AUDUBON AND BOONE, 161 
two athletic youths, the sons of the woman, made their en- 
trance. She whispered with them a little while, when they 
fell to eating and drinking, to a state bordering on intoxica- 
tion. ‘Judge of my astonishment,” he says, “when I saw 
this incarnate fiend take a large carving knife, and go to the 
grindstone to whet its edge! I saw her pour the water on 
the turning-machine, and watched her working away with the 
dangerous ‘instrument, until the sweat covered every part of 
my body, in spite of my determination to defend myself to 
the last. Her task finished, she walked to her reeling sons, 
and said: ‘There, that'll soon settle him! Boys, kill yon 
, and then for the watch!’ IJ turned, cocked my gun 
locks silently, and lay ready to start up and shoot the first 
who might attempt my life. Fortunately, two strangers enter- 
ing at the moment, the purpose of the woman was disclosed, 
and she and her drunken sons secured.” 
But before and during this most erratic period of Audubon’s 
long life of vicissitude and exposure, these same solitudes 
amidst which he wandered, knew another shaggy presence 
even better than his own. The same earthquakes, the same 
hurricanes, and the same red foe had beset the path of Daniel 
Boone—and he, too, the rough, strong birth of nature, was a 
Hunter-Naturalist! Though his deeds and aims were not 
after the manner of those of Audubon, yet were they as 
grand, and their lives, how much alike! These remarkable 
men, one the Pioneer of Civilization and the other of Art and 
Science, in that great wilderness, through which the path of 
empire leads, did not meet until the career of each had been 
finally shaped, and then what grandeur was there in such 
meetings ! 
But we will trace rapidly the career of Boone up to these 
periods, and see how much resemblance in the outline of the 
gigantic proportions of these two men shall appear. 
The great Pioneer was born in 1746, and, though a netive 
of Maryland, had lived as a hunter in two other States— 
11 
