you know the habits of crows or the habits of caribou in general,
watch the first one that crosses your path as if he were an entire
stranger; open eyes to see and heart to interpret, and you will surely
find some new thing, some curious unrecorded way, to give delight to
your tramp and bring you home with a new interest.

This individuality of the wild creatures will account, perhaps, for
many of these Ways, which can seem no more curious or startling to the
reader than to the writer when he first discovered them. They are,
almost entirely, the records of personal observation in the woods and
fields. Occasionally, when I know my hunter or woodsman well, I have
taken his testimony, but never without weighing it carefully, and
proving it whenever possible by watching the animal in question for
days or weeks till I found for myself that it was all true.

The sketches are taken almost at random from old note-books and summer
journals. About them gather a host of associations, of
living-over-agains, that have made it a delight to write them;
associations of the winter woods, of apple blossoms and nest-building,
of New England uplands and wilderness rivers, of camps and canoes, of
snowshoes and trout rods, of sunrise on the hills, when one climbed
for the eagle's nest, and twilight on the yellow wind-swept beaches,
where the surf sobbed far away, and wings twanged like reeds in the
wind swooping down to decoys,--all thronging about one, eager to be
remembered if not recorded. Among them, most eager, most intense, most
frequent of all associations, there is a boy with nerves all a-tingle
at the vast sweet mystery that rustled in every wood, following the
call of the winds and the birds, or wandering alone where the spirit
moved him, who never studied nature consciously, but only loved it,
and who found out many of these Ways long ago, guided solely by a