Author Audubon

AUDUBON'S AMERICA--Edited by Donald Culross Peattie--Houghton Mifflin ($6).

John James Audubon migrated up & down early 19th-Century North America about as freely as the birds he painted. When he was not padding through the Kentucky forest or slinking about bird-abundant Feliciana Parish, he was flat-boating on the Mississippi and Ohio, exploring Florida's St. Johns River or sailing along Louisiana's Gulf Coast. In Labrador he hunted seals, in the Dakotas buffalo. He traveled up the Big Muddy to the Rocky Mountains. Everywhere he painted birds magnificently, sometimes painted animals almost as well.

He also wrote. Writer-Naturalist Donald Culross Peattie has got together at last the best of Writer-Naturalist Audubon's random writings. They are published in a large, handsome volume, largely and handsomely illustrated with 15 11 1/2-by-15-inch color reproductions of birds and beasts by Audubon, one landscape by Audubon, one animal picture by Son John Woodhouse Audubon, one Audubon self-portrait.

Audubon writings include sporadic journals, letters, accounts of his meetings with Frontiersman Daniel Boone, Naturalist-Bird Painter Alexander Wilson, eccentric Naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz. There are lively descriptions of coon, possum, bear and cougar hunts, bird biographies, racy reporting of the frontier's human fauna. Most exciting piece is The Prairie. One night Audubon asked shelter at a cabin where he found a strapping woman, her two hulking sons, an Indian. The woman admired Audubon's gold watch so much that though he lay down, he decided not to sleep. The woman did not sleep either. Writes Audubon: "Judge of my astonishment, reader, when I saw this incarnate fiend take a large carving knife and go to the grindstone to whet its edge. . . . Her task finished, she walked to her reeling sons and said: 'There, that'll soon settle him!'" Just then two strangers arrived. In 25 years of wandering through the American wilderness, this was the only time that Audubon was ever in danger from human beings. Says he: ". . I can only account for this occurrence by supposing that the inhabitants of the cabin were not Americans."

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