Under a Wild Sky, page 13
Care had to be exercised in handling the muzzle-loader. Accidentally discharging the first barrel while loading the second could cost you a hand. A more life-threatening—and maybe more common—mistake was the inadvertent loading of two charges into the same barrel, which could turn a shotgun into a small bomb. It took time to load such a weapon, plus a healthy respect for the dangers involved. It also took time to shoot one.
When a modern gun is fired, the discharge is immediate—indistinguishable, really, from the act of pulling the trigger. But there was a time delay between squeezing the trigger on a flintlock and the gun actually going off. First the spark ignited a primer, which smoked and burned and then lit the main powder charge, which in turn burned much more slowly than modern gunpowders. When Audubon pulled the trigger on his gun, it clicked, sparked, smoked, issued a flash of light near the breech, and finally, after a brief eternity, fired. Around 1825, percussion firing caps came into general use, replacing the flintlock in providing the primary ignition. These shot a little faster, though the main advantage of the percussion cap was that it worked in the rain.
Wingshooting, that is, taking birds in the air, requires timing and a sense of speed, distance, and angle that can be acquired only through experience. To the uninitiated it seems a loud and cruel pastime. To the hunter, there is something ineffable yet almost physical in the pleasure of taking a bird from the air. The tang of fall on the wind, the swing of the gun, its powerful slam against the shoulder, the long, slanting parabola of the stricken bird falling to earth—all of it is an experience that, for some, begs repeating.
Using a gun that is slow to shoot changes the geometry of wingshooting. Nineteenth-century hunters presumably accommodated themselves to the individual proclivities of their guns. Still, some challenging species—fast-flushing upland birds like grouse, or certain puddle ducks that leap vertically into the air and are away in almost the same instant—must have presented Audubon with many a difficult shot. No doubt he was happy when he did not have to take a bird on the wing. Nowadays it’s considered unsporting to shoot a bird perched in a tree, or one sitting on the ground. In Audubon’s time it was merely the mark of an efficient woodsman.
Audubon’s eagerness to shoot the very birds he loved is today sometimes excused as an unfortunate necessity—a function of having no camera, no modern optical device with which to “capture” his subjects unharmed. It was, the argument goes, a different era, with a different, less enlightened ethos. This is wrong. Many things were different in Audubon’s time, but field ornithology has in truth changed little since then. Modern ornithologists still collect bird specimens all over the world. They still shoot them with shotguns. Many of these same scientists are both conservationists and avid bird hunters.
On short forays into the woods, when he could return home the same day, Audubon would have needed little equipment other than his gun, powder, and shot. He usually had along a game bag to carry his birds in. For longer excursions, Audubon had to consider how best to achieve his main objective—making new drawings. There were two options. He could take his drawing equipment with him, or he could preserve the birds against spoilage and carry them back.
One of the telling facts that argues against Audubon’s claim of having studied under the French master Jacques-Louis David is that David, who was principally a portraitist, worked in oils. Although Audubon spent many hours struggling with oil paints later in his career—especially after his reputation grew and he thought he could knock off duplicates of his birds for a profit—the medium always confounded him. In Kentucky, where his technique matured, Audubon stuck to the media he already knew: watercolors, pencil, and pastel chalks, which he called crayons. A traveling kit for this work would have been quite manageable. But Audubon would have been limited to working on smaller species in the field because he always drew the birds full-sized. For the bigger birds, Audubon bought the largest paper available, a truly enormous size called “double elephant,” which measured about twenty-seven inches by forty. These sheets would have been unwieldy for foot travel, or even on horseback—though conceivably they could have been rolled into tubes. But there was the additional matter of the boards—one to which the bird could be wired for posing, and a second to hold the paper—and these would have been more cumbersome to carry. Audubon most likely never used an easel, as it is easier to work with watercolors on a flat or nearly flat surface.
Audubon traveled light. He didn’t go in for fancy camps. He liked to sleep in the open, or, when forced to by inclement weather, in lean-tos he fashioned in the woods. It seems likely that Audubon would have hauled his full complement of drawing equipment with him on only his most ambitious trips—where he could set up a base camp at a friend’s cabin, or when he could ship his gear ahead by trunk. Otherwise, he either hustled home with his birds or skinned them on the spot.
Bird skinning was a technique well-known to naturalists in Audubon’s time, and one still in general use by ornithologists today. It’s not as crude as it sounds. A bird “skin” is not a flattened pelt of feathers, but rather something that looks quite like the whole bird. It’s a simple form of taxidermy, really, in which the bird’s innards are removed and replaced with inert material. Audubon probably stuffed his with straw, or cotton when he could get it. A well-skinned bird is a vivid, three-dimensional version of the real thing that looks like—a dead bird. Several collections of Audubon’s bird skins still exist, and many of his specimens look as if they might have been on the wing only yesterday.
Skinning equipment was an even smaller burden than drawing gear. All Audubon needed was a scalpel or sharp knife, perhaps a pointed scissors, and a needle and thread. Methods varied—everyone tended to skin the way whoever taught them did it—but the general procedure was simple enough. A freshly killed bird was slit open along its abdomen, sometimes on the back or under a wing, though Audubon seemed to prefer opening the stomach with a long incision beginning immediately below the breastbone and continuing down to the tail. Using his fingers, Audubon removed the viscera and then gently pried the skin away from the ribcage. He disjointed the leg and wing bones. Using the point of his knife or scissors, he patiently separated the flesh within the wings and legs from the bones. All bones but the very tips of the wings and those inside the feet were extricated in this way. Removing the esophagus, tongue, and eyes allowed the skull to be carefully emptied and left in place. As he worked, Audubon inverted the skin as it pulled away from the parts he was removing, so that when he finished, the bird was literally turned inside out, like a sock rolled off a foot.
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
The 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.
