Changing the landscape

I'm in the middle of editing a novel right now, and I've drawn a detailed map for it so that I could get the characters' journey right.  The only problem is that the text doesn't match up with the map.  Early on in the journey I had my band of characters crossing a river.  It was only about six chapters later, when they are about to cross a second river, that I realised I'd used the wrong river name first time round.

That was easy enough to fix, but dealing with some other landmarks was a little trickier.  I'm writing about big cats who are organised into tribes and who live in cave systems in the mountains which run across most of the continent. There are several tribes, and two long series of mountains, so you'd think  I'd have enough room for everyone.  

I needed to make each tribe's territory large enough to support a  couple of hundred cats.  They're modelled on lions, and hunt in family prides.  Each tribe needed a big enough territory to support that number of cats.  The mountains adjoin a huge savanna which supports huge herds of several prey species, so I just parcelled up the caves evenly along the mountain ranges to give each tribe enough territory.

Then I came to a part of the novel which originally had two characters in hand-to-hand combat in a cave.  But on the rewrite I wanted to move them nearer to their destination, a downed starship, a bit  earlier in the story.  So now by the time the fight scene occurs the characters have already passed the last cave.  It was time for some rearrangement of the landscape.  Instead of caves, I've invented a convenient clump of woodland for them the rest in.

That meant rewriting six chapters to remove all references to caves and to move the action onto grassland.  And now that fight scene is done my characters have to tow the body of a pony-sized cat back to a cave a days' journey along the mountains for burial.  To shorten this journey I decided they could travel along the other side of the mountains, where the cave they need conveniently has another entrance.

I usually draw my map before I start writing, but sometimes what I write dictates that I must change the landscape - and sometimes my map too - as I go.