Karl May's first work in a series of stories for young people, written in January–September 1887 for the magazine “The Good Friend” (“Der Gute Kamerad”). As a separate book and in a slightly abbreviated version, “The Bear Hunter’s Son” was first published in 1890 by Wilhelm Spemann’s publishing house in Stuttgart, together with another story “The Spirit of Llano Estacado” (1888) under the general title “Heroes of the Wild West” (Die Helden des Westens). Spemann suggested that May combine both stories, which had a common plot outline, into one novel, but the writer rejected the offer, leaving the two works independent. In 1914, after the death of the writer, the publishing house of Karl May in Radebeul near Dresden combined both short stories under the title “Among the Kites” (Unter Geiern), changed them somewhat and even introduced new characters (from “The Son of the Bear Hunter”, in particular, two stories about bears were removed, the dialogues were greatly shortened, the saga about the leader Fire Water was excluded, etc.). It is worth noting that when creating the story, Mai successfully used many sources and guidebooks (in particular, the writer took the image of the young Vokade from a translated book George Catlin's "Die Indianer Nord-Amerikas" (Leipzig, 1848), description of Yellowstone Park - from "Die neuentdeckten Geyser-Gebiete am oberen Yellowstone und Madison-River" ("Petermanns Mitteilungen". 1872), etc.), which gave his paintings of North American nature and the customs of the Indians a very authentic look. For the first time in Russian, in a greatly abbreviated version, “Son of the Hunter” appeared in 1892 in the appendix to the magazine “Around the World” by Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin in the book “In the Far West” together with “Spirit” Llano Estacado" (this story was also shortened). A century later, in 1993, the Moscow publishing house "Olympus" released a new translation of "Son of the Hunter", which, although carried out from a modern edition that exactly repeated the original, also turned out to be not entirely complete. This translation was carried out based on a book published in 1984 by the Berlin publishing house "Neues Leben", repeating the most complete original version, published in 1890 in Stuttgart ("Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft"). The division into chapters and some corrections are made according to the publication “Die Helden des Westen” (LKG mbH Leipzig, 1992).