Wild Animals I have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton

Wild Animals I have Known is a collection of short stories.  The first one is about a wolf that terrorized farmers for years until a large enough bounty was put on his head.  Then comes a crow that organizes the other crows like an army.  Raggylug the rabbit learns in the third short story how to live like a rabbit.  The fourth story is more personal and is about the author's own dog.  A cruel and beautiful family of foxes strive to outwit humans in the next short story.  Then several people try to tame a mustang, who is the champion of the western range.  Wully is a dog with a dark secret.  Finally, the last short story is about the life of the largest partridge in several states.

The problem that people in the time this book was written had was that he appeared to believe that the events in the stories were true and plausible.  I don't entirely know whether the introduction that said that Seton believed that these were perfectly true stories was sincere or the type of warning that goes with many books in the fiction sections, usually spoken by a character, assuring that the strangest of events are true.  Seton, along with many others, sparked a controversy about teaching the public misinformation about what animals can and can't do. 

Every last one is written in a prose that is flowery without growing boring.  It captures the spirit of the animal kingdom, and writes only of legendary creatures, never giving us one that we would think of as mundane or average.  Every story has the feel of a fairy-tale about it.  I was a bit annoyed by three of them ending in more or less the exact same way ("Lobo, the King of Currumpaw", "The Springfield Fox", and "The Pacing Mustang",) but Seton warns us in the beginning that many animals have their stories end that way.