Under a Wild Sky (13 page)

Audubon had fallen into an air hole. Instantly, the current swept him under, pushing him along beneath the ice and away from all sight and sound. His friends rushed to the place where he'd gone through. An eternity seemed to pass as they stared, horrified, into the swirling blackness. There was nothing to say, nothing they could do. The night was a clear, frozen envelope of silence surrounding them. They shifted on their skates. The ice groaned. Then they heard a cry many yards downstream. Audubon had somehow found his way up through another air hole. He was dragged coughing and shaking onto the ice, where someone stripped off a coat and wrapped it around him. As they got him to his feet, Audubon told his companions that in the shock of going under he'd lost consciousness. It was by pure chance that he'd popped up through another opening and regained his senses before being pulled down again.

Audubon worked hard at his drawing. His favorite subjects were birds, but they frustrated his efforts to translate nature onto paper.
In France, as a boy, he'd collected birds with his father along the Loire River, but when he drew them in pencil and crayon the results were “miserable.” The objects of these early sketches looked like what they were—dead birds. Audubon depicted them in “stiff, unnatural profiles,” a manner he would later find all too common in conventional ornithology. The elder Audubon was unstinting in his encouragement, but warned his son that “nothing in
the world possessing life and animation” is easy to imitate. At Mill Grove, Audubon tried to solve the problem by taking his crayons and pencils to the grotto above Perkiomen Creek, where he made countless attempts at drawing his beloved phoebes as they flitted about. Sometimes he made rough outlines of birds in the field, then shot them and returned to his room, where he laid them out as best he could in the same positions. This didn't work, as “they were dead to all intents and neither wing, leg, or tail could I place according to the intention of my wishes.” He even tried tying threads to the head and wings of his specimens to support them in lifelike attitudes.
But when he compared these clumsy models to the real, live thing, he said, “I felt my blood rise in my temples.”

These efforts so demoralized Audubon that at one point he stopped drawing for a month. Instead, he walked every day through the woods, looking at birds and waiting for inspiration.
Audubon later claimed that during this time he began to dream about drawing birds, and long before daylight one morning he sat up in bed with a start. As Audubon told it, he ordered his horse saddled—probably he had to do it himself—and rode off at a gallop to Norristown, about five miles away. There he bought wire in various gauges and, leaping back on his “steed,” returned to Mill Grove. He passed up breakfast and instead grabbed his gun and bolted down the hill for Perkiomen Creek, where he shot a kingfisher. He gently carried the bird home by the bill and then went back down to the mill for a soft board. Filing points onto short lengths of wire, Audubon skewered the bird through the head, legs, and feet, and then, laying it on its side against the board, drove the wires into the wood to maintain the body in a fixed position. A final stiff wire was stuck under the tail to hold it up at a jaunty angle. Audubon was so excited he began to draw immediately, giving no further thought to time or hunger until he had finished. That kingfisher, he later said, marked the real beginning of his career. As he worked on his drawing, he reached over periodically and carefully opened the bird's eyelid, and every time he did this it was as if the kingfisher had sprung back to life.

Audubon eventually added an important refinement to what he called “my method of drawing.”
He marked off the surface of his mounting board with squares, and matched this grid with lightly penciled duplicate squares on his drafting papers. This allowed him to get the proportions and the foreshortenings of perspective just right. As for the scale, it was
always a simple one-to-one. Audubon drew every bird as he saw it, exactly life-sized. It was a practice from which he never deviated.

Months streamed by in a delicious haze. Audubon was in love. Lucy was smart and bold, and she shared his enthusiasm for a day in the woods. He was thrilled at how well she kept up with him, and impressed by her riding skills. In England, Lucy had ridden with the hounds. She was at ease in the forest, and increasingly, she was attached to her companion at Mill Grove. They began to talk of marriage.
When Audubon got sick just before the holidays in the fall of 1804, he went to Fatland Ford to be taken care of. His illness lasted weeks, and at one point it looked as if he might die. But once again he bounced back to life. Lucy read to him while he recovered. By early February he was well enough to go out for a ride.

