The Project Gutenberg EBook of Baree, Son of Kazan, by James Oliver Curwood

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Title: Baree, Son of Kazan

Author: James Oliver Curwood

Posting Date: September 6, 2009 [EBook #4748]
Release Date: December, 2003
First Posted: March 12, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BAREE, SON OF KAZAN ***

Produced by Diane Bean. HTML version by Al Haines.

Baree, Son of Kazan.

James Oliver Curwood.

JTABLE 10 31 1

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 i