Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

David Dun

Technology and its ills, together with Native American mysticism, contrasts two worlds often at war-science versus back-to-nature values. In his first thriller, Necessary Evil, David Dun spun an action-driven tale of wilderness survival that highlighted this war of the worlds, pitting Kier Win-tripp against a ruthless corporate personality using human cloning to achieve medical cures.

Kier Wintripp is part of the Tilok tribe. Most of Dun's novels have involved characters from that tribe, which, although fictional, is in many respects based on various factual accounts of Native American life, lore, myth, history and religion. One aspect of Tilok culture is the Talth, a medicine person, part psychologist, part political leader, part judge, an expert on forest-survival arts. The pinnacle of the Talth is propounded by Spirit Walkers. These men come along only once a century and are recognized by their profound intuition concerning the affairs of men and nature. Kier was Dun's first, and perhaps most striking, Tilok character. A superb woodsman and tracker, a guide to youth, a teacher of the forest arts, he's also a doctor of veterinary medicine. Science being the ultimate rationalism, in Dun's novels Kier has many times sought, often unsuccessfully, to find peace in reason.

This is the story of how he became a Spirit Walker.