days along the Delaware until they fled south with the first frost.
Canada geese—which were shot in the spring as well as the fall—were more difficult to hunt, as their sharp eyesight and skittishness made them impossible to pursue in the open. Hunters had to conceal themselves near places regularly overflown by flocks of geese, and it was possible to decoy the birds within range by various means, some as crude as shooting a goose or two and impaling them on stakes that were then set out near the gunner. Many hunters tamed geese they had wounded and used them as live decoys, tethered and eager to call to other geese flying overhead.
But it was canvasback hunting that seemed to inspire the most imaginative and relentless techniques. Their ranks now immensely reduced, these large, tasty waterfowl, which got their name from the white plumage that wraps their midsections, once migrated across America in great numbers. The duck waters around Philadelphia produced crops of an aquatic plant known as “wild celery,” which grew so thick in places that it was impossible to row a boat through a stand of its submerged stalks. Canvasbacks love the root of this plant, and when it comprises the bulk of their diet, the taste of canvasback flesh is unequaled. It was not uncommon for rafts of canvasbacks to form in open water near stands of wild celery, and to remain there in safety through the daytime before coming closer in at night to feed.
Temporary measures were sometimes adopted to regulate duck hunting, usually in times when waterfowl numbers appeared low. As early as 1727, the colony of Massachusetts had briefly outlawed nighttime hunting. But, for the most part, anything went. On moonlit nights, when the canvasbacks were thick on the Delaware, it was common practice to guide a boat silently under the shadow of the shoreline and then drift into a flock of feeding ducks—whereupon the stillness was broken by a blue flash and a booming report that echoed over the water as the hunter raked the ducks where they sat, killing many at a time. Another method, used late in the season, involved painting a boat white and setting chunks of ice or snow along the gunwales. The hunter—also dressed in white—approached a flock from upstream and reclined hidden in the boat, allowing it to float in among the ducks as it if were a chunk of drifting ice before he rose up and fired. The method that most intrigued Wilson was “tolling,” in which a well-hidden hunter ordered his highly trained dog to scamper along the shoreline, usually with a brightly colored handkerchief tied about its midsection. The canvasbacks mistook the dog’s actions for the movement of other ducks paddling close to shore and, curious, would swim in to investigate.
Wilson eagerly took up these sports, so different from his casual walking hunts over the moors near Paisley. It would have been hard to envision a more dramatic demonstration of nature’s bounty than the annual flights of ducks and geese that passed over his head each autumn and again every spring. Their numbers, like the vision itself, are now so much diminished that it is all but impossible to conceive what it was like. The throngs of geese and ducks that Wilson saw were but a fraction of the waterfowl migrating along the Eastern Flyway, a number that was itself a fraction of the unimaginable masses overflying the continent.
Although there were other Scottish immigrants in the area, Wilson avoided people he thought might know about the circumstances under which he’d left his homeland. One exception was a man named Charles Orr, who lived in Philadelphia and occasionally visited Wilson out at Milestown. They wrote each other often, with Wilson sometimes corresponding in verse. Evidently, he enjoyed Orr as a compatriot and captive audience. The great thing about letter-writing, he once told Orr, was that it afforded you an opportunity to speak your mind without fear of interruption.
Time slipped away. William Duncan moved to upstate New York, to establish a farm. In 1798 Philadelphia was again gripped by a yellow fever outbreak that emptied the city. Through the summer and into the fall, people died by the thousands. Wilson could scarcely believe the deserted streets—no more than 8,000 of the city’s 65,000 residents remained in town. It was possible, Wilson wrote to his family, to stand in any public square and hear no other human being “except for the drivers of the death carts.” But the plague passed with the onset of winter and Philadelphia again recovered. Before he knew it, Wilson found that he’d been teaching for five years—and that he was on the verge of something, either an epiphany or a nervous breakdown. Or maybe both. He began to feel imprisoned by his responsibilities. He periodically complained of being ill. At one point he even resigned his post, only to be coaxed back to work with a promise of additional sick leave from the school’s trustees. In the summer of 1800, Wilson’s letters to Orr began to confide his innermost feelings—which were suddenly jumbled and anxious. In one letter, Wilson suggested they had much to reveal to each other as “lovers of truth,” adding, oddly, that they were both “subject to the failings of Human Nature.” Wilson couldn’t quite seem to stay on one subject. He said he planned to begin an earnest campaign of frugality. Did Orr think that was a good idea? Could he speculate on the benefits of such a program? Wilson admitted he was writing in haste and urged Orr to write him back the same way. In a long, nearly inscrutable passage, Wilson hinted at something he wished to discuss that was so mysterious that even he couldn’t tell for sure what it was:
I, for my part, have many things to enquire of you, of which at different times I form very different opinions, and at other times can form no distinct decided opinion at all. Sometimes they appear dark and impenetrable; sometimes I think I see a little better into them. Now I see them as plain as broad day, and again they are as dark to me as midnight. In short, the moon puts on not more variety of appearance to the eye than many subjects do to my apprehension & yet in themselves they still remain the same.
Alarmingly, Wilson added that he had “many things of a more interesting and secret nature” to talk over with Orr. Perhaps Orr would find these “things” funny. A few days later, Wilson again wrote to Orr—who, not surprisingly, showed a growing reluctance to write back—and this time solicited Orr’s opinion on marriage and family, a topic that Wilson said had been on his mind since a fateful walk in the woods the previous spring.
It was in the middle of May, Wilson wrote. The forest was in full bloom, and Wilson noticed many birds “in pairs” building nests in which to mate and raise their young. Continuing on his hike, Wilson saw a colt nuzzling its mother. Then he heard the bleating of lambs “from every farm,” and after that he became aware of insects “in the thousands” at his feet and in the air around him, all “preparing to usher their multitudes into being.” Suddenly, as if from a voice out of the heavens, the words “multiply and replenish the earth” formed in his mind. For a moment, Wilson said, he “stood like a blank in this interesting scene, like a note of discord in this universal harmony of love and self-propagation.” He perceived himself in this flash of clarity for what he was: a wretch, living outside of normal society, a man with “no endearing female” who saw in him “her other self” and no child to call him father.
“I was,” Wilson wrote, “like a dead tree in the midst of a green forest.” Hurrying home, Wilson found his landlords playing happily with their children. He was mortified. What good had he accomplished? What was the point of all his study and his books? Did it not strain the bounds of decency that a man such as he—learned now in science and in literature, and susceptible to “the finer feelings of the soul”—should not continue his line? There and then, Wilson vowed to fulfill the biological imperative. He would marry. He would raise a family. Bachelor to the core, he promised to do all this even though he could anticipate “ten thousand unseen distresses” that would befall him in the bargain. In any event, Wilson said, what he most wanted Orr’s advice on was this: Was it not a crime to “persist in a state of celibacy”?
Of course, Wilson quickly admitted, he’d forgotten about all of this as soon as he was back in his room and immersed in his mathematics. Almost as an afterthought, Wilson said he had lately considered a modified version of his plan. It would not be necessary, strictly speaking, to get married in order to contribute “towards this grand work of generation” and to become “the father of at least one of my own species.” Evidently there had been more than sap rising in the Pennsylvania woods that season. But Wilson said no more about it—certainly
