The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Arrow, the Wolves, and the Guardians by Charles L. Hay

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

The Arrow, the Wolves, and the Guardians by Charles L. Hay https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lifes-Little-Pebbles-Quotable-Quotes/dp/1467882011 It is early in the morning during the second week of elk hunting season in Montana as Harold Hendricks leaves a note for his sleeping wife, Shayla, and heads out on a solo bowhunting excursion into the woods. But when he spontaneously decides to change direction and hunt in another location, Harold has no idea of the implications of his choice. A few hours later, Harold sustains an accident that leaves him momentarily unconscious and severely crippled. When he regains consciousness, he realizes he is alone in the mountains of Montana unable to summon help, and in life threatening circumstances. As his time in the mountains drags on, his loved ones embark on a desperate search to find him. And Harold finds himself on his own trip that he has no control over—a trip of beauty and wonder that is also more terrifying than any trip he has taken before. In the course of this trip, Harold searches for a loving God to help him amidst his suffering, his fear, and his troubled relationships at home and at work. Will he find the answers he seeks, and will his family find him before it is too late? In this inspirational novel, an attorney must grapple with his complicated feelings about God after a hunting accident leaves him injured and without much hope in the mountains of Montana.

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His book is entitled The Arrow, the Wolves, and the Guardians by Charles L. Hay. He's on the show with us today. We're going to get into some of the deets, as the kids say. I don't know. That's what they say. But he is here, and the kids are not. So we'll get into it. Charles El Hay has held numerous jobs over the course of his life,

including that of Forest Lookout, a Trail Surveyor, a clerk, a logger, a nanny, a house sitter, and an exterior house painter, an elementary school teacher, a boy's home supervisor, and lastly, a caregiver. Besides writing, his most rewarding career has been the law. He has been a trial lawyer in two large firms, a solar practitioner, and a judge in a juvenile court. He's published several articles in Christian Outdoor Legal Magazines, and this is his first published novel. He currently resides with one of the wife of 51 years in Marine. In the show, Charles. How are you, sir? I am doing fine. And again, I thank you for the opportunity to come to your show.

Thank you. That's quite an opening you have there. I know, right? It's almost like we've been up to something for the past 17 years, and I can feel it in my legs. I can't feel my legs. No, that's a joke. Anyway, so, Charles, give us any dot com's, websites, emails. Where do you want people to communicate with you on the interwebs? Say again, and I have to apologize ahead of time on death as opposed sometimes. even though I've got the hearing aids that shoot the noise right into my hearing aids, I still have trouble. So say that over.

Let me slow down a little bit. Give us some plugs, like your email or a website, where are people you want them to follow and communicate with you. I appreciate that. I don't have a website, but I do have an email. Hey, at gmail.com. N-D-B-H-A-Y at gmail.com. Chuck and Bob.

My beautiful wife of 54 years is Bobby, and I'm Chuck. All right. Charles, do you want me to call you Chuck or Charles during the show? It doesn't matter. People call me a lot better and a lot worse. Fine. You and me, they call me just four-letter explosives, and that's my mom. No, I'm just kidding.

So give us a $30,000 over you, what's inside your book, The Arrow, the Wolves, and the Guardians. I appreciate that. This takes a little time, but the inspiration for the story came from an episode. that happened some years ago, and I have to give a little bit of a preview, and it's going to take a little time, but I think it's worth it because that's what the story is about in length and expanded. In college, I was a jerk, a dummy, a loser, and this was despite the fact that I was at a pretty prestigious university, University of Stanford in Palo Alto, California. And I got married on a whim and then on a second whim, I quit school on the last semester when I was ready

to graduate and decided that I was going to be a writer and write the world's best novel up in the woods. After two years of, like you read, working in the forest and sweeping floors and everything else, I decided that wasn't so good. So I started working my way back in, but my focus was still myself. I was just very selfish. And so, So to lead up to this story, my wife and my child, I had one child at the time, we're driving from Missoula, Montana to Seattle. And we stopped at Spokane to visit my parents and just visit before we went on to Seattle. On the way there, we stopped at a food sort of a court where they had a lot of homegrown

cherries. We got a bowl of cherries, and we ate them on the way to Spokane. I ate most of them. and here's how stupid I was at the time. Instead of pitting any of the seeds out, I ate every single seed, and so I ate a bowl full of cherries full of seeds. And don't ask me why I did that.

