HOLY GROUND TRILOGY VOLUME III: THE BIRD SHAMAN

 

     What if there were a power capable of forcing everyone everywhere to stop damaging the biosphere?  What would such a power be like, what means would it employ, and how would Earth’s people react to it?  The Bird Shaman addresses these questions dramatically, by following the actions and passions of two exceptional characters on whom, as it turns out, the futures of both humans and alien invaders depend.


     The year is 2037, the 27th year of Hefn occupation.  The curtain rolls up on a planet massively destabilized by an abrupt acute breakdown in relations—always shaky—between the dictatorial Hefn and the human population of Earth.  The Baby Ban imposed by mass hypnosis to force compliance with ZPG has reduced population numbers, and made Earth a cleaner and wilder place. But it has now lasted so long, and provoked such hatred, that when a spark is struck the two sides explode into wordwide riots on one side and retaliatory mindwipings on the other.  Years of effort by the Gaians, who mediate between Hefn and humanity, have been destroyed.

   While the Gaians regroup and brainstorm frantically in an atmosphere of doubt and danger, one obsessed alien and one young woman privately begin a radical experiment.  Pam Pruitt has discovered her growing ability to acquire information by non-rational means.   It emerges that childhood suffering has enabled her, in a way once understood by hunting and gathering peoples—an understanding lost with that lost lifeway—to communicate with mysterious powers on behalf of her community.  Or, put another way, to function in the role of a shaman. 

    Skeptical since young adulthood, Pam is reluctant to accept that the capacity developing within herself is real.  But random moments of waking illumination evolve into lucid dreaming, and when critical information she gains through such dreams is twice confirmed in realtime experience, she stops trying to avoid the bizarre role events have evidently chosen her to play.  Aided, abetted, manipulated, goaded, and ultimately persuaded by the Hefn Humphrey, Pam commits herself to learning how to use her newfound abilities, thereby providing Humphrey with information he can use to resolve the crisis but can’t get for himself.  Having convinced her to work at this fascinating and challenging task, Humphrey himself is wild with hopeful excitement, to a degree that puzzles and faintly alarms his human friends; but the urgent need to avoid worldwide disaster takes precedence over everything else.


     In the haunting, hazardous redrock deserts of Utah among rock art panels painted by the long-vanished Barrier Canyon culture, and again at a Gaian shrine in the recovering Kentucky wilderness, Pam confronts her own power to see into the future, and wrestles with the moral dilemma of what she must do when a third lucid dream exposes the key to the aliens’ real mission on Earth.  

    The Bird Shaman explores a complex web of themes and subjects, but two are always in the foreground:  the quizzical nature of human nature, and the true value and meaning of Planet Earth.   It evokes vividly, and with fierce passion, two contrasting landscapes:  the Ohio River Valley and the desert canyons of southeastern Utah.  These are Gaia.  They represent everything we stand to lose unless humanity can find solutions to the problems dramatized in this novel.