In the original preface to "Northern Trails" the author stated that, with the solitary exception of the salmon's life in the sea after he vanishes from human sight, every incident recorded here is founded squarely upon personal and accurate observation of animal life and habits. I now repeat and emphasize that statement. Even when the observations are, for the reader's sake, put into the form of a connected story, there is not one trait or habit mentioned which is not true to animal life.

Such a statement ought to be enough, especially as I have repeatedly furnished evidence from reliable eye-witnesses to support every observation that the critics have challenged; but of late a strenuous public attack has been made upon the wolf story in this volume by two men claiming to speak with authority. They take radical exception to my record of a big white wolf killing a young caribou by snapping at the chest and heart. They declared this method of killing to be "a mathematical impossibility" and, by inference, a gross falsehood, utterly ruinous to true ideas of wolves and of natural history.

As no facts or proofs are given to support this charge, the first thing which a sensible man naturally does is to examine the fitness of the critics, in order to ascertain upon what knowledge or experience they base their dogmatic statements. One of these critics is a man who has no personal knowledge of wolves or caribou, who asserts that the animal has no possibility of reason or intelligence, and who has for years publicly denied the observations of other men which tend to disprove his ancient theory. It seems hardly worth while to argue about either wolves or men with such a naturalist, or to point out that Descartes' idea of animals, as purely mechanical or automatic creatures, has long since been laid aside and was never considered seriously by any man who had lived close to either wild or domestic animals. The second critic's knowledge of wolves consists almost entirely of what he has happened to see when chasing the creatures with dogs and hunters. Judging by his own nature books, with their barbaric records of slaughter, his experience of wild animals was gained while killing them. Such a man will undoubtedly discover some things about animals, how they fight and hide and escape their human enemies; but it hardly needs any argument to show that the man who goes into the woods with dogs and rifles and the desire to kill can never understand any living animal.

If you examine now any of the little books which he condemns, you will find a totally different story: no record of chasing and killing, but only of patient watching, of creeping near to wild animals and winning their confidence whenever it is possible, of following them day and night with no motive but the pure love of the thing and no object but to see exactly what each animal is doing and to understand, so far as a man can, the mystery of its dumb life.

Naturally a man in this attitude will see many traits of animal life which are hidden from the game-killer as well as from the scientific collector of skins. For instance, practically all wild animals are shy and timid and run away at man's approach. This is the general experience not only of hunters but of casual observers in the woods. Yet my own experience has many times shown me exactly the opposite trait: that when these same shy animals find me unexpectedly close at hand, more than half the time they show no fear whatever but only an eager curiosity to know who and what the creature is that sits so quietly near them. Sometimes, indeed, they seem almost to understand the mental attitude which has no thought of harm but only of sympathy and friendly interest. Once I was followed for hours by a young wolf which acted precisely like a lost dog, too timid to approach and too curious or lonely to run away. He even wagged his tail when I called to him softly. Had I shot him on sight, I would probably have foolishly believed that he intended to attack me when he came trotting along my trail. Three separate times I have touched a wild deer with my hand; once I touched a moose, once an eagle, once a bear; and a score of times at least I have had to frighten these big animals or get out of their way, when their curiosity brought them too near for perfect comfort.

So much for the personal element, for the general attitude and fitness of the observer and his critics. But the question is not chiefly a personal one; it is simply a matter of truth and observation, and the only honest or scientific method is, first, to go straight to nature and find out the facts; and thenlest your own eyesight or judgment be at faultto consult other observers to find if, perchance, they also have seen the facts exemplified. This is not so easy as to dogmatize or to write animal stories; but it is the only safe method, and one which the nature writer as well as the scientist must follow if his work is to endure.

Following this good method, when the critics had proclaimed that my record of a big wolf killing a young caribou by biting into the chest and heart was an impossibility, I went straight to the big woods and, as soon as the law allowed, secured photographs and exact measurements of the first full-grown deer that crossed my trail. These photographs and measurements show beyond any possibility of honest doubt the following facts: (1) The lower chest of a deer, between and just behind the forelegs, is thin and wedge-shaped, exactly as I stated, and the point of the heart is well down in this narrow wedge. The distance through the chest and point of the heart from side to side was, in this case, exactly four and one-half inches. A man's hand, as shown in the photograph, can easily grasp the whole lower chest of a deer, placing thumb and forefinger over the heart on opposite sides. (2) The heart of a deer, and indeed of all ruminant animals, lies close against the chest walls and is easily reached and wounded. The chest cartilage, except in an old deer, is soft; the ribs are thin and easily crushed, and the spaces between the ribs are wide enough to admit a man's finger, to say nothing of a wolf's fang. In this case the point of the heart, as the deer lay on his side, was barely five eights of an inch from the surface. (3) Any dog or wolf, therefore, having a spread of jaws of four and one-half inches, and fangs three quarters of an inch long, could easily grasp the chest of this deer from beneath and reach the heart from either side. As the jaws of the big northern wolf spread from six to eight inches and his fangs are over an inch long, to kill a deer in this way would require but a slight effort. The chest of a caribou is anatomically exactly like that of other deer; only the caribou fawn and yearling of "Northern Trails" have smaller chests than the animals I measured.

