an accomplished horseman. He could fence and swim, and he was a superb shot. He seemed to know everything about birds and animals. His curiosity about nature never rested. Audubon was always in a good mood, always full of ideas about what to do or where to go to see something interesting. It gave William Bakewell pause to hear that young Audubon had led his daughter to some hidden place in the bluff above Perkiomen Creek—but he relaxed when he was reassured that they were only up there to look at phoebes. He was less forgiving when Audubon, on skates and armed with a shotgun, talked Tom Bakewell into tossing his cap in the air for a target.
One afternoon in late winter, Audubon led a hunting party after ducks. The season was not yet far enough advanced for a spring flight of waterfowl, but there must have been a few early arrivals and some ducks always stayed through the winter. The hunters moved up frozen Perkiomen Creek on skates, being careful to avoid the patches of open water they called “air holes.” The group was still a long way from Mill Grove when darkness fell, leaving a fair distance of treacherous river ice between them and home. Undaunted, Audubon volunteered to lead the way. Tying a white handkerchief to a stick, Audubon held it aloft and told everyone to follow him. The others adjusted the still-warm ducks hanging from their belts, looking around doubtfully at the gloom. Then they were off, gliding down the creek beneath the bare branches of the overhanging trees, now and then passing by a gurgling air hole. The frigid night air stung their faces. At the head of the line, Audubon’s white signal bobbed along like a beacon in the dark sky. Suddenly, it disappeared.
Audubon had fallen into an air hole. Instantly, the current swept him under, pushing him along beneath the ice and away from all sight and sound. His friends rushed to the place where he’d gone through. An eternity seemed to pass as they stared, horrified, into the swirling blackness. There was nothing to say, nothing they could do. The night was a clear, frozen envelope of silence surrounding them. They shifted on their skates. The ice groaned. Then they heard a cry many yards downstream. Audubon had somehow found his way up through another air hole. He was dragged coughing and shaking onto the ice, where someone stripped off a coat and wrapped it around him. As they got him to his feet, Audubon told his companions that in the shock of going under he’d lost consciousness. It was by pure chance that he’d popped up through another opening and regained his senses before being pulled down again.
Audubon worked hard at his drawing. His favorite subjects were birds, but they frustrated his efforts to translate nature onto paper. In France, as a boy, he’d collected birds with his father along the Loire River, but when he drew them in pencil and crayon the results were “miserable.” The objects of these early sketches looked like what they were—dead birds. Audubon depicted them in “stiff, unnatural profiles,” a manner he would later find all too common in conventional ornithology. The elder Audubon was unstinting in his encouragement, but warned his son that “nothing in the world possessing life and animation” is easy to imitate. At Mill Grove, Audubon tried to solve the problem by taking his crayons and pencils to the grotto above Perkiomen Creek, where he made countless attempts at drawing his beloved phoebes as they flitted about. Sometimes he made rough outlines of birds in the field, then shot them and returned to his room, where he laid them out as best he could in the same positions. This didn’t work, as “they were dead to all intents and neither wing, leg, or tail could I place according to the intention of my wishes.” He even tried tying threads to the head and wings of his specimens to support them in lifelike attitudes. But when he compared these clumsy models to the real, live thing, he said, “I felt my blood rise in my temples.”
These efforts so demoralized Audubon that at one point he stopped drawing for a month. Instead, he walked every day through the woods, looking at birds and waiting for inspiration. Audubon later claimed that during this time he began to dream about drawing birds, and long before daylight one morning he sat up in bed with a start. As Audubon told it, he ordered his horse saddled—probably he had to do it himself—and rode off at a gallop to Norristown, about five miles away. There he bought wire in various gauges and, leaping back on his “steed,” returned to Mill Grove. He passed up breakfast and instead grabbed his gun and bolted down the hill for Perkiomen Creek, where he shot a kingfisher. He gently carried the bird home by the bill and then went back down to the mill for a soft board. Filing points onto short lengths of wire, Audubon skewered the bird through the head, legs, and feet, and then, laying it on its side against the board, drove the wires into the wood to maintain the body in a fixed position. A final stiff wire was stuck under the tail to hold it up at a jaunty angle. Audubon was so excited he began to draw immediately, giving no further thought to time or hunger until he had finished. That kingfisher, he later said, marked the real beginning of his career. As he worked on his drawing, he reached over periodically and carefully opened the bird’s eyelid, and every time he did this it was as if the kingfisher had sprung back to life.
Audubon eventually added an important refinement to what he called “my method of drawing.” He marked off the surface of his mounting board with squares, and matched this grid with lightly penciled duplicate squares on his drafting papers. This allowed him to get the proportions and the foreshortenings of perspective just right. As for the scale, it was always a simple one-to-one. Audubon drew every bird as he saw it, exactly life-sized. It was a practice from which he never deviated.
Months streamed by in a delicious haze. Audubon was in love. Lucy was smart and bold, and she shared his enthusiasm for a day in the woods. He was thrilled at how well she kept up with him, and impressed by her riding skills. In England, Lucy had ridden with the hounds. She was at ease in the forest, and increasingly, she was attached to her companion at Mill Grove. They began to talk of marriage. When Audubon got sick just before the holidays in the fall of 1804, he went to Fatland Ford to be taken care of. His illness lasted weeks, and at one point it looked as if he might die. But once again he bounced back to life. Lucy read to him while he recovered. By early February he was well enough to go out for a ride.
Audubon did have one nagging concern—his father’s overseer, François Dacosta, who seemed intent on gaining control of Mill Grove. Evidently the two argued over who was giving orders to whom, and the elder Audubon got wind of it back in France. In truth, Audubon’s father had never completely explained to his son that Dacosta was an equal partner in Mill Grove. He wasn’t satisfied with Dacosta’s slow progress in opening the lead mine, but their arrangement had not changed. It meanwhile dawned on the younger Audubon that his say in the management of the estate didn’t amount to much, and that it was all but impossible to convey to his father on the other side of the world how unsatisfactory this was to him. The elder Audubon, having also heard of his son’s possible engagement, was already doing everything in his power to prevent a marriage between Audubon and Lucy. Audubon’s father suspected Lucy might only be after a wealthy husband. He wrote to Dacosta, urging him to find a way to delay his son’s plans, and, if need be, to let the Bakewells know that young Audubon, despite outward appearances, was not rich and could not expect anything in the way of support from his family in France if he were to marry “in his present condition.” In a follow-up letter, Audubon’s father warned Dacosta to stop complaining about his son, whose conduct must be the result of “bad advice and lack of experience.” Young Audubon was, after all, not yet twenty. The elder Audubon felt certain that the Bakewells had “goaded” his son into bragging that Mill Grove was his.
The old sea captain’s vision remained sharp. Even from across the ocean, his view of the situation was penetrating, and his response was a masterly demonstration of finesse and fatherly concern. He wrote to Dacosta, reassuring him that everyone in Philadelphia—except, apparently, young Audubon—understood perfectly that Dacosta’s rights and interests in Mill Grove were the same as his own. He said he had written to his son advising him as much and admonishing him to be a more respectful member of the household. He told Dacosta that sending young Audubon home to France, as Dacosta now proposed, was out of the question. All of the elder Audubon’s reasons for having his son in America were as before. Instead, he artfully suggested how Dacosta could act in his stead to bring the boy under control. Having repeated his command that his son not get married at such a young age, Audubon advised Dacosta to go easy:
Only an instant