It was just part of my focus that time, just being stupid and being thinking I was a super van or something. Yeah. As we left Spokane and headed to Seattle, we went about 10 miles, and I had the worst pain I've ever had in my entire life. ever. And so I couldn't hardly talk. I could moan and I could point. So my wife turned around and took me to the nearest hospital in Spokane. And of course, they found that I had the appendicitis

and they took out an appendix that was subject to being burst at any time full of cherry pits. And I dodged the bullet on that one and they were ready to release me two or three days later. And my brother came to visit me just before I released me. And he didn't see me in good shape. I was delirious. I had a very high fever. I was mumbling. And I had no idea what was going on. And he ran and got the doctors. And sure enough, they had to perform another emergency, a life-threatening emergency. And because the appendix had split at the last minute and the poison was going all through my body. Well, that's leading up to what the vision I had that was the inspiration for my story. Okay. I went unconscious and I woke up, so, to speak in this vision at the edge of a huge, huge canyon, didn't have a bottom, couldn't see a bottom. I looked to the right right and there was a bridge over the top of the canyon from one side to another, a beautiful, very delicate, a very substantial bridge at the same time.

And something made me go to the foot of the bridge and then I just felt compelled to walk up over the bridge. I got to halfway and I stopped. and at that time a group of dwarves about 10 or 12 of them went past me they were very cordial they said hi and then just went on past and stopped at the other end of the bridge for the first time i looked at that country on the other end of the bridge and it was beautiful Chris it was the best vision i'd ever had there were butterflies flowers the mountains and the grass and everything was so clear and crystal and I just felt love and sweetness flowing out of that country over there.

And I wanted more than anything else to go to that country. And the dwarves, in fact, were at that point urging me on. They said, come on, come on, come join us. And I turned around and looked back at where I'd left, and there at the foot of the bridge my wife and my son were calling to me. Hey, it's not time to go yet. Come on back. We need you.

we need you. Pardon me, I can't even say this 50 years later, and I've said it so many times. That's the motion of it, this gives a value, right? I felt that time. And anyway, it was the hardest decision I'd ever made to that point. It was the first one, really a big decision

that went against my self-interest and my pleasure-seeking, and I turned around and trudged back to the foot of the bridge. and just when I made the edge of the bridge, and then I woke up, and I found myself in a bath cup full of ice. There were lights and told me. I was in a room. People with white suits were all around.

And it turned out that they put me in this ice to lower my temperature so they could do some emergency surgery. And they cut a big portion of my large intestine out, put in a plus. with a bag on the side and started draining all the poison. Well, to make a long story short and put an end of this thing,

that vision stuck with me and I've always wanted to write about it. And just the last couple of years, I figured it'd make a little bit more sense and read better if I extended it into a sort of a small book. And that's what the book is about. It's about a guy that faces

that kind of choice that he has to make. And he's on a pretty dangerous. area itself. He's in the woods. He's got a life or death situation. There's a storm, and he has to make some choices. He has to make some good choices at that time. And he's made some bad ones up until that point, too, a little bit like my beginning. But to cut back to me for a second, I was in the hospital for about four months, and I had seven other surgeries because each time the poison would peak, they'd have to go in there and drain it from that particular spot. Finally, they had it all drain and they kicked me out of there.

