Under a Wild Sky (29 page)

Later that day, as the flatboat came into the Mississippi and they turned toward New Orleans, Audubon again felt a foreboding, noting in his journal that he had become the victim of an “involuntary fear” he could not shake as “every moment” carried him farther away from his family.

One morning when it was too rainy to hunt, Audubon sat down and composed a long journal entry seemingly addressed to Victor, though he obviously meant it for both his sons. It amounted to a brief autobiography, offering a carefully edited version of his birth at Saint-Domingue, his
removal to France, and his eventual arrival in America. In a confessional tone that revealed his uneven state of mind, Audubon admitted to contradictory feelings about his time in Henderson. It was, on one hand, the place that saw his best and happiest days. John Woodhouse had been born there—a great blessing. Business had been good too, and for years he and Lucy had felt close and certain of themselves and their future. But it was also the place where disaster had befallen him. Audubon wrote of having too many partners and taking on too much debt, and of confronting too many unforeseen events that “reduced” and “divided” everything the family had achieved. Now he was embarked on a new chapter in his life, one forced upon him by bad luck but also by a disposition that he believed made it necessary for him to pursue his only abiding passion. His confession was sharply at odds with his later claims about when the idea of publishing his work first formed:

Ever since a Boy I have had an astonishing desire to see Much of the World & particularly to Acquire a true Knowledge of the Birds of North America, consequently, I hunted when Ever I had an Opportunity, and Drew every New Specimen as I could, or dared
steel time
from my Business and having a tolerably Large Number of Drawings that have been generally admired, I Concluded that perhaps I Could Not do better than to Travel, and finish My Collection or so nearly so that it would be a Valuable Acquisition—My Wife Hoped it might do Well, and I Left her Once More . . .

Audubon found the passage south painfully tedious, largely because the weather forced the travelers to remain in the cabin so much of the time. Yet scarcely a day passed that he did not record observations of birds—as well as the occasional geological feature or some aspect of the lives and characters of the settlers and Indians the party encountered. Audubon began seeing bird species with which he was unfamiliar. Some of these he drew and later included in his published works; others, like the “fin-tailed duck” and the “imber diver,” disappeared among many future corrections of his taxonomy. Sometimes the stormy weather so retarded the boat's progress that Audubon had time to hike the woods. One day, after a bone-chilling and sleepless night during which everyone
aboard had gone repeatedly over the side to keep the wind from pushing the boat hopelessly aground, Audubon discovered a small, quiet lake where he shot several geese and ducks and found the largest mussels he had ever seen, recording them as “muscles” in his journal. Later that afternoon he caught a catfish that weighed over sixty pounds. Audubon reported happily that such a large fish was easily dispatched by “stabbing it about the Center of its head.”

But a day later, having caught another, smaller catfish, Audubon wrote that this one survived for over an hour during the same stabbing treatment. Apparently in a brutal mood, Audubon tied a line around the foot of a bald eagle Captain Aumack had wounded, lashed the other end to a large pole, and pitched both the bird and the pole overboard to see what would happen. Surprisingly, the eagle swam off rapidly, flailing the water with its huge wings and dragging the pole along with it. As he amused himself watching a frightened Mason attempt to recapture the eagle with the skiff, Audubon noted the bird's mate circling overhead and crying out with “true sorrow.” An hour later the eagle accepted a fish from Audubon, but the next day it hissed at him whenever he came near.

As they passed through the Arkansas territory, the flora and fauna began to change. Audubon wrote to the territorial governor imploring him for assistance in exploring the region, but heard nothing back. Spanish moss now hung in the trees. Audubon was on the alert for alligators and was eager to see them—though the chilly weather did not cooperate. Ivory-billed woodpeckers became a common sight, and their calls reverberated through the forest. Dash, it turned out, was pregnant. Audubon referred to her in his journal as “my slut Dash.” After she finally gave birth to a litter of pups, Audubon and Mason decided to perform a gruesome experiment. It was said that the flesh of the Carolina parakeet—or “parrokeet” as Audubon wrote in his journal—was toxic to a dog's heart. Audubon and Mason shot ten parakeets, boiled them, and fed them to Dash—who showed not the slightest ill effect.

