NATURE 



25 



THURSDAY, NO\EMBER 14, 1901. 



A CANADIAN NATURALIST. 



Wild Animals I have Known . By Ernest Seton-Thom p- 

 son. (New York City : Scribner and Sons.) 



The Trail of the Sandhill Stag. (New York City : 

 Scribner and Sons.) 



The Bioiiraphy of a Grizzly. ( Xeiv York : The Century 

 Company.) 



MR. ERNEST SETON-THOMPSON, Naturalist 

 to the Government of Manitoba, is an American 

 author and artist whose works enjoy a wide popularity in 

 his own country, but are less known than they deserve 

 to be on this side of the Atlantic. He has written books 

 on the birds and mammals of his State and done other 

 more or less scientific work, but owes his fame, perhaps, 

 rather to three lighter volumes, beautifully got up and 

 illustrated by himself, with the assistance of his wife, the 

 companion in his later wanderings. These are " Wild 

 Animals I have Known,'' first published in 189S and 

 already, early last year, in an eighth edition ; '" The 

 Trail of the Sandhill Stag, " and latest, and perhaps most 

 powerful of the three, "The Biography of a Grizzly." 



The full-page drawings in all three books are finished 

 works of art, and many of the little marginal sketches — 

 scraps of boughs and berries, and suggestions in a few 

 strokes of footprints in the snow and woodland and 

 mountain scenes — would have delighted Ruskin. 



At one time in his life a wolf-trapper, Mr. Seton- 

 Thompson is, in the highest sense of the word, a field 

 naturalist ; and, gifted with a poet's imagination, has 

 identified himself, with a completeness which few writers 

 have reached, with the wild creatures whose lives and 

 surroundings he paints. The key-note of his writings is 

 struck in the preface to the first of the three books :^ 



" A moral as old as Scripture, \Ve and the beasts are kin. 

 Man has nothing that the animals have not at least a 

 vestige of, the animals have nothing that man does not 

 in some degree share. . . . They surely have their 

 rights." 



When caught hand and foot in wolf traps which he had 

 been carelessly setting, and from which in the end he was 

 freed only by the intelligence of a faithful dog, who, after 

 one or two fruitless attempts to help him, brought him 

 the trap wrench which had lain just beyond his reach, he 

 remembered as the prairie wolves howled round him, 

 drawing closer and closer, " how old Giron, the trapper, 

 had been lost, and in the following spring his comrades 

 found his skeleton held by the leg in a bear trap," and 

 a " new thought came to him '' — " This is how a wolf feels 

 w^hen he is trapped." "Yan," in "The Sandhill Stag," 

 alone and far from help of any kind, on the trail of the 

 muckle hart, in the mid-winter moonlight hears across 

 the frozen snow the gathering hunting cry of the wolves, 

 nearer and nearer, until it suddenly flashes upon him, 

 •' It is my trail you are on ! You are hunting me." 

 When at last within fifteen feet of "the great ears and 

 mournful eyes" of his tired-out quarry, he remembers 

 how he felt then, and cannot shoot. He had "found the 

 Grail" and "learned what Buddha learned'' more than 

 2000 years ago. 



XO. 1672, VOL. 65] 



Where all alike are excellent, none can well be best ; 

 and of the wild animals which Mr. Thompson " has 

 known " and writes of it is not easy to make a choice. 



There is the "Springfield fox," who shook the dogs 

 off when she thought proper by "the simple device of 

 springing on a sheep's back," and who, when, in spite of 

 gunshots, she had tried for three nights to bite through 

 the chain which held her cub, and found all her attempts 

 to free him useless and danger faced for nothing, brought 

 him poison and was never again herself seen or heard 

 of in the neighbourhood. 



There are "Wully," the four-legged Jekyll-Hyde, a 

 faithful sheep-dog by day ; and at night a treacherous, 

 bloodthirsty monster, who, when found out, flew straight 

 at the throat of the girl to whom he had always pro- 

 fessed especial devotion; and " Silverspot," the canny 

 old leader of the band of crows which had their head- 

 quarters on a pine-clad hill near Toronto ; and others, 

 not less interesting, sketched by a master-hand. 



The most striking figure in the first book, second only, 

 if second, to the grizzly who has the honour of a 

 volume to himself, is "The King of Currumpaw," a 

 great wolf who, with his pure white mate and a chosen 

 band of five, all wolves of renown, terrorised one of the 

 vast cattle ranges of New Mexico, and with a price of 

 1000 dollars on his head — an unparalleled wolf-bounty — 

 scorned all hunters, " derided all poisons, and continued 

 for at least five years to exact tribute from Currumpaw 

 ranches to the e.xtent, many said, of a cow each day." 



The band seldom condescended to eat mutton, con- 

 fining themselves almost entirely to the best cuts of year- 

 old heifers ; but for the mere fun of the thing stampeded 

 and killed sheep by hundreds. 



Mr. Thompson gives an instance of the grim bandit's 

 diabolic cunning which came under his own observation. 



" Sheep," he writes, " are such senseless creatures 

 that they are liable to be stampeded by the veriest trifle, 

 but they have deeply ingrained in their nature one, and 

 perhaps only one, strong weakness, namely, to follow 

 their leader. And this the shepherds turn to good account 

 by putting half a dozen goats in the flock of sheep. The 

 latter recognise the superior intelligence of their bearded 

 cousins, and when a night alarm occurs they crowd 

 around them, and usually are thus saved from a stampede 

 and are easily protected. But it is not always so. One 

 night in last November two Perico shepherds were 

 aroused by an onset of wolves. 



"Their flocks huddled around the goats, which, being 

 neither fools nor cowards, stood their ground and were 

 bravely defiant ; but, alas for them, no common wolf was 

 heading this attack. Old Lobo, the weir-wolf, knew as 

 well as the shepherds that the goats were the moral force 

 of the flocks, so hastily running over the backs of the 

 densely packed sheep, he fell on these leaders, slew 

 them all in a few minutes, and soon had the luckless 

 sheep stampeding in a thousand different directions." 



It was not until "the grand old outlaw" had lost his 

 consort and become reckless, following her body to the 

 ranch-house and tearing the watch-dog to pieces within 

 fifty yards of the door, that he met his end at the hands 

 of his biographer, who had come by special invitation to 

 the Palette Ranch to match his cunning with the great 

 wolf's. 



" Wahb," the hero of the book last on the list, is, like 

 the king wolf (whose portrait, adm'ra'ily drawn — " Lobo, 



C 



