The shape moved down from Ice Mountain in that coldest hour before dawn. It ghosted across the flatland beneath dying stars. No rock scraped and no twig snapped to mark its passage. Coyote. Male. Young but fully grown. A silent passage … more remarkably silent because the animal moved on three paws. The lower half of its front left leg was missing.
     j.b. crossed a black road, then grass, and lay down on read stones beneath a dark green bush near the side of the library. The high wall sheltered the coyote from marauding slivers of north wind. He rested and watched night go to early-morning gray. Dawn crept into a low sky. Orange streaks ignited inside long blue clouds like embers being fanned to life by the breath of a rising sun.
     As he waited, he thought of the time of the pain.
     He had stepped into a steel foot trap when he was a yearling, when he was still careless and too curious. It had been the scent of man that had made him paw at the leaves covering the trap, a scent that should have been a warning, not an invitation. But curious was what he was about. And that curiosity had nearly done him in.
     His mother had come in the hour of the pain and had chewed off the snared leg to free him from the cruel steel jaws. She carried him by the nape of his neck as she had done when he was a pup, carried him to a place high on Ice Mountain where cold water took away the hurt, made the bleeding stop, and let him live. And it was she who stood between him and the others after she brought him back to the cave, she who bared her fangs, ruffed her fur, and fought three days to stop the pack from enforcing the law that says a mouth that doesn't hunt is a mouth that should not eat. They had finally accepted his difference … at first, only because of her, but later because of him when he began to show that, despite his missing limb, he could contribute.
     j.b. had come to realize that the time of the steel trap, as terrifying and painful as it was, had been an opening, a dangerous opening, but an opening nevertheless.
     The steel trap had made him different. And because he was different, he was special. He had to be special.

     Timesong is the inspirational story of a three-legged coyote named j.b. who befriends Tom, an autistic boy. Following his father's death, Tom retreats into a shell of isolation. j.b. counters Tom's despair with an uplifting explanation of immortality. For those trying to reconcile the loss of a loved one, Timesong may be the key that opens the door to acceptance and peace of mind.

Author's Note:
     A book like Timesong flows out of the past, not the present. I’ve spent sixty years on this earth. Twenty-three of those years were spent putting Marines and sailors back together … and identifying the remains of those who were too broken. I’ve spent my time in church as an altar boy. I’ve spent my time at Harvard with the pitchmen of science. Then, a decade after college, on the sponson of a Navy ship in the middle of the Pacific beneath a night sky so deep that I had to hold on to the rail to keep from falling up, I came to the crossroad we all come to. Religion or science? Who to believe? A tough choice. I now realize that a choice wasn’t necessary. In the words of j.b., Timesong’s coyote, “… they are hunting the same rabbit.”
     After reading Timesong, those readers who enjoy extrapolating a book’s premise are invited to ponder: (1) For a specific human, ‘me’-time must be continuous, there can be no interval between ‘me’ lifetimes. (2) Awareness is the goal of evolution. (3) If God is universal awareness, as most religion and much of philosophy profess, does is not follow that He must revisit His own evolution? (4) As science wanders into the realm of that first fractional nanosecond and comes eyeball to eyeball with technology, possibilities blossom. Even the Big Chill option may not negate the premise—the Big Bang occurred once, why not again?
     On a technical note, I’d like to respond to a well-read friend who wondered, “In light of the fact that suspension of disbelief is pivotal to a work of fiction, how do you expect any reader to accept the premise that a coyote can communicate with an autistic child?” May I offer this: If you can tell me how an autistic six-year-old, without any piano training, can play thirty minutes of Mozart after hearing the piece only once, and play it perfectly, then I shall explain to you how an autistic child can communicate with a coyote … I’ll buy the beer.
     Timesong, in some respects, resembles a children’s book. That decision was deliberate. The format was chosen to invite young minds…and old eyes. But Timesong most certainly targets the sophisticated reader; mixing scientists and saints is heady business. My hope is that this little story might ease at least one child past the inevitability of loss … even if that “child” is eighty years old.

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“It’s a loving tribute to his cancer stricken mother.”
   —Las Vegas Sun

“Simple on the surface … Branon just may have produced a classic with this one.”
   —KNPR

“A book that parent and child can read together … (but) there is much more going on.”
   —Parent & Child