Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Maria Cecilia Lim and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
By
William J. Long
1905
In the original preface to "Northern Trails" the author stated that,with the solitary exception of the salmon's life in the sea after hevanishes from human sight, every incident recorded here is foundedsquarely upon personal and accurate observation of animal life andhabits. I now repeat and emphasize that statement. Even when theobservations are, for the reader's sake, put into the form of aconnected story, there is not one trait or habit mentioned which is nottrue to animal life.
Such a statement ought to be enough, especially as I have repeatedlyfurnished evidence from reliable eye-witnesses to support everyobservation that the critics have challenged; but of late a strenuouspublic attack has been made upon the wolf story in this volume by twomen claiming to speak with authority. They take radical exception to myrecord of a big white wolf killing a young caribou by snapping at thechest and heart. They declared this method of killing to be "amathematical impossibility" and, by inference, a gross falsehood,utterly ruinous to true ideas of wolves and of natural history.
As no facts or proofs are given to support this charge, the first thingwhich a sensible man naturally does is to examine the fitness of thecritics, in order to ascertain upon what knowledge or experience theybase their dogmatic statements. One of these critics is a man who has nopersonal knowledge of wolves or caribou, who asserts that the animal hasno possibility of reason or intelligence, and who has for years publiclydenied the observations of other men which tend to disprove his ancienttheory. It seems hardly worth while to argue about either wolves or menwith such a naturalist, or to point out that Descartes' idea of animals,as purely mechanical or automatic creatures, has long since been laidaside and was never considered seriously by any man who had lived closeto either wild or domestic animals. The second critic's knowledge ofwolves consists almost entirely of what he has happened to see whenchasing the creatures with dogs and hunters. Judging by his own naturebooks, with their barbaric records of slaughter, his experience of wildanimals was gained while killing them. Such a man will undoubtedlydiscover some things about animals, how they fight and hide and escapetheir human enemies; but it hardly needs any argument to show that theman who goes into the woods with dogs and rifles and the desire to killcan never understand any living animal.
If you examine now any of the little books which he condemns, you willfind a totally different story: no record of chasing and killing, butonly of patient watching, of creeping near to wild animals and winningtheir confidence whenever it is possible, of following them day andnight with no motive but the pure love of the thing and no object but tosee exactly what each animal is doing and to understand, so far as a mancan, the mystery of its dumb life.
Naturally a man in this attitude will see many traits of animal lifewhich are hidden from the game-killer as well as from the scientificcollector of skins. For instance, practically all wild animals are shyand timid and run away at man's approach. This is the general experiencenot only of hunters but of casual observers in the woods. Yet my ownex