Under a Wild Sky (45 page)

Some of the episodes were meant to shock, especially those dealing with a cruelty to animals that Audubon casually accepted as part of frontier life—savageries in which he was often a willing participant.
In “Pitting of Wolves,” Audubon told an improbable story in which two young slaves walking through the woods at night were set upon by a pack of wolves, which managed to kill one of them. Audubon then explained a method for dealing with wolves shown to him by a farmer with a special loathing for the animal. The farmer dug pit traps around his property, covering them with brush and baiting them with putrid venison. On the day Audubon visited, the farmer had caught three wolves in one of his pits. Astonished at first and then hugely amused, Audubon watched as the farmer leapt into the pit, where the wolves cowered, ears flattened against their heads. One by one, the farmer grabbed each by the hind feet and with a deft motion of his hunting knife severed the leg tendons at the hamstrings. Climbing back out, the farmer then threw a noose around the neck of one and then another wolf, hauling each bleeding and half-strangled animal out onto the ground, where they were fed to a pack of dogs.

After an entertaining discussion of the lives of bears, Audubon launched into another ugly tale in “Scipio and the Bear.” In this episode, Audubon told of being summoned by a neighbor one night to assist in hunting down a group of marauding bears destroying a cornfield. Audubon, the neighbor, and a third friend, assisted by “four stout Negro men, armed with axes and knives,” mounted horses, led out a pack of dogs, and surrounded the bears. A warm drizzle was falling. Blowing horns and loosing the dogs, the hunting party advanced noisily toward the center of the field where a number of dead trees stood, flushing the bears ahead of them. There turned out to be five of the animals in the field, an adult and four cubs. Presently, all five were treed.

Two of the cubs were shot at and wounded badly enough to fall from the trees. The dogs finished them off. Now eager to “procure as much sport as possible,” the white men directed the slaves to chop down the tree holding the largest of the remaining bears. This took some time, but at last the tree swayed and then crashed to the ground. Audubon could hardly believe that the bear survived the fall, but he was even more surprised when it tore into the dogs, killing several. Just when they were about to shoot the bear, it suddenly charged and seized a horse ridden by a young slave named Scipio. After a brief, violent struggle, the horse was
rolled onto the ground. Scipio, however, smoothly stepped off his mount as it went down and with a single blow of his axe crushed the bear's skull.

As dawn approached the rain stopped. The last two small bears were located in one tree. The men gathered brush at the base of the trunk and set it alight. Flames crawled up the tree and choking columns of smoke enveloped the cubs. The panicked bears climbed to the highest limbs that would support them as the tree became a “pillar of flame.” Blinded by the smoke and feeling the intense heat rushing up at them, the bears tottered for a few minutes and finally fell in a fiery heap, snapping off burning limbs and branches as they came. Once on the ground, they were left to the dogs. Surveying this scene as daylight came on fully, Audubon noted that the dogs and fires and general mayhem had done far more damage to the cornfield than the bears ever would have managed.

In “The Prairie,” Audubon recounted the night he lay awake next to the half-blind Indian as he made ready to defend himself against the crone and the drunken sons determined to kill him for his pocket watch. Who could tell how much was true and how much was embellishment?
There was a similar dubious quality to the events Audubon described in an episode called “The Runaway,” in which he told of a suffocatingly hot afternoon in a Louisiana swamp. Burdened with his gun and a pack loaded with the carcasses of half a dozen wood ibises, Audubon came to the bank of a narrow, treacherous-looking bayou. Fearing he might sink in the muck if he tried to wade across, Audubon threw his gear to the opposite shore, drew his knife in case of alligators, and gingerly half-waded and half-swam to the other side. His hunting dog, happy to get wet in the heat, swam and frisked by his side. But as Audubon stood up dripping after the crossing, the dog suddenly began to growl. Someone yelled at him to halt. Audubon grabbed his gun, cocked it, and leveled his barrels at a blank wall of vegetation from which the voice had seemed to emanate. Presently, a “tall, firmly built Negro emerged from the bushy under-wood.” Audubon aimed his gun at the man's chest and nudged his triggers. But on seeing how rusted and dilapidated the other man's gun was, Audubon decided he had little to fear and slowly lowered his own piece.

