David Quammen and his wife, conservationist and historian Betsy Gaines Quammen, are walking the talk as COVID-19 sweeps the world, the nation and, increasingly, Montana — as described in his ominously prescient 2012 best-selling book “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.”

Quammen is quick to assert he is no pandemic expert. Rather, he listens to experts and relays the science to the public in digestible language.

What those experts forecast — and what "Spillover" lays out in a sobering recap of pandemics, epidemics and outbreaks since 1961 — was a scenario revealing a new or “novel” virus, very possibly a coronavirus, coming from a wild animal, very possibly a bat, that was brought to a “wet” market, very possibly in China.