6o Life of Audubon, 



showed their excellent training, felling the trees after the 

 fashion of experienced woodmen. The daily and weekly 

 allowance of wood contracted for was safely delivered, 

 and Audubon had reason to feel much contentment with 

 his servants. The miller was satisfied ; and the master, 

 to prove his appreciation of the valuable services, sent 

 various presents of game and provisions to the strangers. 

 Finding they had neglected to forward their usual supply 

 one day, Audubon went off to their camp, found that 

 the "Yankees" had gone off bodily, had taken his 

 draught oxen with them, and had harried the place of 

 all that could be lifted. He and his miller hunted down 

 the river for the fugitives, but they had got a start and 

 were not to be caught. Finding an escape into the 

 Mississippi, the runaways voyaged out of reach of their 

 victim, and a rare accident alone placed one of them 

 within Audubon's power. While on board a Mississippi 

 steamer, Audubon saw a hunter leave the shore in a 

 canoe and reach the steamer. No sooner had the pas- 

 senger reached the deck, than he recognized in him one 

 of his plunderers ; but the woodcutter, fearing an arrest, 

 leaped into the stream and swam towards the shore. 

 Entering a canebrake, he was lost to sight, and the 

 naturalist was never gratified by either hearing of, or 

 seeing any one of the fellows again. 



In referring to Kentuckian sports, Audubon remarks 

 that that State was a sort of promised land for all sorts of 

 wandering adventurers from the Eastern states. Families 

 cast loose from their homesteads beyond the mountains, 

 wandered westward with their wagons, servants, cattle, 

 and household gods. Bivouacking by some spring, in 

 a glade of the primeval forest, near some well known 

 " salt lick," where game would be plentiful, these West- 

 ern representatives of the patriarchs moved on towards 

 new resting-places, from which the red man, not without 



