Under a Wild Sky (18 page)

Once the skin was removed, it was turned right side out, then cleaned and dried. An experienced skinner could do a small songbird in about twenty minutes. A big, thin-skinned species like a duck took several hours. Bird skins were remarkably durable and could even be washed and wrung out before the feathers were stroked back into place with one's fingertips. But they were vulnerable to insects, which were encountered everywhere on the frontier and could be counted on to infest and ruin a bird skin unless it was treated with a “preservative.” Audubon used the standard treatment: arsenic. A potent insecticide, arsenic was also known to be poisonous if ingested, but no one then understood the neurotoxic effects of chronic, long-term exposure to it. Audubon, like other naturalists and taxidermists in that time, routinely handled arsenic through most of his adult life. It came packaged in different forms. Audubon probably bought it in cakes, like soap bars, that he smeared directly into the cavities of his birds before stuffing them and stitching them up, being careful to hide the thread beneath the feathers. Audubon's surviving bird skins even now faintly retain the sweet almond smell of arsenic.

Birds of all kinds were so easy to find in Kentucky then that Audubon may rarely have resorted to skinning specimens except on his most extended forays. Later in his career, though, Audubon came to rely on skins in his work and had them sent to him from all over America. He used skinned specimens to correct proofs of his drawings and also, in some instances, to depict birds he'd never seen in the wild.

As Audubon settled into married life and acquainted himself with the diversions of the frontier, the polar ends of his personality became more distinct. There was the playful Audubon who neglected his work and his family to tramp the woods at his leisure. This Audubon—seemingly immune to physical hardships and eager to partake of every amusement—was suited to life at the edge of civilization. He was a popular figure—a
gentleman merchant who could shoot and ride and dance with the best among them. Comfortable now with his English, Audubon picked up a Kentuckian's knack for tall tales and practical jokes.
Once, Audubon and a group of friends presented a local flower fancier with what they said was a rare type of geranium, the “rat-tailed Niger.” In fact, it
was
a rat, buried headfirst in a pot, its spindly, semi-dried tail protruding up from the dirt and tied to a short stake as if it were a leafless stem. Water and tend it, Audubon advised, and it will soon green and bloom. The man followed Audubon's instructions for days—until the smell convinced him that he'd been duped.

There was also the other Audubon—this one an artist testing the limits of a prodigious talent, teaching himself to draw birds as he actually saw them.
In the quiet hours he spent over his drawings, Audubon experimented with his pencil and his colors. Gradually, over the course of the next several years, Audubon found more uses for his outlining pencil, using graphite for shading and rubbing to create undertones that brought added texture to the images. He sometimes worked over his pastels and watercolors with pencil, adding the striations of individual feathers or highlighting details in the feet. It would be a few years, still, before he released his subjects from conventional poses and set them free to fly and cavort on the page. But even at this stage, Audubon's birds were advancing beyond anything as yet seen.

Audubon destroyed his earliest drawings. A few that exist—including some that were made in 1805 during his brief return to France, as well as some from his later formative years at Mill Grove and in Louisville—are the equal of Alexander Wilson's at the height of his career.
A sign of what was to come was Audubon's drawing of a belted kingfisher he shot at the Falls of the Ohio in the summer of 1808, shortly after he and Lucy arrived there. Audubon drew the bird in simple profile—yet it appears utterly real, from the rich blue of its fat, compact body, to its wispy head crest and powerful, spiky beak. The eye, especially, looks
alive
. Audubon was an emotional man, and at Louisville his feelings for the first time entered his drawings in a way that imparted the most human of all traits to his subjects: consciousness.

