to understand

We shot this picture from our car early this month, with Jamie looking on from the backseat. These beautiful creatures returned the interest. Often on my walks with Kazan, we see this little herd (or another like it). If we don't move too quickly, they like to stand and watch us standing and watching them.

The following was written in 1917 by James Oliver Curwood, author of "Kazan, the Wolfdog," and "Baree, Son of Kazan," in his preface to the latter book:

"Since the publication of my two animal books, 'Kazan' and 'The Grizzly King,' I have received so many hundreds of letters from friends of wild animal life, all of which were more or less of an enquiring nature, that I have been encouraged to incorporate in this preface of the third of my series - 'Baree, Son of Kazan' - something more of my desire and hope in writing of wild life, and something of the foundation of fact whereupon this and its companion books have been written.

"I have always disliked the preaching of sermons in the pages of romance. It is like placing a halter about an unsuspecting reader’s neck and dragging him into paths for which he may have no liking. But if fact and truth produce in the reader’s mind a message for himself, then a work has been done. That is what I hope for in my nature books. The American people are not and never have been lovers of wild life. As a nation we have gone after Nature with a gun.

"And what right, you may ask, has a confessed slaughterer of wild life such as I have been to complain? None at all, I assure you. I have twenty-seven guns - and I have used them all. I stand condemned as having done more than my share toward extermination. But that does not lessen the fact that I have learned; and in learning I have come to believe that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into the homes and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made and their lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever a heart beats it is very much like our own in the final analysis of things. To see a bird singing on a twig means but little; but to live a season with that bird, to be with it in courting days, in matehood and motherhood, to understand its griefs as well as its gladness means a great deal. And in my books it is my desire to tell of the lives of the wild things which I know as they are actually lived. It is not my desire to humanize them. If we are to love wild animals so much that we do not want to kill them we MUST KNOW THEM AS THEY ACTUALLY LIVE. And in their lives, in the FACTS of their lives, there is so much of real and honest romance and tragedy, so much that makes them akin to ourselves that the animal biographer need not step aside from the paths of actuality to hold one’s interest.

"Perhaps rather tediously I have come to the few words I want to say about Baree, the hero of this book. Baree, after all, is only another Kazan. For it was Kazan I found in the way I have described - a bad dog, a killer about to be shot to death by his master when chance, and my own faith in him, gave him to me.

"We travelled together for many thousands of miles through the northland - on trails to the Barren Lands, to Hudson’s Bay and to the Arctic. Kazan, the bad dog, the half-wolf, the killer - was the best four-legged friend I ever had. He died near Fort MacPherson, on the Peel River, and is buried there. And Kazan was the father of Baree; Gray Wolf, the full-blooded wolf was his mother. ...”