to see the Forest through his eyes - and more importantly, through his nose and ears!

From the start, I knew that when he first meets Torak, Wolf mistakes him for another wolf, because of the strip of wolf skin which Torak wears on his jerkin. Knowing that, I began to understand how Wolf would perceive Torak, with his complicated forepaws and his puzzling lack of a tail. I realized that Wolf would regard Torak as a special kind of tailless wolf: hence Wolf's name for him, "Tall Tailless". From then on, I began to know Wolf better, and the rest flowed naturally from there. However, I always bear in mind that although Wolf is cute because he's a cub, he's also an authentic wolf - and therefore, even to Torak, in some ways he's ultimately unknowable.

Since then, I've been lucky enough to meet some real wolves at a wolf sanctuary, where I was able to put what I know of wolf talk to the test. I'm happy to say that it worked!

LIBRARY RESEARCH

In addition to location and wolf research, I also did lots of library research. What weapons did Torak's people use? What shelters did they build? For that I've studied archaeology. And to fill in the gaps, I've taken clues from the ways of life of more recent traditional people, including the Inuit and Native American peoples, the San of Africa, the Ainu of Japan, the Sami of Lapland, and certain central and south American tribes.

The more I studied, the more I realized that the term `hunter-gatherer' can be misleading, evoking (at least for me) a picture of someone casually spotting a clump of berries and saying, `Oh, good, I think I'll gather some of those'. In fact, hunter-gatherers had to be experts about their world. They had to know precisely when particular plants bore fruit or nuts; when the bark of different trees was at its best for making rope, and where such trees could be found, and so on. The more I learned, the more I understood how unbelievably skilled these people were. It's as far from The Flintstones as you could possibly imagine!

But the world of the clans is about more than tracking prey and scraping hides. How did they think? What did they believe about life and death? Again, I've learnt from more modern hunter-gatherers. I've found that many similarities among them:-

• Because hunter-gatherers travel often, they don't tend to value possessions as much as we do (you wouldn't, would you, if you had to carry them around?).
• They often don't have a concept of owning land.
• They value the qualities you need for hunting: patience, resilience, and the ability to listen (hence the idea of Torak being "the Listener").
• Often they treat their spear or bow as a valued `hunting partner', not just as an object (hence Renn and her bow). They treat their prey with respect, honouring its spirit, and taking care to use of every part of it.

It'll be be clear by now that I've tried very hard to make Torak's world accurate; and recently I had confirmation that I might have succeeded, when I was asked to open a special Wolf Brother display case at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The Museum has taken excerpts from the book, and exhibited them along with real archaeological artefacts mentioned in the story, such as flint flakes, red ochre, etc. I was delighted that the book has been so honoured!