Dear Sir Robert,

I have but one regret in offering to you and to some small section of lovers of wild life this bundle of stories, a regret that for the most part they end with the violent death of the bird or beast whose life-story is set out. One of my friendliest and most charming critics, whom I would not willingly hurt or offend, told me lately that she will read no more of my stories of bird and beast unless I promise to make them end happily. I quoted Omar the Tentmaker in extenuation, and pointed out that if we could shatter the sorry scheme of things and remould it “nearer to the hearts desire” the lion and the lamb would lie down side by side and the big game shooter would confine his skill to the target. Then I added that for the time being the battle is to the strong, and the explosive bullet and the hammerless ejector are to the sportsman, but from the depth of a twelve year knowledge of the world and a deep love of the life that is entrusted to our care, she turned away declaring in great distress that I am “very horrid”. Certainly I was greatly abashed, even though I could not wish her to read this book.

You, no unworthy son of one who was a mighty hunter before the Lord, know that these stories are true in substance if not in form, and that such cruelty as is set out in its proper place is of the kind that man has dealt in some way or another to the brute creation since the dim far-off days when first he learned to fashion hatchet and spear and knife. His excuse has passed, but the old-time savagery lingers. I have done no more than set down what I have seen, though I have gifted bird and beast with an intelligence they are not allowed to possess. You at least will grant that there is some foundation for my lapse from the grace in which serious naturalists thrive even to the second and third edition of volumes that become works of reference to those who refuse to admit imagination to their councils. You have seen much of the strange camaraderie that exists in the African forest and on the heather-clad hills of your native land, and you know that the philosophy of the orthodox professor has not yet fashioned even in dreams all the wonders of life in the heavens above and on the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth. I am presumptuous enough to think that those of us who have camped out under the canopy of the stars in the world’s waste places, and have followed the track for days and nights together, not without privation, have caught glimpses of an order and union in the wild life around us that will some day be recognised and investigated by those who speak and write with more authority than I have even the ambition to command. I must even confess, with all due humility, that I am beyond the reach of rebuke for my attitude towards bird and beast so long as it does not come from those, like yourself, whose experience of the fauna and avi-fauna of North Africa, Southern Europe and the Scottish Highlands is greater than my own.