46 LIFE OP AUDUBON. 



weekly allowance of wood contracted for was safely delivered, 

 and Audubon had reason to feel mucli contentment with his 

 serTants. 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 passenger reached the deck, than he recognized in him one 

 of Ws plunderers ; but the woodcutter, fearing an arrest, leaped 

 into the stream and swam towards the shore. Entering a cane 

 brake, 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 waggons, 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 western representatives of the patriarchs moved on towards 

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

 danger, had been driven. When a voyage by water was 

 meditated as the easiest means of transporting the family and 

 the baggage, a group of emigrants would build an ark on some 

 creek of the upper waters of the Ohio, and in a craft, forty or 

 fifty feet long, drift down the stream, carrying upon the roof 

 the bodies of carts and waggons, upon the sides the wheels, of 

 the same. 



Within these floating mansions the wayfarers lived, not 

 without fear of impending dangers. To show a light through 

 the loopholes within range of a redskin's rifle was certain death 



