Ask the Author: David Fitz-Gerald
Answered Questions (4)
David Fitz-Gerald
In the language of the old West, they’ve long been called buffalo. That is the word woven into history, the stories, and the landscape, from Buffalo Bill Cody to Buffalo, New York, to Buffalo, Wyoming. It has a certain ring to it and sticks to the hide like the curls on a buffalo’s hump.
David Fitz-Gerald
How easy it was to be a buffalo. It was a gas to fill a novel with their sounds and body language, including snorts, grunts, scratching, wallowing, and tail flicks. At times, it felt like the story wanted to be told a certain way and I was following along like a migrating herd. It was an immersive perspective, and more than once I felt like one of the lesser bulls within the story. In the end, it is a blessing to just be a buffalo.
David Fitz-Gerald
Yes. The bones of the story are firmly rooted in the genre. There are threats on every horizon, shifting landscapes, and constant pressure to survive. At the same time, there’s a quiet sense of continuity beneath it all, as if the canyons and herds remember more than the present moment. The perspective may be different, but the stakes are exactly what readers expect from a western.
David Fitz-Gerald
I wanted to put readers inside a world that traditional westerns often ride past. The great herds move along paths shaped long before them. Generations of buffalo echo a long-extinct species, the extinct mammoths who first blazed trails across the West. Those ancient ones live on through instinct, memory, and legend. It gave me a chance to tell a story from an animal’s point of view and portray a character closer to John Wayne than Bambi or Simba.
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