Under a Wild Sky (16 page)

Ashore, the new season had replenished the woods along the river with game, and it was quick work for Audubon to disappear into the trees with his gun and return with a turkey or a brace of wood ducks.
Lucy packed bread and ham, plus some beer, for the trip. They bought milk, eggs, and an occasional chicken en route. The suddenly lush forests lent an almost submarine quality to the journey.
Lucy found the dense wall of trees and flowers flanking the river remarkable, though she was disappointed that the closeness of the overhung shorelines and high bluffs limited the vistas from midstream. Even so, it was the river itself that bedazzled.

The name
Ohio
, puzzlingly, seemed to have been derived from an Indian expression meaning “bloody river.” The French, however, who were probably the first Europeans to descend the Ohio, called it
La Belle Rivière
—“the beautiful river”—and settlers who came later agreed.
The Ohio, it was said, was “beyond all competition the most beautiful river in the universe.”
At its head in Pittsburgh, the more powerful and crystal-clear Allegheny pushed across the darker current of the Monongahela at a right angle, so that the waters of the two did not mix for several miles. Below Pittsburgh, the Ohio blended and broadened and took on the color of the sky. An abundance of navigable tributary streams, many beautiful in their own right, gave the Ohio communication with a vast region on its way west. In fact, as Lewis and Clark had discovered only a few years earlier, it was possible to descend the Ohio, proceed up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, cross the continental divide, and then
continue down the Columbia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This great network of rivers seemed to many people proof that the young country's destiny ultimately reached across North America.
Zadok Cramer, a Pittsburgh bookseller and expert on Ohio River travel, saw a link between America's rivers and America's future that filled him with optimism: “No country perhaps in the world is better watered with limpid streams and navigable rivers than the United States of America,” Cramer wrote, “and no people better deserve these advantages, or are better calculated to make a proper use of them than her industrious and adventurous citizens.”

The Ohio River's uniform breadth was striking—it was generally between four hundred and six hundred yards across along its entire length, except near Louisville and at the river's end at the Mississippi, where it was wider. Much of the land on either side of the river was a steady procession of hills standing in ranks, changeless waves on an emerald sea. Seams of coal had been found between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, but where the land had not been cleared, a formidable forest remained.
The uplands were thick with oak, walnut, hickory, chestnut, and ash. Willows, locusts, mulberry, beech, elm, aspen, and maples filled the bottoms. Tremendous stands of cedar and cypress grew in the swamps below Louisville.

But it was the sycamore that was thought of as “king of the forest.” An immense species, sycamores grow to over a hundred feet in height. Their smooth, pale bark is unusual, like skin, but they're more notable for the great diameters of their trunks. Historical records indicate that the largest individuals may have reached fifteen feet across. In Audubon's time, when myths grew as large as trees, this was believed to be only an average-sized sycamore in the Ohio River valley. It was said some monster specimens more than twenty feet in diameter lurked in the forest.
The summer following the Audubons' arrival in Louisville, a man named Miller in Scioto County, Ohio, claimed that a hollowed-out sycamore on his land was so large that thirteen men on horseback had ridden inside it—and had room left over. In many places, all the trees in the forest huddled under a knitting of grapevines that entwined the highest branches and dangled heavily in the air between the canopy and the earth.

Game was everywhere, but things had changed in even the short time of Kentucky's settlement.
The first serious influx of people from the colonies had begun around 1775, following a string of settler victories in local wars with the Indians. Early arrivals came from Pennsylvania and
Virginia and North Carolina. In many cases, they were failed or deeply indebted farmers looking for greener pastures. For a time the early settlers were at odds with one another.
On the lawless frontier, vigilantes calling themselves “Regulators” often enforced a crude justice. After the Civil War, the Regulators merged with the Ku Klux Klan, committing lynchings and other atrocities. But in Audubon's time they helped maintain a general order, administering floggings and banishing unsavory types from respectable communities.
Audubon, like many people in Kentucky, admired the Regulators, and later claimed to have ridden with them and observed their stern adjudications.
Kentuckians also had problems with a large commercial land venture called the Transylvania Company, which had illegally acquired vast land holdings from the Indians. The company subsequently offered Kentucky property to settlers at inflated prices completely out of line for such a wild region. The company's chief scout and road builder was the hunter Daniel Boone. Boone recalled that as late as the hard winter of 1780–1781, residents of Kentucky had survived almost exclusively on buffalo meat. Three decades later, as the Audubons drifted toward Louisville, buffalo were becoming rare in Kentucky. So were wolves, which of all the animals seemed the least tolerant of human encroachment.

