“Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting.”
—General Zaroff, The Most Dangerous Game, Richard Connell
This will be a brief introduction because I don’t want to delay you from making your way into the storytelling—storytelling being, of course, the earliest form of art and the one emerging directly from the hunt. The tales in this exceptional compendium reflect the wide diversity of the hunting experience. Yet while each is unique, they all follow a similar set of tracks, deriving from the identical coil of racing heart and illuminating soul, the spark of which is traced to the first of our ancient hunting fathers. Not only the original storyteller, this hunter was also, perforce, the original reader—of spoor, light, wind, and more. He was the earth’s initial interpreter of abstract signs, precursors to the black letters and words marked, like hoof- and pawprints, across the pages you now hold in your hands. So the reading of this book is also, like the hunt, being on the trail, giving chase to an object of pursuit.
It would seem right, then, to wish the reader “good hunting.” The old cacciatori of Italy ’s Piedmont, though, accounted it the very worst of luck to express such a sentiment. Instead they made another petition, to camouflage their true intentions: In bocca al lupo, “Fall into the jaws of the wolf!” May you, as well, and with great pleasure.