Audubon's carelessness about his business and the industry with which he developed his art were, for the time being, the affordable luxuries of a young man having a great time with little thought of the future.
Later, when Audubon recalled his years in Louisville, one of his most
vivid memories was of a party. It was the Fourth of July. In a stand of beech trees near Beargrass Creek, the forest had been cleared, the low branches cut away, and a sprawling lawn opened to the sky. Everyone in town came, bringing with them venison and ham and turkey and fish, plus baskets of peaches, plums, and a variety of succulent melons. Fires were kindled. A “barbecue” commenced. Fifes and drums played, as patriotic speeches echoed through the forest and a small cannon went off at intervals. Carafes of wine were passed, and stouthearted men filled their glasses from barrels of “Old Monongahela.” Shooting contests were staged and horses were raced across the glen. Stories were told and hoots of laughter filled the air. At the call to dinner, the women sat first while the men tended their partners with the preening enthusiasm of turkey cocks in full strut. The men ate next. And then came the dancing, the men in their leather hunting shirts twirling women in fringed skirts to the thumping music of violins, clarionets, and bugles. At dusk the fires were relit and another meal appeared beneath a spray of stars overhead. “Columbia's sons and daughters,” Audubon later wrote, “seemed to have grown younger” that day.

What a time it was for Audubon and Lucy and little Victor. Even as Ferdinand Rozier wrung his hands at the bleak numbers in their ledger, the Audubons were intoxicated with their life together.
In the spring of 1810, Lucy's father oversaw the sale of Audubon's remaining interest in Mill Grove and deposited nearly $8,000 in Audubon and Rozier's account in New York. This was, for all practical purposes, the last of their money. The decision also severed one of the few remaining ties between Audubon and his family back in France—where the elder Audubon apparently took little notice.
Lucy's father, complaining about the difficulties of the transaction, wondered pointedly about the lead mine—which was apparently beginning to produce ore. But Audubon and Lucy were untroubled by the disposal of their only remaining asset. Were they not a golden couple in a golden land?

8

MR. WILSON'S DECADE

Anas sponsa
: The Wood Duck

The flight of this species is remarkable for its speed, and the ease and elegance with which it is performed. The Wood Duck passes through the woods and even amongst the branches of trees, with as much facility as the Passenger Pigeon; and while removing from some secluded haunt to its breeding grounds, at the approach of night, it shoots over the trees like a meteor, scarcely emitting any sound from its wings.

—Ornithological Biography

T
he years from 1803, when he first conceived of the work that would become
American Ornithology
, until his sudden death in 1813 were the happiest and most productive of Alexander Wilson's life. This was in spite of—or possibly because of—the hardships and physical complaints that were the inevitable lot of any serious naturalist in those days. He lived in the city now, walking each day to Bradford's publishing house, except when he could get away for some shooting.
Wilson told Bartram about a day he went out in search of a nuthatch, leaving before dawn in light shoes. Soon he was far afield, slogging through muddy wastes over his ankles. He reached the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, on the southern outskirts of Philadelphia, where he was surprised to see much of the forest cut down and, with it, the normal habitat of the nuthatch. He got home late in the evening, soaked and sweating. Contrary to common wisdom, he said, this seemed to have done him good and he planned to “repeat the dose,” minus the wet feet. He teasingly begged Bartram not to tell this to Lawson, who already feared for his sanity.

In 1807, Samuel Bradford's company won the contract to publish Meriwether Lewis's account of his expedition to the Pacific with William Clark. Lewis came to Philadelphia to oversee the project and before long had befriended Wilson. The Lewis and Clark expedition had returned
from the West with a number of bird specimens, though many had been lost on the way back. Lewis handed these over to Wilson to include in his ornithology, and he also supplied many observations about the distribution of species that Wilson incorporated into his written descriptions.
One of the species formerly unknown to science that Wilson was thus able to depict was a small, striking, black-yellow-and-scarlet bird he called the “Louisiana tanager,” later renamed the western tanager.