Audubon's refusal to shoot the man on the spot had an unexpected effect. The black man at once became subservient, addressing Audubon as “master” and inviting him back to his humble camp in the woods. It was getting late, the man said, and Audubon would be welcome to spend the night and to hear his story. Which was this: The man was a runaway slave
who had recently been sold from his home plantation, along with his wife and three children, all five of them being sent to different owners. Unable to endure this separation, the man had escaped and stolen away first his wife and then each of the children, taking them deep into the swamp, across murky bayous and through heavy canebrakes. Audubon, who had judged himself physically equal to the black man in the event this was some kind of trick, was at first alarmed when he came into their camp and was surrounded by the whole family. But they were friendly and quite obviously intimidated by him. As the children petted his dog and the wife prepared dinner, the man cleaned and greased Audubon's gun and asked if there was anything to be done for his poor family. Audubon assured him there was. The next day he took them out of the swamp and back to their original owner—with whom Audubon was acquainted. After some discussion Audubon had arranged for the family to be bought back and reunited. Audubon concluded this story on an ambiguous note, saying the family was ever after “rendered happy as slaves generally are in that country,” but adding that since the time of this event it had become illegal to involuntarily separate slave families.

Of course, all of this could have been true. Audubon's admission that he was frightened at being outnumbered by a man in company with his wife and three small children feels authentic enough. The happy ending, however, seems dubious—rather like his sudden rescue in “The Prairie.” Audubon may have known a few plantation owners in Louisiana, but he was hardly on an equal footing with them at the time. Could an impoverished woodsman married to the local schoolteacher have prevailed on a rich cotton grower in this way?

What seems probable is that Audubon simply took a liberal license in the episodes, steering real events into more dramatic waters.
In “The Earthquake” he told of riding over the “barrens of Kentucky” one November day when a “sudden and strange darkness” opened on the western horizon. Thinking a storm was on the way, he gave Barro a boot to bring him to a gallop. But to Audubon's consternation the horse instead slowed and began picking his way over the ground like it was a “sheet of ice.” After a little of this, Barro stopped altogether, quivering and splaying all four legs out as if something terrible were about to happen. And something did. As Audubon dismounted, the trees and bushes around him began to sway and the earth itself heaved in successive waves “like the ruffled waters of a lake.” Audubon hurried home and was relieved to
find his family safe, though for weeks afterward more tremors shook Henderson at intervals, unnerving everyone. This, Audubon said, was all due to the New Madrid earthquake—so named for its epicenter near New Madrid, Missouri, where huge craters formed as the earth sank into itself as the ground pitched wildly and eerie lights played across the sky. Whole islands disappeared, and the course of the Mississippi River was permanently altered.

Audubon without question experienced the New Madrid earthquake—almost everyone then in North America did. Where he was at the time is hard to say and he was wrong about the dates. The New Madrid earthquake was actually three distinct quakes, all connected by resounding aftershocks. The first quake occurred in December of 1811. The second and strongest of the three was in the first week of February 1812. It was the most powerful earthquake to hit North America in recorded history, estimated now to have exceeded 8.0 on the Richter scale. It was felt in every corner of the continent but the far Pacific Coast. Houses rattled, clock pendulums stopped, and chandeliers were set swinging all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In Richmond, the tremors caused church bells to ring.

At the time of the initial quake in December, Audubon was not in Kentucky. He, Lucy, and Victor were visiting Lucy's family at Fatland Ford just outside of Philadelphia. Leaving his family behind, Audubon had then gone off toward Henderson sometime later that month, reaching Pittsburgh by the first of the year. From there, he and Barro had gone downriver by boat, putting ashore before Cincinnati and riding overland the rest of the way. It's possible that he was still on the road in early February when the big quake hit. But the implication that he then rushed onward to Henderson to see to his family can't be right, since they weren't there. Audubon returned to Philadelphia that same winter and it wasn't until the following summer that he brought Lucy and Victor home to Kentucky.

