Opinion by Bonnie Henry : 'Just so happy to be alive'

Sure, he wrote the best-seller "Dances With Wolves," which also earned him an Academy Award for adapted screenplay.

But he wrote the book in his car — his home at the time. In longhand.

And when he accepted the Academy Award, he was battling cancer.

"I'm just so happy to be alive," says Blake, who's been in remission since 1993. Naturally, there were dues to pay.

"My reprieve came at a price — chemo and scorched-earth radiation," says Blake, who thinks the radiation may have damaged his vascular system.

"I've had a double bypass and I've got stents all over my chest."

But today he's just gotten a clean bill of health from his doctor. He's feeling good and happy to reflect on his life — one he's been living at the base of the Rincons since 1992.

"I had to get out of L.A. I said, 'If I ever get enough money, I'm out of here,' " says Blake, who lives on an old ranch with his wife, Marianne, and their three children, Quanah, 10; Monahsetah, 9; and Lozen, 6.

"At least they have a sense of place," says Blake, 61, recounting how his own family frequently moved when he was growing up.

After high school, he joined the Air Force and used his G.I. Bill money to study English and Russian history at the University of New Mexico.

Following a two-year stint at the LA Press, he tried his hand at scriptwriting. "It did not go well," he says. Neither did a first novel, never published.

In the late '70s, Blake went to film school in Berkeley. There he met fellow student Jim Wilson, future producer of "Dances With Wolves."

Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles, taking up residence in a friend's garage. Once again, he met Jim Wilson, this time at a party. Wilson, a former tennis pro, offered him $400 a week to write a script.

Its name: "Double Down," starring unknown actor Kevin Costner. Released in the early '80s, the picture "did horrible," says Blake, though it did jumpstart Costner's career.

Blake stayed in L.A. churning out scripts, "a thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there."

Meanwhile, he read and reread Dee Brown's heartbreaking, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," which told of the demise of the American Indian from the Indians' point of view.

"I went to Kevin's house one night and said, 'I have this idea.' I had read this small anecdote in a book about a freighter during the Civil War who went to supply this fort in Western Kansas. No one was there. I thought, 'What if I had been him and I'd stayed?' That was the seed."

Costner told him, "Write a book, not a screenplay."

And so he did. "I wrote 'Dances With Wolves' in my car. I was homeless, jobless, phoneless, bankless."

After Blake finished the book, he roamed around, went to Bisbee and wound up washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant.

In the meantime, his friend, Jim Wilson, took the book to the William Morris Agency. "They said Indians weren't selling."

Nevertheless, the book was published in paperback. "It was released to convenience stores and airports in 1988 as a romantic novel," says Blake. "Somebody who looked like Fabio was on the cover."

In spite of that — or perhaps because of it — the book sold close to 30,000 copies.

Best of all, Costner was one of those readers. "He became obsessed with it, with making a movie," says Blake, who wrote the screenplay.

Filming started in the summer of '89 in South Dakota. "We started shooting with $7 million," says Blake. "After shooting started, Orion Pictures decided to come in. It cost $18 million to make."

Slammed by critics even before it was released, the movie opened in just nine cities. "And then the lines started building and building and building."

The movie would go on to earn more than $184 million in the United States alone. It also won seven Academy Awards, including best picture.

The book was re-issued, selling 3 million copies — this time with Costner on the cover.

"They called to tell me I was on the best-seller list," says Blake, who was still undergoing radiation. His first reaction: "So what?" But he continued to write, continued to get better.

In 2001, "Holy Road," the sequel to "Dances With Wolves," was published. "It came out on 9/11/2001," says Blake. "Most people do not know it exists."

His latest book, "Indian Yell," was published last year and recounts how the West was won at the Indians' expense.

Backed by a lifetime of research, the book, says Blake, was written "as a primer for the public to give them some idea of what the Indians went through."

It also offers up some startling parallels between then and now, when the military also had to deal with too-few soldiers, cultural barriers and a determined opponent.

Blake is also happy to step on another topical soapbox, this one about a threatened Earth.

"I'm not crazy about Indian people, but what I relate to strongly is their reverence for the Earth. We've lost all reverence for that."

Today, he's writing yet another movie script, this one for AMC, American Movie Classics. Whether it ever approaches the success of "Dances With Wolves" bothers him not a whit.

Says Blake: "If they put, 'Author of "Dances With Wolves," ' on my tombstone, I'll be proud. It's not a problem for me."

"I'm not crazy about Indian people, but what I relate to strongly is their reverence for the Earth. We've lost all reverence for that."

Michael Blake

Author of the best-seller "Dances With Wolves"