3 The education of a. Seton Indian 



are mighty serious when you are a boy and have your heart set on 

 living out in the woods forever. 



As far as I know there were no naturalists in my family back- 

 ground. My father was a lawyer, and one grandfather and one 

 great-grandfather before him. Mother had been a schoolteacher, 

 and her father had been a law student turned minister in the 

 Methodist Church South, a change of route brought about by his 

 marrying a remarkable woman who started out to be a missionary 

 in China, but settled for the Methodist Church South and eleven 

 children of her own instead. There wasn't a scientist in the lot, but 

 there was a great deal in the way of speaking and writing and ex- 

 postulating and devotion to Causes. All of which not only made 

 important and inevitable contributions to my own character, but, 

 since the sum of all these talents had in some mysterious way 

 produced in me a Seton Indian, it would seem reasonably logical, 

 or at least not surprising, that in course of time my path should 

 lead to the Audubon Society, and to an opportunity to work for 

 some of that society's great causes. 



In early summer, when the valley and the town were hidden 

 beneath a thick fog, we would climb to the peak of Bald Eagle 

 Mountain and see below us a white blanket of wool filled with 

 muffled sounds and mystery. Off there close to the sky, without 

 visible connections with the rest of the universe, it was like being 

 in another and less complicated world, or perhaps in our own world 

 as it might have been at an earlier time. Yet this was not a feeling 

 of escape, for there was almost as much in the world there below 

 us that we loved as in any other place. We simply enjoyed the peace 

 and the beauty and the solitude of the mountain slope without 

 wondering why. If the pleasures we found on those mountain ridges 

 the soaring flight of a red-tailed hawk, the song of a veery, the 

 fresh beauty of the first wild honeysuckle if this was escapism, 

 then what could one describe as reality? Without really knowing 

 it, my brother John and I had stumbled upon something of great 

 value, an easy kinship with the world of nature. And all this was 

 real, every bit of it the trees in their strong grandeur, the bird 

 song in its sweetness and variety of meanings, the depth of sky, 



