feasting on animals fleeing ahead of the deluge. Inevitably, Catesby experienced the heart-stopping run-in with a rattlesnake that seemed obligatory among early American naturalists. After awaking at an inn in Georgia one morning, Catesby had just sat down to tea in the next room when he heard the maid who’d gone to make up his bed start to scream. She had discovered a rattler between the sheets that Catesby had vacated only minutes before. Catesby concluded that the snake had climbed into bed with him to warm up—it was February—but he couldn’t guess how long they’d kept one another company. In any case, the snake did not care to be disturbed at this point, as Catesby noted when he investigated the scene and found the serpent “full of ire, biting at everything that approached him.” Tellingly, Catesby’s painting of the rattlesnake included a separate close-up of one of its fangs.
For the first time since the days when he had dreamed of being a poet, Wilson felt he’d found an objective—and a means of achieving it. He continued to work at his drawing, routinely submitting his renderings of birds and plants to Bartram for correction and advice. He got to know the Philadelphia engraver Alexander Lawson, a fellow Scot, who provided additional instruction. In the spring of 1804, Wilson sent Lawson a note explaining his frustration at not having more time away from his teaching duties to tend to his “itch for drawing,” which he said he’d gotten from Lawson. He then told Lawson of his idea for an ornithological study of America, confessing that he was famous for having big ideas that came to nothing, but saying he would appreciate his friend’s backing just the same. “I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America,” Wilson wrote. “Now I don’t want you to throw cold water, as Shakespeare says, on this notion, Quixotic as it may appear. I have been so long accustomed to the building of airy castles and brain windmills, that it has become one of my earthly comforts.”
Wilson had taken lodgings near his school with a family named Jones, and in this, too, he was fortunate. The Jones house stood between two creeks that merged into a pool at the base of a low cliff in a thicket a short distance away. Wilson spent hours before and after school lazing atop this hill, reading poetry and studying the sunlight filtering through the beech trees overhead, or looking down at the water, which reflected the laurel branches hanging beside the pond. The grove was full of birds in the spring and summer—so many species that Wilson’s observations there would become the basis for much of his ornithology. He kept track of the intermittent appearances of hawks and orioles, goldfinches and whipporwills. Once, while walking in Bartram’s woods not far away, he saw a species of woodpecker he was sure was new.
Wilson was sometimes joined in his poolside bower by Bartram’s niece. Her name was Nancy, though Wilson called her by her nickname, Anna. Whether they were ever more than the closest of friends is unclear. A few lines in several of Wilson’s poems hint at a greater affection. Wilson seemed, in any event, content and focused on his future—even when Lawson ignored his plea for support and instead tried to talk him out of attempting to publish an illustrated ornithology. Given the more than two hundred birds already known, plus the many more Wilson intended to add to the list, Lawson calculated that the cost of engraving, coloring, and printing such a work—in which Wilson also planned to include a scientific narrative giving the natural history of each species—would easily run to several thousand dollars a copy. No one would pay so dearly, Lawson said, and no publisher would risk investing in a book that might end up costing as much as a small farm.
Wilson never shared these reservations. He kept at his drawing undeterred. Within two years of his coming to Gray’s Ferry he had assembled a fair collection of drawings of the larger birds in the area and was hard at work on the warblers and other small species. His students, amused by his interest in nature, constantly brought Wilson all sorts of plants and animals for his enjoyment. He received a whole basket of ornery crows from a boy in his class, and wondered if the child would next turn up with a load of live bullfrogs. One day a student caught a mouse in the schoolhouse and turned it over to Wilson, who considered how best to pose the animal for drawing. He finally decided to kill the mouse and mount it in the claws of his stuffed owl, but as he watched the animal struggling against a string with which he’d tied it up, Wilson’s heart melted. When he accidentally spilled a few drops of water near it, the mouse quickly drank them up and then, to Wilson’s mind at least, looked up at him with terror in its eyes. He let the mouse go.
Wilson’s perpetually erratic mood stabilized during this time, or at least its extremes subsided in his new, invigorating surroundings. But he still had his moments. Bartram and his niece had promoted Wilson’s interest in birds and drawing partly as a way of pulling him out of the tail-spin he was in when he arrived. They understood that his long walks in the woods were not entirely about his devotion to nature, but were in fact Wilson’s way of escaping his tormented thoughts. On one of these walks, he had accidentally dropped his gun—which shockingly went off. Stunned by the concussion of the blast and the whoosh he felt as the shot charge narrowly missed his chest, Wilson had gone home badly shaken. He confided to Bartram how ironic it would have been if his life, so amply punctuated by times when he almost wished he were dead, had ended in an accident that looked like a suicide. Bartram didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried sick.
And while the birds seemed to lift Wilson’s spirits, his work held his mood in check. Wilson was better paid at the Union School than he ever had been, but he knew now that teaching was not for him. He hated its confinement above all. Indeed, he was now convinced that the grinding repetitiveness of the classroom was killing him. “Close application to my profession, which I have followed since November 1795,” he wrote to a friend, “has deeply injured my constitution, the more so, that my rambling disposition was the worst calculated of anyone’s in the world for the austere regularity of a teacher’s life.”
Troculus colubris: The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
I ask of you, kind reader, who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover?
—Ornithological Biography
While Wilson walked in the woods and practiced his draftsmanship, drawing and redrawing his owl, someone else was watching the birds thirty miles away. The eighteen-year-old who now called himself John James Audubon had arrived at his father’s estate, Mill Grove, in late summer of 1803. The final leg of his journey from France had proved more difficult than the ocean crossing. Two weeks earlier, Audubon had left his ship the instant it docked in New York and walked all the way into Greenwich Village, where his father had arranged a line of credit with a bank. Audubon, excited by the city, perhaps failed to notice an uneasy quiet in the streets. Yellow fever had broken out in New York that summer, and by the time Audubon made his way back to the docks he was feeling unwell. His condition deteriorated so quickly that the captain, a man named John Smith, hired a carriage and hurried him out of the city. He ended up at a boardinghouse run by two Quaker ladies who cared for him as his condition first turned grave and then, amazingly, improved just as rapidly.
Audubon’s first weeks after finally reaching Mill Grove were awkward. His English was all but nonexistent, and his exact status at the estate was ambiguous. The elder Audubon was having trouble managing his property from France, and was at odds with both his American agent in Philadelphia (who, among other things, evidently was to handle John James’s modest allowance) and with François Dacosta, the man he’d sent over from Nantes to develop the lead mine on the property. Audubon’s father and Dacosta had entered into an agreement for shared ownership of Mill Grove that was a continually evolving tangle of bonds, mortgages,