But that still left an abundance of wild birds, fish, and other animals beyond belief. Herds of elk roamed the Kentucky woodlands, as did cougars—or
painters
as they were locally known.
Bear and deer were so common that they were often seen swimming across the Ohio, and sporting flatboaters kept a rifle handy to restock their larders from such encounters. Catfish as big as a hundred pounds were readily caught in the river, which also supported enormous perch and pike. Ducks of every sort and many geese lived along the waterways and back in the adjoining wetlands. The woods teemed with turkey and other upland species.

Kentucky had become a state in 1792, and its population continued to soar.
When the Audubons got to Louisville in May 1808 there were nearly 400,000 settlers in Kentucky. About 20 percent were black slaves. Nobody counted the Indians, whose numbers were much reduced—pushed out of the territory and decimated by European diseases. The Shawnee, who'd put up the strongest resistance to the white invasion, probably numbered only a few thousand and had relinquished most of their land.

The Audubons took lodging at a hotel called the Indian Queen, which stood on the corner of Fifth and Main Streets in Louisville. It would be the only home Lucy would know during the two years they remained in the city. The hotel was a two-story wood-frame building. It was a decided improvement over the flatboat, but must have seemed to her a tremendous compromise after years of comfort at Fatland Ford.
The ground floor featured a bar, a “boot room,” and a dining area. The Audubons evidently had their own quarters upstairs, but had to pass through a common dormitory to get there. They bathed at a cistern in the courtyard, attended by a black slave.
Even so, Lucy declared that she and her new husband were “as private as we please.”

Lucy was less happy with the creeping minutes and hours that measured out her new life. The days were long and hot and dull, and there was an almost unendurable lack of anything for her to do while Audubon was down at the store with Rozier or, more often, out in the woods getting acquainted with this new country. Audubon and Rozier employed a clerk, so she wasn't needed at the store. Lucy loved books, and she regretted having time on her hands and nothing to read.
“I am very sorry there is no library here or bookstore of any kind,” she wrote to her cousin.

From the start, business was slow for Audubon and Rozier. They found they could mark up their goods to what would seem a sure profit, only to lose money more or less continually because of small volume. Audubon took advantage of sluggish business conditions by devoting his spare time—which is to say most of his waking moments—to hunting and drawing. He made friends with Louisville's experienced woodsmen and learned his way in the forest. On those few occasions when new inventory was needed for the shop, Audubon eagerly made the trip east, by horse and foot and boat, shooting and observing birds as he went.
During his more extended absences, whether for business or birds, Lucy often stayed with friends. She was meanwhile convinced they would soon have their own house.

If Lucy was often bored, Audubon was quite the opposite.
These years, he said later, were spent in “the most agreeable manner,” and they enjoyed “the best pleasures which this life can afford.” Even allowing for Audubon's readiness to exaggerate, Louisville seems to have felt like some kind of paradise to him. Within months of their arrival his portfolio had swollen considerably.
By the time he and Lucy left, Audubon had
completed more than two hundred bird drawings. He had also become a father for the first time.
Victor Gifford Audubon was born at the Indian Queen Hotel on June 12, 1809.

