She would, and did, and he asked for illustrations. She found that his time limit gave her one day to do them in. She worked from 8 A. M. to 4 A. M. to make the necessary photographs, which required special settings and costuming.
Not long after, Mrs. Porter wrote a short story of 10,000 words and sent it to the Century. Richard Watson Gilder advised her to make a book of it. This is the origin of The Song of the Cardinal. “Following Mr. Gilder’s advice, she recast the tale and, starting with the mangled body of a cardinal some marksman had left in the road she was traveling, in a fervor of love for the birds and indignation at the hunter she told the cardinal’s life history.” The book was published in 1903.
She illustrated the book herself after dangers and hardships of which the reader seldom has any conception. Securing a mere tailpiece picture once cost her three weeks in bed where she lay twisted in convulsions and insensible most of the time.
Freckles appeared in the fall of 1904. She had been spending every other day for three months in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of studies of the nest of a black vulture. She combined two men to make McLean of the story, but Sarah Duncan was a real woman; Freckles was a composite of certain ideals and her own field experiences, merged with those of a friend. For the Angel she idealized her own daughter. The book is dedicated to her husband, because he helped make it possible. She had promised him not to work in the Limberlost. “‘There were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every plant, animal and human danger known in the worst of such locations in the Central States.’” Nevertheless lumbermen had brought word of the vulture’s nest. “‘I hastened to tell my husband the wonderful story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the pale blue egg.’” So he said he would go with her.
It was awful.
“‘A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced our way between steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle deep at every step and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our progress was a steady succession of pulling and prying each other to the surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odors for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.
“‘We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take wing.’”
The story itself—Freckles—originated in the fact that one day, while leaving the swamp, a big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and swirling earthward and fell in the author’s path. It was an eagle’s, but Mrs. Porter had been doing vultures, so a vulture’s it became.
Freckles took three years to find its audience. The marginal illustrations made people think it purely a nature book. The news that it was a novel of the kind you simply must read had to get about by word of mouth. The copy that lies beside us as we write this sketch was printed in 1914, ten years after the story’s first appearance. The jacket says that by 1914 exactly 670,733 copies had been sold. And the most important three of the ten years were largely wasted!
Publishers told Mrs. Porter then and afterward, repeatedly and emphatically, that if she wanted to sell her best and make the most money she must cut out the nature stuff. But, as she says, her real reason in writing her novels was to bring natural history attractively before the people who wouldn’t touch it in its pure state.