Short stories
Wild Animals I Have Known
Ernest Thompson Seton · 1898
Synopsis
Eight animals, eight lives told as one would tell a man's. Lobo, a great grey wolf, has for years ravaged the herds of the Currumpaw valley, in New Mexico, and foils traps and poisons. Silverspot, an old crow, leads his flock near Toronto and teaches it his signals. Raggylug, a young rabbit, learns from his mother to keep silent and freeze. Then come Bingo, the author's dog in Manitoba, a vixen who comes to feed her chained cub, a mustang that no one manages to capture, Wully, an English sheepdog, and Redruff, the Don partridge.
Context
In the autumn of 1893, a friend who owned a ranch in this valley in New Mexico invited him to come and shoot a wolf that had been costing him cattle for years; he took it in January 1894, and this hunt opens the book, published in 1898 by Scribner in New York and by Nutt in London, with two hundred drawings by his hand. In 1903, the naturalist John Burroughs reproached him in the Atlantic Monthly for attributing to animals behaviour that no observer had seen, and proposed adding to the title the word that was missing, alone. The quarrel later took the name of nature fakers, and Theodore Roosevelt joined in.
Who it is for
Short stories, easy to read, illustrated by the author; the 2016 translation gives a complete French text of them.
Prizes and reception
An immediate success, reissued eight times in three years; translated into French in 1929, in four volumes, then again in 2016.
Sources for this page 11
The pages consulted to check this page.