The final part of the Tunesmith Trilogy sees Jacques travelling from his home by the River Tweed to his father's spiritual home in the French Pyrenees.  Following a series of tragic losses and his own debilitating accident, he begins his own inner journey, rediscovering faith in life.

Surrounded by kind, thoughtful strangers from countries all over the world gives Jacques a new fund of energy.  Finding himself in a special rôle with a challenging future, he needs time alone, spending several weeks high in mountains where late snow has closed many of the paths.

Researching Feeding the vultures took Percy Stewart to the Pyrenees for three months last spring. There he walked over three hundred miles between the Atlantic and his old stamping-ground, the valleys and mountains which form such a spectacular backdrop to the Grotto shrine in Lourdes.  His journeys and the people he met along the way provided so much fascinating material that his vultures have grown wings, and what began as a trilogy is fast becoming a quartet!

In the seventies, eighties and nineties, Percy Stewart had some close encounters with vultures at high altitude along the Spanish Border, but last year he was astonished to see thirteen of them circling low over the rooftops in the town where he used to live.

'Thirteen of them had gathered in one spot, circling tightly.  A large mammal of some kind must have become stranded on the bank where the river flows right between the big hotels, just above the old bridge with the cafes and pizza house.  What could it be?  In FTV this real event becomes something very dark indeed!  In Lourdes, a writer needs very little imagination: many unlikely things happen every day, including all kinds of miracles.'

'In a Spanish village ten days' walk away I met someone who immediately became a good friend.  He's a great wildlife photographer and in the forest facing his house there is a clearing where people place animal carcasses - road-kill, dead sheep, cattle from the farms and so on.  In the novel I have renamed him Alonso, but in real life he literally does feed the vultures!'

In the book there are many other surprises, some of them rather dark, most of them written directly from real life.

'Some of the most uncanny things have to do with fictional names which I have given to various characters.

'Last year someone I met in France turned out to have the same name as his late wife's fictional name in TT and Pilgrim.  As usual, her name came out of the blue and she appears as another key character in all three novels.'

'With Feeding the vultures almost complete, before the end of March I set off on the motorbike to fit the final pieces in what has become a huge jigsaw-puzzle.

'Right up to putting the final pages to bed, threads which I had introduced three years ago were appearing on the page.  Now I have found the ending which the triology needed all along, so that all of the journeys make sense in one huge, powerful picture of human life on a beautiful planet which we should cherish and defend rather than destroy in a mindless orgy of greed and instant thrills.'

'There is some tragedy in these three novels, some of it genuine and some fictional, but the overwhelming feeling is wonderfully positive and uplifting, full of joy....simply because the process of living and writing the stories every day has been exactly this.'

Raised by two cats

Pilgrim

Tunesmith, tinsmith

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