It curls its tail high so the waves won't get it wet." That's what Gary Nabhan remembers about his first visit to the Seri village in Kino Bay. There he met storyteller Amalia Astorga. She tells him the bittersweet history of Efrain, a sun-blotched lizard. In so doing, she helps him to understand how the Seris have protected a species that everywhere else is endangered. Together Amalia and Gary give young readers an insight into the life and culture of the Seris, an endangered people themselves, but a people who know how to love their land and its inhabitants.Amalia Astorga is a Seri Elder. She lives with her tribe in Desemboque, Sonora in Mexico. She is preserving the herbal knowledge of the Seri hunting-gathering community, as well as songs and stories about native animals.Since 1975, Gary Paul Nabhan has roamed the ancient cactus forests, mesquite grasslands and hidden oases of the Sonoran Desert. His original scholarship integrates conservation biology, agroecology, ethnonutrititon and applied anthropology in unique and unforeseen ways. A co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pew Scholarship on Conservation and the Environment, the Premio Gaia, and the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.Marketing Plans:o Author tour in the Southwest to include Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and El Paso.o PostcardsJanet K. Miller, a self-taught artist, makes her home in Tucson, Arizona. She lived and worked in West Africa during most of the 1980s, and started painting in 1993. She does reverse glass painting, painting inside out and backwards on the wrong side of clear glass. The original paintings for Efraín are all done using this technique.

    Athgar, last bastion of that fallen civilization, has been brought to the edge of destruction, drained of men and hope in a terrible war caused by a wizard's hunger for vengeance. A young and untried king In his first tumultuous year of a kingship he never wanted, young Herric must prove his right to hold the High Seat of Athgar. With his foreign bride, witch-born Elaine, Herric faces rebellion and overcoming centuries of hatred to find a lasting peace. A thousand-year-old prophecy As enemies gather, Herric and Elaine learn how much harder it is to forge a peace than wage war, especially as the sinistre implications of an age-old prophecy--that the High Kings' last heir will unite man and mages,or lead all peoples into darkness--begins to affect Herric directly, and all his choices can lead to doom. Can courage, honor--and love--possibly prevail? This is the stirring sequel to Wolf's Cub.