Audubon did have one nagging concern—his father's overseer, François Dacosta, who seemed intent on gaining control of Mill Grove.
Evidently the two argued over who was giving orders to whom, and the elder Audubon got wind of it back in France.
In truth, Audubon's father had never completely explained to his son that Dacosta was an equal partner in Mill Grove. He wasn't satisfied with Dacosta's slow progress in opening the lead mine, but their arrangement had not changed. It meanwhile dawned on the younger Audubon that his say in the management of the estate didn't amount to much, and that it was all but impossible to convey to his father on the other side of the world how unsatisfactory this was to him.
The elder Audubon, having also heard of his son's possible engagement, was already doing everything in his power to prevent a marriage between Audubon and Lucy. Audubon's father suspected Lucy might only be after a wealthy husband.
He wrote to Dacosta, urging him to find a way to delay his son's plans, and, if need be, to let the Bakewells know that young Audubon, despite outward appearances, was not rich and could not expect anything in the way of support from his family in France if he were to marry “in his present condition.”
In a follow-up letter, Audubon's father warned Dacosta to stop complaining about his son, whose conduct must be the result of “bad advice and lack of experience.” Young Audubon was, after all, not yet twenty. The elder Audubon felt certain that the Bakewells had “goaded” his son into bragging that Mill Grove was his.

The old sea captain's vision remained sharp. Even from across the ocean, his view of the situation was penetrating, and his response was a masterly demonstration of finesse and fatherly concern.
He wrote to Dacosta, reassuring him that everyone in Philadelphia—except, apparently, young Audubon—understood perfectly that Dacosta's rights and interests in Mill Grove were the same as his own. He said he had written to his son advising him as much and admonishing him to be a more respectful member of the household. He told Dacosta that sending young Audubon home to France, as Dacosta now proposed, was out of the question. All of the elder Audubon's reasons for having his son in America were as before. Instead, he artfully suggested how Dacosta could act in his stead to bring the boy under control. Having repeated his command that his son not get married at such a young age, Audubon advised Dacosta to go easy:

Only an instant is needed to make him change from bad to good; his extreme youth and his petulance are his only faults, and if you have the goodness to give him the indispensable, he will soon feel the necessity of making friends with you, and he can be of great service if you use him for your own benefit.

If Dacosta followed this advice, Audubon said, his son could be “reclaimed” and would be fit to assume the duties at Mill Grove that he had thus far ignored.
If this could be accomplished, the elder Audubon said, he would be “under every obligation” to Dacosta, adding, “This is my only son, my heir, and I am old.”

Unfortunately, both Dacosta and young Audubon ignored all this advice. In late February, Audubon announced he was going to visit his father to set things straight.
He demanded funds for the trip, and Dacosta complied with a “letter of credit” Audubon was to use to book his passage in New York. The letter was bogus—Audubon was laughed out of the bank to which Dacosta had sent him—but he successfully prevailed on Lucy's father to arrange a loan of $150. On March 12, he boarded the
Hope
, bound for France.

Audubon stayed with his family at their big house near Nantes for just over a year.
After recovering from the surprise of his son's unexpected return, the elder Audubon soon perceived that Dacosta thought he was in some way being swindled. He undertook to settle matters at Mill
Grove once and for all. While his son hunted and explored the countryside—taking care not to be recognized by anyone who might report him for conscription—the elder Audubon replaced certain papers of agreement that had apparently miscarried en route to Dacosta, and agreed to some much-needed repairs at Mill Grove.
Short of funds, he also sold a portion of his share in Mill Grove to his neighbors in France, a family named Rozier.

The Roziers had a son, Ferdinand, who had once visited young Audubon at Mill Grove and wanted to go back to America.
The elder Audubon, sensing the advantage to his son of being associated with Ferdinand—who was hardworking, serious, and eight years older than John James—encouraged a joint venture.
In March 1806, John James Audubon and Ferdinand Rozier formed a legal partnership. In ten written “articles of association,” they agreed to proceed to the New World and to enter into commercial ventures as equal proprietors. Much of the agreement centered on Mill Grove, where they would now jointly control half of the plantation. But it also stipulated that they would work together in whatever business seemed suitable and at whatever place they chose, “whether inland or maritime.”

