AUDUBON AND BOONE. 165 
and lucrative employment than can well be realized now, for 
although very many devoted themselves to it as a means of 
earning an honest livelihood, and the skins and meat of the 
animals slain by them found an important branch of traffic to 
the whole country—yet everybody was in addition more or 
less a hunter—so that, fortunately, for our struggles then 
and since, this might be called the chief occupation of the 
people, and we a nation of hunters. 
He went in to the nearest trading post now and then, laden 
with skins and meat, to exchange them for powder, lead and 
other necessaries, returning as speedily as possible, for the 
very atmosphere of even such “crowded haunts,” was oppres- 
sive to him, and the coarse voices of common traffic sounded 
harsh enough to ears accustomed only to those of nature. 
His lonely explorations were first directed towards the sum 
mits of the great chain. He would make excursions of weeks 
together along the wildest and most inaccessible sides of the 
mountains—penetrating their deepest fastnesses, and camping 
wherever the game or other objects of interest attracted him 
for a time—then he would on again, to some newer and yet 
more difficult region within reasonable reach of his solitary 
cabin, and in a different direction. 
Thus the whole year was unconsciously spent in scaling 
the Eastern side of those mountains—the descent upon the 
Western slope of which was to open to him a field of re- 
nown. 
We next hear of him on the Frontier of North Carolina. 
Here he lived for over a year in the most entire seclusion— 
never being seen except when he came in to the nearest 
settlement for powder and lead; and here he seemed still more 
shy than before—but yet his unusual energy as a hunter, his 
skill in wood-craft, and his cool, reckless presence of mind, 
under all circumstances of danger, soon attracted the admira- 
tion of the Border men, and, in spite of his modesty and 
entire shrinking from all intercourse with his fellows that 