For many weeks, Audubon had been seeing numbers of large, long-necked black birds he took to be a species of pelican unfamiliar to him. Above Natchez, Mississippi, at the mouth of the Yazoo River—a beautiful, clear stream flanked by willows and cottonwoods—Audubon spotted a whole flock of the strange birds roosted near the water. Audubon and Mason took the skiff and floated past the birds, then went ashore and
crawled back toward them. When they were finally in range, about forty-five yards away, Audubon carefully picked out a group of three perched on a dead branch and stood and fired at them. All three birds fell.

But when he and Mason rushed forward to retrieve the birds, they discovered them swimming off with the larger flock. All the birds dove at the approach of the two men, and on resurfacing took to the air after running over the surface of the water for a good fifty yards. Audubon was fascinated—and then noticed that one bird, obviously wounded, could not fly. He and Joseph raced back to the skiff and went after the bird, which swam ahead up the river, diving repeatedly. After a mile of inching closer to the bird, Audubon sensed it was tiring, as each dive lasted a shorter time than the last. Finally Mason readied his gun as Audubon pulled on the oars. The bird came up again, close by now, its head and neck like a snake. Mason fired, killing it. Audubon, nervous and exhausted from the chase, was flummoxed once he brought it over the side. The bird looked something like an albatross, but Audubon could not even guess at the genus to which it belonged. And while Audubon surely determined the bird's identity later, exactly what it was remains uncertain, since he never mentioned this incident again.

Most likely it was an anhinga—a bird Audubon eventually encountered all across the southern United States. The anhinga turned out to have several other names, including “black-bellied darter” and “snake-bird,” all of which Audubon somewhat confusingly used in his later description of the species. It is, beyond question, a magnificent bird, with its long neck, sharp beak, and broad, fanlike tail. Although this design suggests a bird made for long, soaring flight, Audubon learned that it is actually the most powerful of all freshwater diving birds. It is also among the most averse to capture. Audubon said that an anhinga even slightly wounded falls immediately into the water—whereupon it swims off rapidly underwater, surfaces, and goes down again and again in a desperate effort to escape. When seriously injured, the anhinga, like certain other waterfowl, sometimes dives to the bottom and, taking hold of some vegetation, stays there until it drowns—a heartrending form of suicide familiar to duck hunters. Audubon's drawing of the anhinga, showing a male and a female perched atop dead tree trunks overlooking a swamp, their heads and necks serpentined to the side in sinuous curves, is one of the most elegant he ever painted.

On Christmas Day, 1820, Audubon got a present. Captain Aumack
shot a great-footed hawk, a bird Alexander Wilson had heard of but, Audubon gleefully noted, had not been able to observe and describe. Audubon's sudden attentiveness to Wilson's inventory of species seemed to indicate that he now viewed Wilson as a rival. Audubon himself claimed to have seen this particular hawk many times, but admitted he had never managed to shoot one. They flew very fast, and as they passed through the air issued a loud, whistling roar that Audubon likened to the swooshing near miss of a cannonball. This hawk was unusually active, rarely soaring passively on the air but always flying furiously and falling on its prey—smaller birds that it seized on the wing—in spectacular dives. Quite a few seemed to be at this place, and Audubon speculated that the abundance of overwintering ducks was the chief attraction for them. The specimen Aumack collected that day turned out to be an old female. Audubon went to work on a drawing of it, and later dissected the bird, finding in its stomach the remains of a teal. Audubon was right to be impressed with this bird—which we now call the peregrine falcon.
The sleekest and most deadly of aerial killers, the peregrine falcon is the fastest living thing on earth, achieving speeds of nearly two hundred miles per hour when stooping on its prey—which usually dies upon impact in midair.

The next morning the flatboat at last came beneath the bluffs at Natchez. It was the first contact with a civilized settlement in two months and nine hundred miles of travel. Audubon thought the city pretty and romantic. Goats grazed on the hillsides, and the town was well laid out with tree-lined streets—though the buildings and houses were a mostly ramshackle collection of small, woodframe structures. The two thousand or so residents overlooked a busy waterfront, where all manner of arks and flatboats were tied up. Aububon was impressed by the bustling traffic of horsecarts and pedestrians, and also by the number of sawmills along the river and several immense rafts of logs, some bound for New Orleans. Audubon realized he was seeing a small fraction of the removal of the forest from the vast interior of America. One raft operator boasted to Audubon that his last delivery to New Orleans of logs he'd “stolen” off government land had brought him $6,000.

