Using their instinct, the animals will tell the stories if we listen to them very carefully.
Big Pine Lake is a real place and the animals in the stories, really lived there When I was a young man, I was lucky enough to be able to watch and listen.
Big Pine Lake is really Crescent Lake in Enfield, Connecticut. The family of woodchucks lived on the High Meadow overlooking the lake. The places identified in the stories and the animals are real. The animals that frequented the lake were regular guests in my back yard and were a constant source of amazement.
My young son used to wait every spring and every fall for the return of the Canada Geese. He would stand at the end of our dock with his bag of cracked corn, waving and calling, "Welcome back geese!" and they would swim to him, tentatively at first, to be fed. J. Duncan Beaver lived on the quiet cove and under our lake garden timbers in two very cozy lodges. The Great Beaver Pond Flood was a real event.
Edward is modeled after my younger brother Ed, now retired. He is a curious and kind man, also a wonderful fiction writer who is now a naturally bearded Santa Clause living in Wichita Kansas.
Uncle Bert is our late Uncle Bert Bremmer who knew every backwater pond and fishing hole on the lower Wisconsin River. The spring peepers were our first real sign of spring in the north and we waited all winter to hear them calling into the night in early April when we were kids.
Gustav and Gerte were our great aunt and uncle in Wisconsin, both loyal and kind. The Ice Rescue is dedicated to them and to the migrating flock of geese that would come every spring and every fall on their way to and from their winter home on the Chesapeake Bay.
We were lucky to be able to watch animals in their own environs at close range, both in Wisconsin as a young man and in Connecticut as an adult. It taught us to appreciate them and to cherish each moment and each shared adventure.
