There really was a Great Black Swamp, although nearly all vestiges of it have long since disappeared. Thousands of years ago, the last great glacier, grinding its way southward, finally stopped and began to recede. Earth and gravel pushed before it resulting in uneven ridges called kames. Generally lying in an east/west direction, they interrupted the natural drainage of the area. The swamp was the result. Comprised of an elongated triangle, the swamp was roughly bounded on the south by a line from Sandusky, Ohio, to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the north by the Ohio-Michigan border. It was an area of forests, reeds, pools, and sandy ridges, which provided excellent habitat for a variety of creatures. There were deer, bear, elk, bobcat, lynx, wolves, as well as even a few forest buffalo. Smaller animals, such as rabbits, beaver, snakes, coyotes, and foxes, populated the area in great numbers. Birds of every type abounded, as did biting flies and mosquitoes. Perhaps the most spectacular dwellers of the Great Black Swamp were the gigantic and dangerous cousins of the elephant, the mastodon. That they were really living in that swampy environment cannot be contested as more than four hundred of their massive skeletons have been unearthed throughout Ohio. In a few cases, Paleo Indian artifacts have been discovered in association with the remains, proving that toward the end of the last ice age, early man successfully hunted them. During the westward movement following the revolution, the area was almost impassable. So bad were travel conditions at that time that a border war over a proposed boundary line between Michigan and Ohio never came about, partly because it was impossible for the Ohio militia to move its ordnance northward through the swamp! In the early eighteen hundreds, after some of the most grueling labor imaginable, much of the Great Black Swamp was effectively drained, resulting in some of the most productive agricultural acreage in the Midwest.

Every spring, billions of birds sweep north. This vast parade often goes unnoticed, except in a few places where these small travelers concentrate in large numbers. One such place is along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. Millions of winged migrants pass through the region. Now climate change threatens to disrupt patterns of migration and the delicate balance between birds, seasons, and habitats

One of TIME’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time Winner of the L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award The New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of 2019 by The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, GQ, Vogue, and The Washington Post "A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made." --Neil Gaiman "Gripping, action-packed....The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The epic novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.