And from that point on, even though it was a up and down path, really, not smooth and clear, I changed my focus from myself to others to God. And I've never really looked back, even though there were some stumbling along the way, which we all have. And so that's a little bit. The focus of my book is about choices and about a guy that has trouble making connection with his fellow persons. He has a little marriage trouble. And the main thing is that he's very angry at God and he has to make his peace with that situation. All wraps up into this life or death situation in the woods.

So it's a lot of different themes, but that's the main thing. Now, is this more of a novel or a memoir or what? What would you describe it at? Seems like there's a mixture of some stuff in here. I'm sorry, say it again. Would you call this a novel, or is this more of a memoir? It's a novel. It's completely fictional, but it's probably as close to, at least emotionally,

my autobiography as I could do. So the names have been changed to protect the innocence. Yeah, basically, that's it. As I say, yeah. I was a hunter a lot. I'm not much more. And I was in the law, as you pointed out. And so some of that, the main protagonist, this Harold Hendricks, has a lot of characteristics that I share.

That's for sure. Yeah. And how did this story come to you? What was the proponent that made you go, I got to write this story. I got to put this down. You never written a book before, right? Or had you before? I wrote a book, but I haven't published it.

It's about my time as a judge. And I still feel that if I have to. time and energy, I'll get out and retouch it up. I'll try to publish that too. But it was just, I don't know, it was just bubbling inside of me for all these years, and I just finally let it bubble out and start writing on it. And I had quite a few false starts before I got it going good. And then I had one part in the middle, Chris, that I stopped. I couldn't go any farther. And I wandered around making my life miserable and everybody around me. And I finally decided to write a story about hunting and I wrote that and got it published and then that got me off the block and so then

went back and finished the story. And is there any future advances to this story? Maybe a series or anything you see or is it pretty much one and done? You got a good point there, but at my age, I'm 81. I'm running out of long-term energy. I don't know if I have it into me to write a series and what I want to do now, rather than write another attachment to that one, is to do a story on caregiving. So that's my next focus. I think maybe I can get that one done in the time allowed it to me. And what was the thing I was going to ask you? What are some of the themes that you have in the book?

That was it. Yeah, that's a good point. I have quite a few themes. I hope that they make it much more something that people want to read and get interested in. It's adventure, first of all. It's survival, as it pointed out. It's a guy that is independent, and he's never had much cooperation or teamwork. So he has to realize that that's part of the reason he's in this mess here, the choices he made.

So it's individualism versus teamwork. He has very mixed feelings, anger and dismay and just apathetic ways that he faces God. he's got to come to a realization of where it's leading him. And that's a big part of the show, because it is a very Christian book. And then it's life and death, too. And he thinks about death approaching him. And he thinks about life and death and what he experiences in the vision that he has there or the life that he has.

I call it a fantasy, Chris, because there's a big part of the trip that he takes. That's totally fantastic. but it's not a fantasy as usually. He doesn't go to a different world. He doesn't go back in time. All these fantasies that I've read kind of uses that framework, and it's a framework totally different from that,

and I won't tell it because it's a surprise when you hit it in the story, but it's at least a different framework. The arrows and the wolves and the guardians. Who are the guardians in the book? What are they about? Tell us a little bit about that. I guess.

At least what you can, if you need to keep it serious. They're guardians. They're guardians that you and I are very familiar with, not in one sense, but everybody has those guardians. Put it that way. And that's about all I'll say about the guardians. We don't get to see him quite the way that he did in the story. The arrow refers to the arrow that he goes bull hunting with because he's bow and arrow hunting.

and it also stands for your focus. Is your focus going to be straight and narrow, or is it going to be spread out and wandering around like our focus tends to be if we don't watch it? And then finally, the wolves are actual wolves, I will say that much, that surround him on this thing, but they also stand for the kinds of things that get us in trouble. We make bad choices and we face the wolves. So it's a little bit that way, too. There's a lot of lessons that you can learn from novels and everything that goes into them and all that good stuff.