Wilson continued his close study of Pennsylvania birds, and combined bird collecting with subscription sales on several long trips up and down the East Coast. The first volume of
American Ornithology
was generally admired, though many literate and prosperous people could not quite bring themselves to subscribe.
Wilson called on businesses, colleges, governmental bodies, and wealthy patrons of art and science.
In New York, where he met an aged and infirm Thomas Paine, Wilson said he pounded the streets so relentlessly that he became a well-known figure—on par with the town crier.
His reception was not always warm. Wilson, in turn, didn't like many of the settled parts of America.
He found New York and Boston cramped and dirty, and thought most of New England a desert of stony fields and unpleasant towns indistinguishable from one another, all of them swarming with greedy lawyers.

Wilson was no more fond of the South when he went there one winter. He thought the region poor and its roads execrable.
He was surprised and offended by the presence of so many blacks, whom he described as usually dirty and half-naked.
White women stayed out of sight and white men stayed drunk on a vile apple brandy that they began drinking the moment they got out of bed each morning.
It was rare, he wrote to a friend, to meet a man whose lips were not “parched and chopped [sic] or blistered with drinking this poison.” The country itself was often arresting in its wildness, though rarely beautiful. Yet even when he was appalled at his surroundings, Wilson was a lively reporter:

The general features of North Carolina, where I crossed it, are immense, solitary, pine savannahs, through which the road winds among stagnant ponds, swarming with alligators; dark, sluggish creeks, the colour of brandy, over which are thrown high wooden bridges, without railings, and so crazy and rotten as not only to alarm the horse, but his rider, and to make it a matter of thanksgiving with both when they make it over, without going through
or being precipitated into the gulf below as food for the alligators. Enormous cypress swamps, which, to a stranger, have a striking, desolate, and ruinous appearance. Picture yourself a forest of prodigious trees, rising, as thick as they can grow, from a vast flat and impenetrable morass, covered for ten feet from the ground with reeds. The leafless limbs of the cypresses are clothed with an extraordinary kind of moss, from two to 10 feet long, in such quantities that 50 men might conceal themselves in one tree.

Wilson didn't care for the people he met in North Carolina, describing them as “ignorant, debased and indolent.” All through the South he marveled at how lazy and slow the whites were, which he blamed on their dependence on slaves to do all the work.
In South Carolina, the roads were long and sandy; he found Charleston to be a pretty town, clean and full of delightful gingerbread houses.
But plantation owners were occasionally so hospitable that he was sometimes detained longer than he wanted to be, and once, when he needed to replace his horse, he had to accompany a country gentleman to the beach, where the deal was finally concluded “amidst the roar of the Atlantic.” The new mount was a handful, cantering off along the surf's edge with him for fifteen miles.

Wilson saw and shot birds along the way, including many species that were familiar to him but that did not overwinter in Pennsylvania.
Near Wilmington, North Carolina, he collected an exceptional specimen of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which he painted for
American Ornithology.
Now extinct, the bird was then still common in the South. It was a spectacular animal—similar to the pileated woodpecker but half again as big, with a heavy, black body, and a cartoonish red head and crest, and a pale beak the size of a railroad spike.
Wilson's shot only wounded the bird and he managed to capture it alive, whereupon it began to scream and bawl with a “piteous note, exactly resembling the violent crying of a young child.” This frightened Wilson's horse and unnerved him, too. But he managed to cover the bird and, placing it on the saddle in front of him, rode into Wilmington—where the townsfolk rushed to their windows at the sound of its wailing. Stopping at a hotel, Wilson inquired after accommodations “for myself and my baby,” ridiculously amused by his joke before unhooding the woodpecker and explaining himself. He locked the bird in his room and went to tend to his horse, only to find the woodpecker furiously hammering its way through the plaster and lath of the
wall when he returned. Recapturing it, Wilson next tied it to a table—the bird was screaming again—and went out once more, to see if he could find some bugs to feed it. As he climbed the stairs on returning a short while later, Wilson heard the bird furiously pecking away and this time discovered it had demolished the table. Wilson managed to subdue the animal long enough to paint it, suffering numerous puncture wounds in the process. The bird refused all Wilson's efforts to feed it and died after three days.