Eagles Watch tells of the struggles of an unconventional ecology professor, Jack Rogers, in the American Southwest meeting Native Americans. They challenge his sense of reality and transform it. It finds a blending of their spiritual concepts with deeper ecological ideas, in a world rich in both violence and calls to goodness and healing. The story begins…

I was asleep and tangled in the damp, twisted sheet when the phone rang. Christy is a light, neat sleeper, and she was out of bed by the second ring. She came back from the kitchen phone almost immediately. “It’s for you, lover.”

I rubbed my eyes clear and managed to find a way out of the tangle. The clock said three P.M. “Any idea who it is?”

She shrugged, then dragged a T-shirt off the chair. “No idea! Some guy who sounds like an accountant. Wouldn’t give his name.”

I got up, slipped by her warmth and went to the phone. I listened, talked and stared out the window at the New Mexico desert for maybe three minutes. To me, the man’s voice was more like a talking computer. Some accountants aren’t that lively. I went back to the bedroom.

Christy was in the shower. “Need to talk,” I called.

She opened the door a crack. “Who was it?”

“They want me to interview in Seattle, Christy.”

Jack goes to Seattle, where a Crow Holy Man, Frank Windsinger, tells him he must go to Arizona and guide Fawn StarRising in a healing center she is starting. In the process, Jack comes to a realization while thinking about Frank’s challenging questions:

While visiting the Provincial Museum, I came around a corner and saw a six-foot, enlarged photo of a Tlingit shaman. He was a great, woolly booger with wild hair and a bearskin robe. A boldly printed legend explained that the shaman kept his people in healthy balance with nature. The shaman is a human ecologist.

Jack goes to Arizona and slowly becomes involved with Fawn’s struggles with a drug dealer, Dead Sage, who wants Fawn’s power. There are a series of battles beyond the edge of ordinary reality, ending in a climatic confrontation in which Jack, Fawn, Fawn’s daughters, and his student lover Christy defeat—for now—Dead Sage.


About the Author:
Bill Reid doesn’t always admit he was a rocket scientist, but he was. He grew up in a family of aircraft builders and studies engineering in college. During that time, his neighbors invited him to serve in the Army after he left school to climb mountains in Colorado. He returned after building runways in Europe, graduated and again left for the West. While working on projects like Apollo, he was lured by nature, high country and wilderness adventures. He returned to school for a Ph.D. in ecology. The then became a professor, taught in Texas and Israel, and worked at the National Laboratory where we once made Plutonium. He then coordinated research in seven national parks in Texas and New Mexico for three years. Now, he lives at the edge of southern Utah’s wild lands and writes.