On the Trail:

Ivan Akexeyevich Aramilev (1896-1954) was born and brought up in the Northern Urals. He came of a long line of professional hunters who passed on to him their love for the hunt which he retained to the end of his days. His stories are about forest life and the habits of birds and animals. They are marked by deep human interest and a hatred of wanton killing.

This book is chiefly addressed to the young reader. The idea in writing the stories was to interest young people in the romance and poetry of hunting, to awaken in them a thirst for roaming about our vast country with knapsack and gun.

A hunter who is a nature-lover, who is attuned to nature heart and soul, is inevitably a meteorologist, and a geographer, and an ethnographer, and a zoologist, as well as a collector of folklore. Almost all hunters are inveterate explorers with an endless store of knowledge of the countryside.

Hunting trips are, besides, excellent physical training; they strengthen the will, build a strong, fearless character, and develop ingenuity and the ability to overcome the greatest possible variety of obstacles and hardships.

In other words, it is the hope of the author that a youth who was not a hunter would, after reading this book, want to become a hunter.