Читать книгу Animal Tracks and Hunter Signs - Ernest Thompson Seton - Страница 7

For over seventy years I have followed the Trail—in the backwoods of Canada, over the snows of Manitoba, through the swamps of Florida, on the sands of the Arctic tundra, in the level fields of England and of France, on the mountains of Norway; yes, and sometimes in the sedimentary rocks that one time were the mud, through which some bygone creature walked in the long ago.

My pleasure and reward have kept on ever increasing, as is always the case with one who earnestly follows a nature trail.

I have spent many days and many nights on the trail, following, following patiently, reading the life of the beast, using a notebook at every important move and change. Many an odd new sign has turned up to be put on record and explained by later experience.

Often a day passed with nothing tangible in the way of reward. Then, as in all hunting, there has come a streak of luck, a shower of facts and abundant compensation for the barren weeks gone by, an insight into animal ways and mind that could not have been obtained by any other method.

For here it is, written down by the animal itself, in the oldest of all writing, and recording a chapter when the creature was not escaping, but pursuing the placid even tenor of its normal forest life.

In this review of my observations, I have given track diagrams of many beasts, reptiles, and birds, all of them drawn from life and to scale, and all observed in America.

This is a mere start in trailing; I hope it may result in giving others as much joy as it has given me.

Ernest Thompson Seton

Seton Village

Santa Fe, New Mexico

August 14, 1946

N.B. The drawings and notes are taken wholly from the author’s own lifelong experiences in the wilds; but the assembling of them into a readable book after Mr. Seton’s death was done by his wife, Julia M. Seton who lived with him through many of the adventures that led to this writing.

Those drawings which the author made life size and marked correspondingly (e.g. page 41) have been reproduced in approximately three-quarters their original size.

Since Ernest Thompson Seton was an American writer, no attempt has been made to anglicize the spelling or vocabulary.