I think you've told us kind of the types of writing that you've done across your lifetime. Do you have any struggles or problems writing the book and how did you overcome them? I'm sorry? Describe any struggles or problems maybe you had writing the book. I didn't really know what I was trying to say at first. I wanted to have the vision or something similar to that, but then I realized the vision was only a prelude. The vision's whole purpose, I believe,

and sometimes what we go through is to get our attention to do something different. Let me explain it in terms of that vision. I realized that if I had died, there was absolutely no guarantee that I'd go to a wonderful place with dwarves and beautiful butterflies and all of those. that, it was a vision put to me to help me make the choice that I had to make, which was not take the selfish one, go back to my family and start treating them like the family should have been treated and start doing the right thing in my life. And when I realized that, after thinking about

it and kind of living up, living it in my past for a while, I realized I had to turn this into a Christian vision because that's where it led me in life. And I have been so satisfied and so happy. And I still have all the problems that everybody has. But it's been really wonderful for me. And that's what I wanted to share more than anything. So that finally got me to writing it as far as in the middle when I stopped. I think he just got tired for a while.

And I said, I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to finish this. And so that was just, I kind of knew where I had to go. but then I got back in and finished me. You overcame it. That's a beautiful part of that. That's the challenge of doing things like this is overcoming them. That's why writing books is one of the hardest things most people do in life. And next to probably raising kids and pets, me.

My pets are like kids. But, you know, it's really hard. And very few people are able to accomplish it. And that's why most people really respect writers. And then did you... I got one thing to add to that. I appreciate what you said. For me, it was doubly hard to finish this because during this period of time,

I did become a full-time caregiver. So it was writing at a time, and then you'd have to break and do something or have some care given. And so it was a little hard there. I couldn't just sit down for eight hours of time and hack away at the computer. So there was that, too. It did take a lot of work and a lot of courage. Again, I think God gave that to me, but the point is you've got to use it when it comes to you. So I appreciate what you're saying there.

Yeah, thank you. And then the other question I had for you is, how does this book differ from maybe other Christian-type fantasies? Yeah, good point. Let's take two that most people are familiar with, but I know mine isn't even anywhere near that class, or at least I don't think it is, the Lord of the Rings trilogy,

and also the C.S. Lewis books of Narnia. And there's been movies about both of them. And they are Christian, in a sense, but there's no Christ, there's a lion. And then it's in different country, and it's a different world. The Lord of the Rings is even a little fuzzier. There's several people that have Christ-like features, but nobody that... Gandalf is the closest one.

But what I wanted to do is throw in more Christian stuff to make readers aware. That's where the power was coming from. And because the propagandist wasn't Christian, I had to be... slow with him, but I had his wife very, very active and praying and everything and showing that the prayers from others make a big difference in your life, too. So I was a little more up the Christianity than a lot of more, I think. And it's a little bit of difference there. You've got quite a broad range that you've written about, like a day in the life of a juvenile court judge. That's got to have an endless amount of stories probably from that work, right?

Right. Yeah. Yeah, the judge's thing was by far my second most satisfying thing. And you asked me a little bit about my other writing. As a judge, you got to write opinions. Oh, yeah. I wrote a lot of opinions. So I kept my reading, my writing skill honed. It was very specific, of course, and focused on the case in 10. But I still had to do a lot of writing. So that kept me going to the point where when I retired, I could actually do this book. So that was important to do. The, yeah, and you collect a lot of stories, too. We've got a lot of people that come from the criminal correction background, detectives and police officers,

sometimes newspaper guys who had the, who had the crime beat for the newspapers. And they, you write what you know. So they have these host of wonderful stories. And they, of course, change the names to protect everybody. And muddle, you know, muck up a little bit, the exact story so that it leaves into great fiction. Yeah, it's just, there's probably a lot of amazing stories you can tell them, maybe a lot of lessons, maybe some good, some good endings and bad endings. Yeah, it is.

