When the world was a wilder place, people wondered about animals the way they wondered about their neighbors...

Now there aren't so many animals, nor occasions to encountered them. In The Voice of the Wild, Patricia Beard has collected the best of classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction in which animals are at the heart of things. Unsentimental images capture the savageness as well as vulnerability of a myriad of species, while at the same time exposing Homo sapiens: an animal that while hunting its fellow creatures sometimes finds a kindred spirit, sometimes the archetypal enemy, but always sees in the wild a reflection of its own mysterious nature.

Stories by: Bartle Bull, Tim Cahill, Pat Conroy, Jim Corbett, Isak Dinesen, Alistair Graham, Elspeth Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Gavin Maxwell, Thomas McGuane, Thomas McNamee, Theodore Roosevelt, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Ernest Thompson Seton, Jean Stafford, Annabel Thomas, Laurens van der Post, and Henry Williamson