Johnny Bear, and Other Stories from Lives of the Hunted

In the golden light of late-19th-century Yellowstone, a clumsy bear cub named Johnny Bear stumbles through his lessons in survival under the watchful eye of his formidable mother, Grumpy. Ernest Thompson Seton, who would go on to help found the Boy Scouts, writes with the patient intensity of a man who has crouched in the sagebrush for hours, watching, waiting, recording every snuffle and swat. These are not sentimental fables but something more fascinating: rigorous natural history dressed in narrative clothes. Johnny is frail, curious, always getting into trouble at the garbage heap while his mother mediates between his inexperience and the dangerous world beyond. The other stories in this collection follow creatures fighting their own battles in the hunted world, the daily calculus of predator and prey rendered with empathy but never softness. Seton's genius lies in making you feel you're hiding in the willows with him, holding your breath as a sow bear disciplines her cub. It is an artifact from a time when Americans were still learning to see their wilderness clearly, and it retains the strange, quiet power of genuine wonder.