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.