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Haint: A Tale of Extraterrestrial Intervention and Love Across Time and Space

by Joy Ward, foreword by William Wegman

194 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-0573; ISBN 1-4120-5675-6; US$18.95, C$24.00, EUR15.60, £10.81

How did we evolve? Did we have help? In a world torn apart by cataclysmic climate changes, survivors answer these immortal questions as they join together based on their love of dogs.

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

How did we evolve? Did we have help? In a world torn apart by cataclysmic climate changes, survivors learn answers to these immortal questions as they join together based on their love of various dog breeds. Two voices, the weimaraner Haint and his mistress Amanda, tell the story of how each in their own way come to the realization of what they mean to each other. Along the way, Haint explains how his species came to help humans along in their evolutionary development. Haint also reveals that the world is becoming inhabitable for humans and dogs so he and his kind must make the decision whether to save themselves and what they have learned over the thousands of years on Earth or stay and take their chances with the doomed humans.

Amanda, accompanied by her friends Kern and Liddy and their canine familiars Haint and Cloudy, travel across a landscape with violent weather and competing tribes as they look for a way to save their "breed" from drought. During the trip they take on an enigmatic young girl who is much more than she appears.

Haint is the story of lives entangled over thousands of years and hundreds of lifetimes as dogs and humans discover the depths of their love for each other.

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About the Author

Joy Ward was raised with Weimaraners and currently lives with two Weimaraners, Sol and Cloudy. Annie, a redbone coonhound, completes the family.

Ward has written for numerous publications including international, national and regional magazines. Her credits include Mother Jones, On the Issues, Commerce, and Governmental Review.

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Excerpts

Foreword

If you live with weimaraners as I do, if you were raised with weimaraners as Joy Ward was, in no time they begin to cast a spell on you. Gray becomes colorful. You become hypnotized. They invade your mind and tell you all sorts of things leading you to construct imaginary worlds. They may tell you that they are tall and walk on two legs. Their laser opal eyes pierce your brain and show you how you need to organize your life around them. You will be choosing furniture THEY like. They may start wearing your clothes. You will need to change your schedule. No more two hour movies or dining out. You may have a yard, a field, a pasture, the entire valley and if you are not out there with them they will come and get you. No use hiding in your car. They can smell you a trip away. You will never be alone even if you want to be. They have become your private home theatre.

If you are me, you will spend a lot of time thinking up names. You will take pictures. Over time you will look deeper and deeper into their fur and observe the light and reflective color that is the weimaraner. While borrowing their bodies, which they generously and eagerly lend, you will try to look into their minds. The observable blinks into the unfathomable. This abyss of yearning, over time, will lead you to a narrative. If you are Joy Ward, raised with weims in Memphis, they lead to a startling cautionary tale set in the future where weimaraners have taken over the world. And that's a good thing. William Wegman

Author/Photographer/Artist

Chapter 1: Haint

They are so frail! Not their bodies, those last longer than ours. Their souls, their minds, their hearts. Those things are so much weaker than ours. They seem to fade with each death.

We live ten, fifteen of their years. They hold on for 60, 70, 80 years. And yet, it is as if they must rewrite their existences each time they are born. How so different from us. How so, so, there is no better word than frail. Frail of spirit.

I know the bodies we've formed make us targets for abuse and pain, but our spirits have memory. We are of stronger stuff than the humans. When we love, it is with memory of other times and lives. When they love it is like children searching for a misplaced light in a dark hallway. It's almost a perpetual game of hide-and-go-seek. They die and then they must find each other all over again.

We, on the other hand, are creatures of much sturdier essence. Our memories, and our spirits, stay with us throughout time. We are born knowing who and what we are. We recognize each other through various lengths of muzzle or change of skin. We watch our humans as they change, sometimes growing in spirit and sometimes not. We love, and follow them through their lives.

Maybe follow is not the right term. We are their silent teachers, their subtle leaders and their unseen guides. We follow in the sense that a piano teacher follows the career of a talented pupil or a proud father follows his child's development into adulthood. This is what we do as a species - lead others' into their own adulthood.

Some, like my Amanda, are closer to us. I have followed her for thousands of years and hundreds of lives. She is as close to me as any of my own species, here or back on our world. From the moment we met, both of us became MORE. For me, her presence increased my then-new physical senses so that I could see more sharply and feel more deeply. For my part, I have done what I could to help her grow and become more than human. At least more than most humans.

Poor humans. Poor, frail humans. They have become more to us than we ever expected. We love them at our own peril and pain. We love them even though we know their souls are more ephemeral, and thus more subject to withering away, than our own. We love them even though we know they will soon disappear.

And above all, I love Amanda. She is my anchor to this world. I can no more imagine life without her than I could willingly relinquish my sense of smell that paints the colors of my world. She is the spirit I follow in life, and the essence I teach in the times between. Hers are the smells I seek out every time I am reborn in this form. Hers is the touch that calms my back. Amanda is as much me, as this four-legged form I wear.

But we, I, must make hard choices. In time that is all too short.

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Catalogue Information

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