It's a fascinating area. A lot of people have made a living with that kind of stuff. And write, right book after book after book. I read a lot of them. They're good books. Yep. And then, let's see, I think, what was this other book that you had? Color is thankful.

Tell us a little bit about this book. That's a neat one. People in my church, I found out, had spent almost the entire married life taken care of severely handicapped children that the rest of the society would call low throwaway people. Just really, really crippled. One girl, for example, had to be kept in a frame. She couldn't stand. She couldn't sit or anything. She had to be in a frame.

And everyone saw the frame had to be turned upside down so that her fluids, her body could get some work and she couldn't speak much, she could gesture and just a young girl. Some of these, I suspect, were drug babies. And this family showed so much class doing that. And they didn't call attention to themselves. They just wanted me to write sort of a history for their family. And it turned into kind of a small book. And I haven't tried to publish it, but I was just very impressed with what they were doing.

And it was just incredible. I've never seen that kind of dedication for foster parenting ever for those kind of kids. Now the other, you've written a couple children's books. Tell us about those as well. Yeah, I wrote one about an eaglet that was with his two brothers up in a tree overlooking the ocean on a high tree. Probably it could be Alaska or Canada. That's kind of what I was thinking when I was writing it.

Anyway, one of the eagles was born with one eye, and one was born totally blind, and the third brother was born perfectly. And so the story is how the two brothers, the one with two eyes and the ones with one eye, taught the one no eye how to fly, and how no eye caught his first fish, even though he was blind. And so that was a neat story. And then the other story I had was a girl that, a little song bird girl that had lost her song. And she was the prettiest singer in the meadow. And she lost her song. And she had to go on a quest to get it back. And he finally gets it back at the end and meets some pretty amazing characters,

a frog and a raven and a big cougar cat that could have eaten her. And it's quite a story, too. So as we grow out, anything more you want me to ask you about anything you've done with your writing and the future and what's coming up? I think we've covered most everything. I just wanted to talk a little bit about my caregiving. It's a wonderful thing. I, like a lot of men, I suppose, took my wife's work at the home, and she had a job pretty much out of the home a lot of the time that we were married. But it was always usually a part-time job or something that she could do for a.

a certain period of time. Anyway, she ended up doing all the cooking and the cleaning and all that kind of stuff. And I did what I could, but looking back at it, I realized I really relied on her. So in a sense, being the caregiver is my way to pay her back for all the devotion and the love and the consistency and the faithfulness. She's shown the kids and I. And I really, I find that I wake up and I'm really really. looking forward to it. And I've got help with two wonderful girls now, two really fabulous

caregivers that give me up to 30 hours a week. But I still have every night and the weekend, and a lot of times during the week, too, to still be a caregiver. So it's fascinating. And you know, something I think it would be something people would like to read because there's a lot of caregivers out there. There's a whole army of us, mostly in the quiet part in our homes or places like that. And so, you know, it'd be nice to have a story about it, I think. Thank you very much for coming the show. We really appreciate it. It's been wonderful, have you, an amazing storytelling. We'll look forward to the caregiver. We have a lot of caregiver folks that have written books on the show, and there's huge generations of what they call these,

sandwich generation. They're mid-age people that are taking care of children, but they're also taking care of an elderly parent who's going into Alzheimer's dementia or other health issues. They're stuck with this double work. So that book could really help people if you put that out. Thank you very much, Charles. Thank you and I really appreciate it. I hope I didn't talk too much because... No, you're great.

You're great. You illuminated it wonderfully, as they say. It was fun being on here, Chris. God bless you and thank you so much for the opportunity. You too, my friend. Folks, Orup her book, his book, Wherever, books are sold, The Arrow, The Wolves, and the Guardians by Charles L. Hay. Thanks for us for watching us for us, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschast Chris Foss,

Chris Foss won on the TikTokity and all those crazy places in it. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning, consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, Younger and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain lead.