Title:  Baree, Son of Kazan

Author:  James Oliver Curwood

Release Date:  December, 2003 [EBook #4748] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 12, 2002] [Date last updated:  July 12, 2005]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of the project gutenberg EBOOK, baree, son of Kazan ***

Etext prepared by Dianne Bean, Prescott Valley, Arizona.

Baree, Son of Kazan. 
James Oliver Curwood.

Preface

Since the publication of my two animal books, “Kazan, the Wolf Dog” 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 inquiring 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.