Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

I've been reading and researching various aspects of history - Dickens' London, Nelson's sea battles, Magellan's nautical explorations, the weapons and battles and key figures of the American Civil War - for most of my life. I pick up a book here or there or see a documentary or talk with an expert in the subject, and my curiosity about the one area of study and discovery always leads to another.

Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren't really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn't know they were insane.

He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that--it didn't work.

He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.

I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.

Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.