On April 12, 1806, Audubon and Rozier sailed aboard the
Polly
, an American ship bound for New York. Audubon's papers gave his home as Louisiana. Rozier's said he was from Holland. The crossing was eventful. A man was killed in a duel over a lady's bonnet, the ship was looted by a British privateer, and a storm drove them temporarily aground in Long Island Sound.

Audubon and Rozier spent most of the next year haggling with Dacosta while they tried their hands at business.
Rozier found work with an importer in Philadelphia.
Audubon, in a monumental mismatch of vocation and personality, took a job as an apprentice clerk in a countinghouse in New York. The business was owned by Lucy's uncle, Benjamin Bakewell. This friendly arrangement probably prolonged Audubon's employment in a position for which he was clearly unsuited. He visited Mill Grove and Lucy when he could, and continued to seek his father's approval for their marriage. Audubon corresponded now in his own peculiar English, blending odd formalisms with imaginative spellings, as in this letter to his father in the spring of 1807:

I am allways in Mr. Benjamin Bakewell's store where I work as much as I can and passes my days happy; about three weeks ago I went to Mill Grove . . . and had the pleasure of seeing there my Biloved Lucy who constantly loves me and makes me perfectly happy. I shall wait for thy Consent and the one of my good Mamma to Marry her. Could thou but see her and thou wouldst I am sure be pleased of the prudency of my choice . . . I wish thou would wrights to me ofnor and longuely. Think by thyself how pleasing it is to read a friend's letter.

Audubon and Rozier grew restless.
Convinced they would never devise a workable partnership with Dacosta, they decided instead to sell him most of their share in Mill Grove for just under $4,000 and a promise of future payments when the mine came in. They mortgaged what was left for $10,000.
Rozier, meanwhile, considered returning to France. Then they started to discuss something entirely different. Why not go west? Settlers were making their way into new territories west of the Alleghenies. Some took a southern route by way of the Wilderness Road. The road followed the old trace blazed by Daniel Boone in the 1770s along Indian trails and bison tracks from the Cumberland Gap in Virginia, across southeastern Kentucky, angling north all the way to the Ohio River. The trace was now becoming a busy turnpike. The other way west was to travel overland to Pittsburgh and then float down the Ohio and into whatever future was out there. The fast-growing town of Louisville sounded promising.

Rozier and Audubon agreed that there were likely to be commercial opportunities in Kentucky.
Audubon encouraged this view, while thinking to himself how fine the hunting would be and how many birds must live in the wilds of America. He said goodbye to Lucy—who said she'd be waiting for him to return once he found them a home in the West.
There are discrepancies in the record as to when they actually left Philadelphia, and whether they were much delayed on the way to Pittsburgh, but sometime between the end of August and the start of October 1807, Audubon and Rozier headed off.
At first they made splendid time, reaching Lancaster, a distance of more than sixty miles from Philadelphia, in one day. The roads were good and lined with pleasant taverns. Crops of hemp grew in the fields. But the roads worsened. A
team of six horses was needed to keep their coach moving over increasingly rough terrain. The jostling ride was exhausting. Sometimes, they got out and walked, finding a faster pace that was also easier on their aching backsides.
In a place called Walnut Bottom, beyond Harrisburg, they had a wonderful meal in a clean tavern where they were served, Rozier happily noted, by “pretty girls.” Rozier was likewise impressed by a species of tree he'd never seen before, called a hackberry. On the third day of November, bone-chilling rains commenced just as the stage entered the steepest section of mountains. The passengers all commented on the treacherousness of this stretch. Four days later, as the rain abated and the afternoon turned unusually hot for that time of year, they descended a final time—cautiously on foot now—and arrived in Pittsburgh.