Foreword
There must be some sentiment attached to an author’s choice of what he considers his “best story” if he can reach any such decision at all. Frankly, I cannot, and so I have chosen the story which has always lived closest to my heart. It is really not a short story complete in itself but is one of ten stories, or instalments, which make up my novel “Kazan.”
This individual story I like best because in it I bid good-by to Kazan and Gray Wolf, two dogs whose memories will live with me long after the memories of many of my two-legged friends have faded away. Kazan died up near Fort MacPherson, a little this side of the Arctic Circle; Gray Wolf near Norway House. Gray Wolf was a dog with an undoubted strain of wolf in her, and was blinded when very young. She did not belong to me, but was owned by a man who claimed to be a relative of the Bishop of the Yukon. Kazan was mine. He was a one-man dog. It was his friendship for blind Gray Wolf, when we were on one of our adventures near Norway House, that led to the writing of my novel “Kazan.”