Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery, committed to excellent service and friendly smiles.

Your food is our passion.

Catherine Rundle is a literary prodigy and superstar.

She's only 37, but already she's written in

the claimed biography of the poet John Dunn, not to mention 10 children's books in one play.

She's been compared to British fantasy writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien.

And last year, she wrote a book called Impossible Creatures about centaurs and sphinxes

and crockins and dragons. But we wanted to talk to her about the real creatures in another

of her books called Vanishing Treasures. It's a collection of essays about endangered animals.

And her favorite, or one of her favorites, is the pangolin, which she says in the

essay is more beautiful than seems plausible in this fallen old world.

I've never fallen in love at first sight with any human being, but I have once in my life,

and it was with a pangolin.

To reach this particular pangolin was difficult, which felt only reasonable.

Something so remarkable shouldn't be gained with ease.

She lives in a wildlife conservation project outside Harari, Zimbabwe.

The roads in Harari have been deteriorating for years.

Gaps are patched with house bricks, and during the rains it would be possible to bathe a Great Dane in the potholes.

Most of the road signs have long since gone.

The rumour was that they were used for coffin handles

during the cholera outbreak in 2008, although that's probably mostly apocryphal, and you drive

by guesswork and hope. Hot pink and purple Bougainvillea grow at the verge and occasionally

...