e up are avowedly fiction. They
are, at the same time, true, in that the material of which they are
moulded consists of facts,--facts as precise as painstaking
observation and anxious regard for truth can make them. Certain of the
stories, of course, are true literally. Literal truth may be attained
by stories which treat of a single incident, or of action so
restricted as to lie within the scope of a single observation. When,
on the other hand, a story follows the career of a wild creature of
the wood or air or water through wide intervals of time and space, it
is obvious that the truth of that story must be of a different kind.
The complete picture which such a story presents is built up from
observation necessarily detached and scattered; so that the utmost it
can achieve as a whole is consistency with truth. If a writer has, by
temperament, any sympathetic understanding of the wild kindreds; if
he has any intimate knowledge of their habits, with any sensitiveness
to the infinite variation of their personalities; and if he has
chanced to live much among them during the impressionable periods
of his life, and so become saturated in their atmosphere and their
environment;--then he may hope to make his most elaborate piece of
animal biography not less true to nature than his transcript of an
isolated fact. The present writer, having spent most of his boyhood on
the fringes of the forest, with few interests save those which the
forest afforded, may claim to have had the intimacies of the
wilderness as it were thrust upon him. The earliest enthusiasms which
he can recollect are connected with some of the furred or feathered
kindred; and the first thrills strong enough to leave a lasting mark
on his memory are those with which he used to follow--furtive,
apprehensive, expectant, breathlessly watchful--the lure of an unknown
trail.

There is one more point which may seem to claim a word. A very
distinguished author--to whom all contemporary writers on nature are
indebted, and from whom it is only with the utmost diffidence that I
venture to dissent at all--has gently called me to account on the
charge of ascribing to my animals human motives and the mental
processes of man. The fact is, however, that this fault is one which I
have been at particular pains to guard against. The psychological
processes of the animals are so simple, so obvious, in comparison with
those of man, their actions flow so directly from their springs