So much for the facts and the possibilities. As for specific instances, years ago I found a deer just killed in the snow and beside him the fresh tracks of a big wolf, which had probably been frightened away at my approach. The deer was bitten just behind and beneath the left shoulder, and one long fang had entered the heart. There was not another scratch on the body, so far as I could discover. I thought this very exceptional at the time; but years afterwards my Indian guide in the interior of Newfoundland assured me that it was a common habit of killing caribou among the big white wolves with which he was familiar. To show that the peculiar habit is not confined to any one section, I quote here from the sworn statements of three other eyewitnesses. The first is superintendent of the Algonquin National Park, a man who has spent a lifetime in the North Woods and who has at present an excellent opportunity for observing wild-animal habits; the second is an educated Sioux Indian; the third is a geologist and mining engineer, now practicing his profession in Philadelphia.

ALGONQUIN PARK, ONTARIO, August 31, 1907.

This certifies that during the past thirty years spent in our Canadian wilds, I have seen several animals killed by our large timber wolves. In the winter of 1903 I saw two deer thus killed on Smoke Lake, Nipissing, Ontario. One deer was bitten through the front chest, the other just behind the foreleg. In each case there was no other wound on the body.

G.W. BARTLETT, Superintendent.

I certify that I lived for twenty years in northern Nebraska and Dakota, in a region where timber wolves were abundant. I saw one horse that had just been killed by a wolf. The front of his chest was torn open to the heart. There was no other wound on the body. I once watched a wolf kill a stray horse on the open prairie. He kept nipping at the hind legs, making the horse turn rapidly till he grew dizzy and fell down. Then the wolf snapped or bit into his chest. The horse died in a few moments.

STEPHEN JONES (HEPIDAN).

I certify that in November, 1900, while surveying in Wyoming, my party saw two wolves chase a two-year-old colt over a cliff some fifteen or sixteen feet high. I was on the spot with two others immediately after the incident occurred. The only injuries to the colt, aside from a broken leg, were deep lacerations made by wolf fangs in the chest behind the foreshoulder. In addition to this personal observation I have frequently heard from hunters, herders, and cowboys that big wolves frequently kill deer and other animals by snapping at the chest.

F.S. PUSEY.

I have more evidence of the same kind from the region which I described in "Northern Trails"; but I give these three simply to show that what one man discovers as a surprising trait of some individual wolf or deer may be common enough when we open our eyes to see. The fact that wolves do not always or often kill in this way has nothing to do with the question. I know one small region where old wolves generally hunt in pairs and, so far as I can discover, one wolf always trips or throws the game, while the other invariably does the killing at the throat. In another region, including a part of Algonquin Park, in Ontario, I have the records of several deer killed by wolves in a single winter; and in every case the wolf slipped up behind his game and cut the femoral artery, or the inner side of the hind leg, and then drew back quietly, allowing the deer to bleed to death.

The point is, that because a thing is unusual or interesting it is not necessarily false, as my dogmatic critics would have you believe. I have studied animals, not as species but as individuals, and have recorded some things which other and better naturalists have overlooked; but I have sought for facts, first of all, as zealously as any biologist, and have recorded only what I have every reason to believe is true. That these facts are unusual means simply that we have at last found natural history to be interesting, just as the discovery of unusual men and incidents gives charm and meaning to the records of our humanity. There may be honest errors or mistakes in these booksand no one tries half so hard as the author to find and correct thembut meanwhile the fact remains that, though six volumes of the Wood Folk books have already been published, only three slight errors have thus far been pointed out, and these were promptly and gratefully acknowledged.

The simple truth is that these observations of mine, though they are all true, do not tell more than a small fraction of the interesting things that wild animals do continually in their native state, when they are not frightened by dogs and hunters, or when we are not blinded by our preconceived notions in watching them. I have no doubt that romancing is rife just now on the part of men who study animals in a library; but personally, with my note-books full of incidents which I have never yet recorded, I find the truth more interesting, and I cannot understand why a man should deliberately choose romance when he can have the greater joy of going into the wilderness to see with his own eyes and to understand with his own heart just how the animals live. One thing seems to me to be more and more certain: that we are only just beginning to understand wild animals, and it is chiefly our own barbarism, our lust of killing, our stupid stuffed specimens, and especially our prejudices which stand in the way of greater knowledge. Meanwhile the critic who asserts dogmatically what a wild animal will or will not do under certain conditions only proves how carelessly he has watched them and how little he has learned of Nature's infinite variety.

WILLIAM J. LONG

STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT