Introducing Archer MacClehan & The Hungry Now
New book explores personalities as hikers encounter grizzly bear

Ordering information:

Archer MacClehan & The Hungry Now (ISBN 1-886591-06-7) is the first in a series Sandy Compton will write featuring Archer MacClehan and friends. Softcover and 181 pages, the book retails for $14 and is available in bookstores, online at SandpointOnline.com in the General Store, or by calling 208-263-3573 or toll free at 1-800-880-3573. The book was published by Blue Mobius Books, an imprint of Blue Creek Press, in cooperation with Keokee Co. Publishing, Inc.

About the book:

Idaho-and-Montana author Sandy Compton puts his ample storytelling talents to play in his brand-new novel, Archer MacClehan & The Hungry Now, a page-turning tale populated by a cast of colorful characters who find themselves at odds in the wilderness – and pulling together for their very survival.

His tale follows five people into wilderness on the border between Montana and Idaho. Larger-than-life outfitter Archer MacClehan and friends Tom Sevlakovs and Jesse Turnbull begin with two “greenhorns” into Skydevil Wilderness on a three-day hike. Sara Cafferty and Rob Thorsen, engaged to be married, are the neophytes seeking a wilderness experience; and the journey has hardly begun when Sara discovers a grizzly track.

Compton’s storytelling style in Archer MacClehan & The Hungry Now leads his characters, including the bear the “two-leggers” call Number Seven, into situations that reveal them. Sara, used to having her way, is so frightened of the bear that she wants to quit the hike and tries to use her temper to achieve it. After a confrontation between her and Archer, though, they continue. After a face-to-face encounter with the bear and a night in camp, Rob calls it quits, on the hike – and the relationship when Sara decides she wants to go on, bear or no.

The bear is presented in a factual and matter-of-fact way. Compton does not demonize or romanticize the animal but presents him in a straightforward, sometimes humorous way. “A real name is the one you know yourself by,” he writes, “and no bear can really think of itself, so bears can hardly have real names because bears are always thinking of other things, the things in their noses and their ears and their eyes at any given moment.” The bear, if it could think of such a thing, would call itself The Hungry Now.

Remarkable for its sharply drawn descriptions of the great grizzly bear and sweeping depictions of magnificent landscapes, Archer MacClehan & The Hungry Now is at once a rousing story of adventure, a drama of relationships and a paean to the wilderness and wild things of the mountainous Northwest.