y
lengthy visits to New York, as my Manitoban friends will remember. And
my old friend, the owner of Tan, will learn from these pages how his dog
really died.

The Mustang lived not far from Lobo in the early nineties. The story is
given strictly as it occurred, excepting that there is a dispute as to
the manner of his death. According to some testimony he broke his neck
in the corral that he was first taken to. Old Turkeytrack is where he
cannot be consulted to settle it.

Wully is, in a sense, a compound of two dogs; both were mongrels, of
some collie blood, and were raised as sheep-dogs. The first part of
Wully is given as it happened, after that it was known only that he
became a savage, treacherous sheep-killer. The details of the second
part belong really to another, a similar yaller dog, who long lived
the double-life---a faithful sheep-dog by day, and a bloodthirsty,
treacherous monster by night. Such things are less rare than is
supposed, and since writing these stories I have heard of another
double-lived sheep-dog that added to its night amusements the crowning
barbarity of murdering the smaller dogs of the neighborhood. He had
killed twenty, and hidden them in a sandpit, when discovered by his
master. He died just as Wully did.

All told, I now have information of six of these Jekyll-Hyde dogs. In
each case it happened to be a collie.

Redruff really lived in the Don Valley north of Toronto, and many of my
companions will remember him. He was killed in 1889, between the Sugar
Loaf and Castle Frank, by a creature whose name I have withheld, as it
is the species, rather than the individual, that I wish to expose.

Silverspot, Raggylug, and Vixen are founded on real characters. Though
I have ascribed to them the adventures of more than one of their kind,
every incident in their biographies is from life.

The fact that these stories are true is the reason why all are tragic.
The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end.

Such a collection of histories naturally suggests a common thought--a
moral it would have been called in the last century. No doubt each
different mind will find a moral to its taste, but I hope some will
herein find emphasized a moral as old as Scripture--we and the beasts
are kin. Man has nothing that the animals have not at least a vestige
of, the animals have nothing that man does not in some degree share.

Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differin