Baree is born in a hollow log, half wolf and half dog, and grows up between the two — a trapper's daughter on one side, the pack on the other, and a wilderness that does not care which he chooses. Curwood was expelled from school, sold his first story at sixteen, and was paid by the Canadian government to travel the far north; he later gave up hunting entirely and campaigned for the animals he had shot. Fifty-two plates of forest and lake paintings by Edvard Munch and Joseph Henry Sharp run through the text, matching the northern wild that shapes Baree's story.
