Wild Animals I Have Known

In 1898, a naturalist and illustrator named Ernest Thompson Seton did something no writer had done before: he told the true stories of individual wild animals as if they were characters in literature, and in doing so, invented a genre. Wild Animals I Have Known presents eight creatures in vivid, unsentimental detail: a crow who returns year after year to the same marsh, a wolf whose intelligence and pride make him legendary across northern New Mexico, a cottontail rabbit whose mother teaches him the ways of the wild. The most famous tale is Lobo, King of Currumpaw, a gray wolf so cunning he evades every trap and hunter Seton sets for him, until tragedy breaks the story open. Seton was both scientist and poet, and his wolves don't howl at moons or moralize. They hunt, love, grieve, and die according to their own logic. The book sparked controversy Seton was called a "nature faker" for giving animals interior lives but it endures because it first made readers see that a predator's soul is not so different from their own. This is frontier America, wild and disappearing, captured in prose that still stings.