I’m a farm-boy who dropped the pitchfork and picked up the pen. My first 10,000 stories were published in the Toronto Sun Newspaper where I was a staff reporter for 21 years.

It was while voyaging down Ecuador’s Río Napo in a motorized canoe with two river merchants that I decided to write a longer story. We supped on piranha, watched the freshwater dolphins jump. As dusk fell we’d sight a lantern on the Amazon jungle shore and pull over to sleep on the floor of a colonist’s hut. Our hostess gift: we brought news of the outside world. I slept one night on the Peruvian-Ecuadorean Amazon border in the shack of a family whose two young sons had been swallowed by a river boat.

So my first novel, Lázaro, was the tale of a feral child raised by Amazon River dolphins. It won a now discontinued prize for the year’s top first-novel in Canada and was made into an MGM feature motion picture called Where the River Runs Black. It premierd with a gala screening at TIFF in 1986

I wrote it in a house outside Lima situated along the main road over the mountains to the cocaine fields of Tingo María. The Policía de Investigaciones del Perú—the local FBI—raided the house and broke up some furniture and ate the mangoes from the garden tree. But they let me go rather than cart me off for tortura blanda at Lima’s Casa Rosada.

My second novel, Inkarrí—it means ‘Redeemer’ in Quechua, the language of the Inca—I wrote longhand at a table in a rented apartment in Cuzco, ancient capital of the Incan Empire. It depicts the adult life of Lázaro, child hero of my first novel. It tells of Lázaro’s stumbling upon an ancient ayllu—an Incan clan—that has waited 500 years in their lost altiplano valley for the sacred emperor’s orders. Instead, orders come from the Lima government to have them removed to make way for a hydro project. But the clan takes orders only from a higher authority. Sling shots against helicopters and automatic weaponry. Environment vs. industrialization.

And so began my string of nine ‘ecological thrillers’. Tales of environmental plunder, the exterminating of the shark population, the trade in endangered white female gyrfalcons at $100,000 a bird, the harvesting of bear bile, the demolition of ancient heritages, the ravaging of pristine tribal cultures and environments, the Pacific islands devastated by phosphate mining. They’re not didactic sermons. They’re thrillers, rife with sex and violence and tension and exotic settings. They’re the waning dreams of Conservation Officers. They’re the stories of 10,000 forgotten animals in a world overrun by one predatory animal.

David E. Kendall

I’m a farm-boy who dropped the pitchfork and picked up the pen. My first 10,000 stories were published in the Toronto Sun Newspaper where I was a staff reporter for 21 years.