In 1970, just as he was about to publish the short story collection Elephant Bangs Train which launched his career as a versatile, prolific writer, William Kotzwinkle moved from New York City to rural New Brunswick, Maine, where he and his wife bought an old farm house. Kotzwinkle recalls "we lived for years in a shack without electricity or plumbing . . . when you live like that, you touch something that moves through the forest." Among other signals that Kotzwinkle responded to in this setting, he began to have recurrent dreams in which "animals came to me, night after night, telling me, "We've got something to say!'" His response to this vision was the animal fable Dr. Rat (1976), a powerful indictment of human mistreatment of other species and as Kotzwinkle puts it, "a political book (that) had to do with the dangerous split between us and our animal...