The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Grizzly King, by James Oliver Curwood,
Illustrated by Frank B. Hoffman

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Title: The Grizzly King

Author: James Oliver Curwood

Release Date: February 7, 2004 [eBook #10977]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

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THE GRIZZLY KING

A ROMANCE OF THE WILD

BY

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

1918

ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK B. HOFFMAN

[Illustration: "As Thor had more than once come into contact with
porcupine quills, he hesitated."]

To
MY BOY

PREFACE

It is with something like a confession that I offer this second of my
nature books to the public--a confession, and a hope; the confession of one
who for years hunted and killed before he learned that the wild offered a
more thrilling sport than slaughter--and the hope that what I have written
may make others feel and understand that the greatest thrill of the hunt is
not in killing, but in letting live. It is true that in the great open
spaces one must kill to live; one must have meat, and meat is life. But
killing for food is not the lust of slaughter; it is not the lust which
always recalls to me that day in the British Columbia mountains when, in
less than two hours, I killed four grizzlies on a mountain slide--a
destruction of possibly a hundred and twenty years of life in a hundred and
twenty minutes. And that is only one instance of many in which I now regard
myself as having been almost a criminal--for killing for the excitement of
killing can be little less than murder. In their small way my animal books
are the reparation I am now striving to make, and it has been my earnest
desire to make them not only of