Seen The Elephant, Heard The Owl

Willamette-Cascade, a large and powerful wood products company, is harvesting burned old growth timber in an alternate world free of humanity. A traitor within their ranks alerts environmental extremists who move to stop the company. Led by the hyper-violent Everett Loving III, who survived Viet Nam tormented by the ghosts of those who did not, a band of mercenaries arm and train for an assault on the timber company compound in 'Alongside,' the alternate Earth. But 'Alongside' is not our world, the mega-fauna there is extinct here, and someone else has gotten there first. And then there's this little girl...but is she?

After signing a year-long intern contract with Willamette-Cascade, assigned to Guatemala, David Hampson awakens in an Oregon which isn't his, quartered in what he thinks of as a 'company town' populated by cheerful millworkers, dedicated support personnel, soccer-playing schoolchildren, and well-weaponed security people. His minder is an old environmental acquaintance, Susan Meath, who signed up a year earlier. Susan poo-poos David's fears and teases him about his job, helping Ornithologist Hobart Morris breed Northern Spotted Owls in an enormous climate-controlled aviary known as the 'Owl Factory.' When ready, nearly four thousand mature Spotted Owls will be released in our world to blunt the efforts of the environmental movement, which has locked-down logging in the Pacific Northwest. But trouble is coming in the form of 'Planet Prime,' an organization which thinks 'Earth First' is a 'bunch of wusses.' Armed with AK-47s and thousand of rounds of ammunition, their well-prepared force will turn 'Alongside' into a smouldering ruin and bring Willamette-Cascade's greedy dreams to an end.

A former millworker who currently owns five chainsaws, D. J. Bershaw lives in the forest with a long-suffering spouse and works in the Health Care industry. 'Seen The Elephant, Heard The Owl' is his eighth novel.