There was a decent hotel—built in the Spanish style—and several crowded taverns that Audubon, penniless, could only stare into as he ambled past. On the boat, floating through the backcountry and living off
the game he shot, Audubon had known he was poor without really feeling it. The men had helped themselves equally to the food they had, sharing the cooking duties and supplementing Audubon's game feasts with hunks of bacon they chewed cold after cutting them from the slab kept hung by the fireplace. Audubon said that no one ever ate a freshly plucked and fire-roasted duck with more gusto than he did on that trip. But, in a town, one needed money to eat. Audubon managed to find two people willing to pay him $5 each for their portraits—which he speedily produced. The recipients were so delighted with the results that one of them actually paid. Audubon treated himself to dinner at the hotel that evening, where he was repeatedly embarrassed when he picked up his food with his fingers, a habit acquired on the boat. Audubon thought bitterly to himself that less hardened men—especially eastern “dandys”—would do themselves good to live as he had, by day hunting through tangled, treacherous woods and at night going to sleep in soaked, mud-caked clothes on a buffalo skin nailed to a board. This would teach them what it was to sweat and to be hungry and so occupied with staying alive that their imaginations would be kept “free from worldly thoughts.” Those who dared, he added, should leave their “high heeled boots” at home but not their “corsets,” which would come in handy for cinching down their shrinking bellies when food was in short supply.

Audubon stayed in Natchez less than a week. On the last day of 1820, he and Mason spent the morning on the flatboat packing their gear. Audubon had run into a friend from Shippingport, who offered to take Audubon and Mason on to New Orleans in his keelboat. Audubon jumped at the chance to ride in greater comfort and felt a rush of gratitude when his friend sent a man to the flatboat to help with their belongings. Feeling as if things were looking up a little, Audubon went to town and had breakfast before going aboard the keelboat and putting off once more into the wide, brown river. They tied up to the stern of a steamboat heading south and were soon making good time. That afternoon, when he got out his drawing kit, Audubon realized something terrible had happened. One of his portfolios—a small one—had been among the things he had entrusted to the porter. It was now nowhere to be found. The portfolio contained about fifteen drawings, including at least three “non-descripts,” plus a portrait of Lucy and some “silver papers” used as protective liners between his drawings. Audubon, imagining the portfolio ripped open and
cast aside on the Natchez waterfront, pictured his drawings tacked up in the cabins of various flatboats or decorating the walls of houses owned by “low characters” who would have no concept of their worth. He felt sick.

The next morning, New Year's Day, Audubon stared glumly at the passing country, which had become flat. It seemed scarcely possible, but exactly twenty-one years before, he had been a cadet training at the naval school in Rochefort in France. It all felt far away and long ago. He believed an account of his life and travels since that time could fill a big book. But his experience had been “dearly purchased,” and this morning he thought the only thing to be said of him could be recorded in a single sentence. “I am,” he wrote in his journal, “on Board a Keel Boat going down to New Orleans the poorest Man on it.”

Audubon and Mason arrived in New Orleans a week later—where Audubon's intention of continuing across the Gulf of Mexico to Florida met with reality. He had no money with which to go on. He had no money with which to go back. After nearly three months away from his family, Audubon felt the constant weight of his loneliness for Lucy and the boys. On his first night in the city, Audubon dined with friends of the keelboat's owner and found himself disgusted by their boisterous behavior. Audubon thought these people talked too loudly and laughed too hard at “dry” jokes that left him at a loss. At one point the party was entertained by a pet monkey that was permitted to caper around the dining room. Audubon, unhappy and feeling out of place, refilled his wine glass many times. He finally excused himself after dinner—everyone else was headed to the theater, a diversion he could not afford—and returned to the boat with a headache. The next day, hungover and depressed, Audubon went to a parade commemorating the sixth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans—where a pickpocket lifted the letters of introduction he'd taken along in hopes of meeting the governor. Back on the boat, Audubon was lampooned as a “green horn.”