Audubon was not unaware that his neglect of the business earned him ridicule in Louisville.
He later said that only his family understood him; his friends and acquaintances made remarks about his slack work ethic that “irritated me beyond endurance.” Characteristically, he saw such criticism not as a just assessment of his shortcomings but instead as an obstacle that he had overcome by force of will. Over time, his forays into the wild kept him from his family for days, then weeks, then months at a time.
This, Audubon maintained, showed only that he'd “broken through all bonds” in giving himself over entirely to the study of nature. His journeys were long and exhausting as he “ransacked” the woods and lakes and prairies. But he went, he said, only for the purity of the experience. Though it did not seem to reflect well on him as a provider for his family, Audubon insisted for the rest of his life that his curiosity about nature, and about birds in particular, was his sole motivation. Not until much later, he maintained, did the idea of making a living from these activities occur to him. In Kentucky, Audubon did nothing. And he did everything.

Audubon was drawn to every kind of bird—from the smallest, blandest warbler or wren to the great eagles. He seemed to care as much for a crow or grackle as he did for the rose-breasted grosbeak or the magnificent ivory-billed woodpecker. But he was especially fond of birds whose social behaviors became demonstrative with the turning of the seasons.
And probably no bird fascinated him more—or figured more prominently in his art—than the turkey.

Audubon no doubt had seen a few turkeys in Pennsylvania. But they were already growing scarce in the East by the time he arrived in America. In Kentucky, though, turkeys were plentiful. It was a striking bird, with a heavy body topped by a short neck and a small head. Audubon thought its fine table quality, its tremendous size, and its ungainly yet beguiling appearance—plus the fact that a domesticated version had become popular on both sides of the Atlantic—made the turkey uncommonly appealing. And because turkeys do not winter in the tropics like most true migratory species, their seasonal movements across a region could be closely studied. To this end, Audubon devoted himself. When, twenty
years later, he described the turkey, Audubon poured all that he knew of the animal and its nature into what he wrote.

Turkeys, Audubon discovered, are “irregularly migratory, as well as irregularly gregarious.” He commenced his observations in the fall, when the Kentucky evenings cooled and the sky seemed bluer and the forest recolored itself in the transparent air. The movement and gathering of turkeys are governed, Audubon said, largely by variations in the density of food sources in the areas where they live. Turkeys subsist on various foods, but mainly on mast—an inclusive term for the nuts and fruits that fall from trees and litter the forest floor. Audubon determined that as turkeys forage they are sensitive to changes in the density of acorns and other mast items, and that they proceed in the direction of increasing abundance, as “flock follows after flock” until some districts are empty of turkeys, while in others great aggregations are formed.

Turkeys begin collecting themselves into flocks in October, Audubon said, in anticipation of the fresh mast that will soon appear on the ground. Females, usually attended by a brood of adolescent chicks, avoid groups of males—which tend toward obstreperous behavior at any time, and are apt to kill young turkeys by pecking them on the head. The birds proceed through the forest in this segregated fashion until they come to a river. There they halt for a day, or maybe two. While they wait at the river's edge, the turkeys' moods grow agitated. Males preen and gobble and fan their tails. Females and the young strut and purr. Finally, on a clear day, the birds ascend to the highest parts of the trees, and at the signal of a single “cluck” by an old leader, the whole flock launches for the opposite shore. Audubon observed that the flight across was made easily by the “old and fat” but that the younger birds sometimes struggled in the air and, if the river was wide, would often fall into the water partway over. But they did not perish. Instead, the birds would fold back their wings and swim powerfully across the current, continuing on to the far shore. If the bank proved too steep to climb, the birds would fall back into the water and drift in the current until they found a way out, although even then a waterlogged turkey extricating itself from a river was quite a sight. In keeping with one of his main obsessions—hunting—Audubon observed that turkeys that have just crossed a major river are for a time disoriented and unalert to their surroundings, making them easy targets. In fact, much of what Audubon learned about turkeys came via his persistent attempts to kill them. He said that turkey nests were well hidden
in the forest, as the hens varied the routes of their comings and goings, and usually covered the nest with leaves when absent. If a human did manage to find and tamper with a nest, the turkey would still return to it. But if a snake or a skunk raided the nest it was immediately abandoned.