hung to his shoulders, took some getting used to. But he was friendly, and his accent was cute. Lucy found his odd use of archaic expressions like “thee” and “thou” utterly charming. Despite the language problem, they managed to understand one another. Soon they were talking about England and France, and comparing impressions of their new homes in America. When Lucy spoke of the moors in Derbyshire, Audubon sensed that they shared certain feelings about wild places. He found himself hoping that her father would take his time getting back. She was pretty, he thought. Maybe not classically so, but she had lovely gray eyes and a sweetness that seemed to fill the room. Audubon was happy to see a pianoforte in the corner. When William Bakewell at last appeared, he saw that the two of them were getting on well and suggested that Lucy prepare lunch. Audubon would later recall that he and William Bakewell ate “over guns and dogs,” lost in talk of hunting. But his most vivid memory was of Lucy’s tiny waist as she went to the kitchen ahead of them.
“She now arose from her seat a second time,” he later wrote, “and her form, to which I had previously paid but partial attention, showed both grace and beauty; and my heart followed every one of her steps.”
Audubon’s feelings for Lucy advanced quickly in the days that followed. He got to know all the Bakewells, which in addition to Lucy, William, and Mrs. Bakewell, included five more children: Thomas, who was seventeen; his eager little brother William, who was five; plus Eliza, who was fourteen and exceedingly pretty; and the two little girls, Sarah and Ann. After Audubon’s visit to Fatland Ford, the Bakewells called at Mill Grove on several occasions. One cold evening, everyone went skating on Perkiomen Creek—where Audubon demonstrated impressive skill. He also had a fine time pushing Lucy around the ice on a sled. On another occasion, Audubon led the Bakewells up the cramped stairway to his specimen room, where they were impressed by his collection of stuffed birds and other animals. Shyly, he took out a few crayon drawings of some birds and a mink. He was an intense young man, though in his eagerness to impress he was prone to rash claims. He foolishly told the Bakewells that a portrait of George Washington hanging above the mantel had been presented to his father, “Admiral” Audubon, by Washington himself after the “Battle of Valley Forge.” Audubon was ignorant of the fact that Washington had only camped his troops at Valley Forge, and that the general had visited not Mill Grove, but Fatland Ford. No doubt he got by with these lies because the Bakewells by then wanted to believe that Audubon was the aristocrat he seemed. If they doubted his boast of having studied painting with Jacques-Louis David, they apparently let that one pass as well.
There was no denying that Audubon had many talents. He danced well, played music, and was 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,