A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly
changing popular attitude toward nature during recent years.
People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in
conserving game for sportsmen to shoot, but in preserving all
wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora,
in building houses that harmonize with climate and landscape.
Roger Tory Peterson's _Field Guide to the Birds_ has become
one of the popular standard works of America.
The story of the American Indian is--despite taboos and
squalor--a story of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf
Brother," in _Long Lance_, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance,
is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with
the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick
Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode
horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote
_Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_. In this book
he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp,
waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes
coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would
have shot the lobo at first appearance.
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