The minor confusions of dates and places are forgivable. After all, twenty years had gone by. But the other problems with some of Audubon's episodes for
Ornithological Biography
cannot be dismissed as inadvertent mistakes. Audubon did not misremember his interference between a master and a slave, nor did he simply mix up the details of a near-death experience in a frontier cabin. Despite having lived an adventurous life, Audubon apparently decided the simple truth was not exciting enough,
and woven into many of his episodes are exaggerations and invented exploits that he apparently believed were the kind of colorful scenes his readers expected from the American West. From the moment he'd stepped off a ship in New York in 1803 with a new name and a blank past, Audubon had taken liberties with the truth about himself whenever it suited his purposes. Audubon may not have been a habitual liar, but he was a chronic fictional character, first as the Louisiana-born son of an admiral and a Southern belle, trained by Jacques-Louis David and given an American plantation—and now as the main attraction in a kind of serial autobiography.

Two of Audubon's most memorable episodes concerned his exploits with America's most famous woodsman, Daniel Boone. “
Kentucky Sports” began with Audubon's rough-and-ready account of the early settlement of Kentucky, as the Western frontier was first opened up by pioneers streaming in from Virginia. Audubon wrote of the hardships of the wilderness, the bloody perils of Indian attack, and the excitement of descending the Ohio River by flatboat. Kentucky, he carelessly said, had “probably been discovered by a daring hunter, the renowned Daniel Boone.”

Audubon continued with a lengthy discussion of the shooting prowess of Kentucky riflemen that was more myth than fact. Any self-respecting Kentucky hunter thought nothing of shooting the head off a turkey at a hundred yards, Audubon said. These same intrepid marksmen also loved shooting contests. In one such event, riflemen took turns attempting to drive a nail into a board from around forty paces—at least one hundred feet. Audubon said it usually took no more than three shots to drive the nail home. In another test, each shooter attempted to fire a ball through the flame of a candle from fifty yards without extinguishing it. These boasts were so much a part of the Kentucky character that Audubon probably gave little thought to repeating them, even though such sharpshooting feats with the primitive rifles then in use would have been beyond remarkable.

The most interesting shooting trick, however, was a hunting technique Audubon claimed Boone himself had shown him. This happened near the town of Frankfort, about halfway between Lexington and Louisville, in the woods along the banks of the Kentucky River. Audubon described
Boone that day as a “stout, hale, and athletic man, dressed in a homespun hunting shirt, bare-legged and mocassined.” The acorn mast was heavy that year, and the two hunting companions found the forest full of squirrels. Boone offered to teach Audubon a way of shooting them with a heavy rifle without destroying the meat. He called it “barking off squirrels.” Spotting a squirrel sitting motionless on a tree limb, Boone lifted his rifle and took aim. At the “whip-like report” of Boone's gun, Audubon expected to see the squirrel cut in two. Instead, the ball struck the limb just beneath the animal, splintering the bark and creating a concussive explosion that killed the squirrel without harming a hair on its body.

Audubon gave a much fuller description of the great long hunter in an episode titled “Colonel Boon.” In this story, Audubon and Boone had spent a day hunting together. After returning home and getting ready for bed, Audubon sized up his friend thus:

The stature and general appearance of this wanderer of the western forests approached the gigantic. His chest was broad and prominent; his muscular powers displayed themselves in every limb; his countenance gave indication of his great courage, enterprise, and perseverance; and when he spoke, the very motion of his lips brought the impression that whatever he uttered could not be otherwise than strictly true. I undressed, whilst he merely took off his hunting shirt, and arranged a few folds of blankets on the floor, choosing rather to lie there, as he observed, than on the softest bed.

The episode continues on with a bedtime story from Boone about his capture many years before by a band of Indians. In those days, Boone said, he hunted Indians in the wilds of Kentucky in the same way he did “any ravenous animal.” Boone told of escaping his captors when they got drunk and passed out. For a moment he considered killing them where they lay, but thought better of it and instead cut a mark on a nearby tree by which to remember the place. Sometime later, Boone's mark was used to settle a land dispute.