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 romantic interest, but reliable in their
fact. As in human life, there are tragedy, and humour, and pathos in the
life of the wild; there are facts of tremendous interest, real happenings
and real lives to be written about, and very small necessity for one to
draw on imagination. In "Kazan" I tried to give the reader a picture of my
years of experience among the wild sledge dogs of the North. In "The
Grizzly" I have scrupulously adhered to facts as I have found them in the
lives of the wild creatures of which I have written. Little Muskwa was with
me all that summer and autumn in the Canadian Rockies. Pipoonaskoos is
buried in the Firepan Range country, with a slab over his head, just like a
white man. The two grizzly cubs we dug out on the Athabasca are dead. And
Thor still lives, for his range is in a country where no hunters go--and
when at last the opportunity came we did not kill him. This year (in July
of 1916) I am going back into the country of Thor and Muskwa. I think I
would know Thor if I saw him again, for he was a monster full-grown. But
in two years Muskwa had grown from cubhood into full bearhood. And yet I
believe that Muskwa would know me should we chance to meet again. I like to
think that he has not forgotten the sugar, and the scores of times he
cuddled up close to me at night, and the hunts we had together after roots
and berries, and the sham fights with which we amused ourselves so often in
camp. But, after all, perhaps he would not forgive me for that last day
when we ran away from him so hard--leaving him alone to his freedom in the
mountains.