y thirty years. In the canyons
from British Columbia to Mexico, I have lighted my campfire, far beyond
the bounds of law and order, at times, and yet I have found no place
more rewarding than the Yellowstone Park, the great mountain haven of
wild life.

Whenever travellers penetrate into remote regions where human hunters
are unknown, they find the wild things half tame, little afraid of man,
and inclined to stare curiously from a distance of a few paces. But very
soon they learn that man is their most dangerous enemy, and fly from him
as soon as he is seen. It takes a long time and much restraint to win
back their confidence.

In the early days of the West, when game abounded and when fifty yards
was the extreme deadly range of the hunter's weapons, wild creatures
were comparatively tame. The advent of the rifle and of the lawless
skin hunter soon turned all big game into fugitives of excessive shyness
and wariness. One glimpse of a man half a mile off, or a whiff of him on
the breeze, was enough to make a Mountain Ram or a Wolf run for miles,
though formerly these creatures would have gazed serenely from a point
but a hundred yards removed.

The establishment of the Yellowstone Park in 1872 was the beginning of a
new era of protection for wild life; and, by slow degrees, a different
attitude in these animals toward us. In this Reservation, and nowhere
else at present in the northwest, the wild things are not only abundant,
but they have resumed their traditional Garden-of-Eden attitude toward
man.

They come out in the daylight, they are harmless, and they are not
afraid at one's approach. Truly this is ideal, a paradise for the
naturalist and the camera hunter.

The region first won fame for its Canyon, its Cataracts and its Geysers,
but I think its animal life has attracted more travellers than even the
landscape beauties. I know it was solely the joy of being among the
animals that led me to spend all one summer and part of another season
in the Wonderland of the West.

My adventures in making these studies among the fourfoots have been very
small adventures indeed; the thrillers are few and far between. Any one
can go and have the same or better experiences to-day. But I give them
as they happened, and if they furnish no ground for hair-lifting
emotions, they will at least show what I was after and how I went.

I have aimed to show something of the little aspects of the creatures'
lives, which are those t