I asked him if he ever heard that rare piece of bird music, the flight song of the oven-bird. "Yes," he replied, "we frequently hear it of an evening, while we are sitting on the porch, right down there at the corner of the woods." Now, this flight song of the oven-bird was unknown to the older ornithologists, and Thoreau, with all his years of patient and tireless watching of birds and plants, never identified it; but the President had caught it quickly and easily, sitting on his porch at Sagamore Hill. I believe I may take the credit of being the first to identify and describe this song—back in the old "Wake Robin" days.
In an inscription in a book the President had just given me he had referred to himself as my pupil. Now I was to be his pupil. In dealing with the birds I could keep pace with him pretty easily, and, maybe, occasionally lead him; but when we came to consider big game and the animal life of the globe, I was nowhere. His experience with the big game has been very extensive, and his acquaintance with the literature of the subject is far beyond my own; and he forgets nothing, while my memory is a sieve. In his study he set before me a small bronze elephant in action, made by the famous French sculptor Barye. He asked me if I saw anything wrong with it. I looked it over carefully, and was obliged to confess that, so far as I could see, it was all right. Then he placed before me another, by a Japanese artist. Instantly I saw what was wrong with the Frenchman's elephant. Its action was like that of a horse or a cow, or any trotting animal—a hind and a front foot on opposite sides moving together. The Japanese had caught the real movement of the animal, which is that of a pacer—both legs on the same side at a time. What different effects the two actions gave the statuettes! The free swing of the Japanese elephant you at once recognize as the real thing. The President laughed, and said he had never seen any criticism of Barye's elephant on this ground, or any allusion to his mistake; it was his own discovery. I was fairly beaten at my own game of observation.
He then took down a copy of his "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," and pointed out to me the mistakes the artist had made in some of his drawings of big Western game.
"Do you see anything wrong in the head of the pronghorn?" he asked, referring to the animal which the hunter is bringing in on the saddle behind him. Again I had to confess that I could not. Then he showed me the mounted head of a pronghorn over the mantel in one of his rooms, and called my attention to the fact that the eye was close under the root of the horn, whereas in the picture the artist had placed it about two inches too low. And in the artist's picture of the pronghorn, which heads Chapter IX, he had made the tail much too long, as he had the tail of the elk on the opposite page.
I had heard of Mr. Roosevelt's attending a fair in Orange County, while he was Governor, where a group of mounted deer were exhibited. It seems the group had had rough usage, and one of the deer had lost its tail and a new one had been supplied. No one had noticed anything wrong with it till Mr. Roosevelt came along. "But the minute he clapped his eyes on that group," says the exhibitor, "he called out, 'Here, Gunther, what do you mean by putting a white-tail deer's tail on a black-tail deer?" Such closeness and accuracy of observation even few naturalists can lay claim to. I mentioned the incident to him, and he recalled it laughingly. He then took down a volume on the deer family which he had himself had a share in writing, and pointed out two mistakes in the naming of the pictures which had been overlooked. The picture of the "white-tail in flight" was the black-tail of Colorado, and the picture of the black-tail of Colorado showed the black-tail of Columbia—the difference this time being seen in the branching of the horns.
The President took us through his house and showed us his trophies of the chase—bearskins of all sorts and sizes on the floors, panther and lynx skins on the chairs, and elk heads and deer heads on the walls, and one very large skin of the gray timber wolf. We examined the teeth of the wolf, barely more than an inch long, and we all laughed at the idea of its reaching the heart of a caribou through the breast by a snap, or any number of snaps, as it has been reported to do. I doubt if it could have reached the heart of a gobbler turkey in that way at a single snap.
A YEARLING IN THE APPLE ORCHARD
From stereograph, copyright 1907, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
The President's interest in birds, and in natural history generally, dates from his youth. While yet in his teens he published a list of the birds of Franklin County, New York. He showed me a bird journal which he kept in Egypt when he was a lad of fourteen, and a case of three African plovers which he had set up at that time; and they were well done.