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preferred direct action, always ready to rumble. Although both men hunted, Burroughs’s pockets didn’t always bulge with bullets. While in Wake-Robin Burroughs wrote about a deer hunt in the Adirondacks and about shooting rabbits for sport, his literary talent was better suited to promoting the joy of watching wildlife. The older Burroughs got, in fact, the more hunting bored him. To Burroughs, for example, the American Museum of Natural History was a morgue, an abominable mockery of the great web of vibrant life in the animal kingdom. “A bird shot and stuffed and botanized is no bird at all,” he later told a group of children who came to visit the museum. “And a bird described by another in cold paint is something less than you deserve. Do not go to museums but find Nature. Do not rely on schoolbooks. Have your mothers and fathers take you to the park or the seashore. Watch the sparrows circle over you, hear the gulls screech, follow the squirrel to his nest in the hollow of an old oak. Nature is nothing at all when it is twice removed. It is only real when you reach out and touch it with your hands.”8

One can be reasonably sure Roosevelt knew Burroughs’s biography from Catskills childhood to Signs and Seasons publication practically by heart at the time of their first meeting. Born in Roxbury, New York, on April 3, 1837, Burroughs was six years younger than Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. In his memoir My Boyhood, Burroughs wrote of growing up poor on his family’s farm yet being enchanted by juniper trees, gurgling streams, apple orchards, and picturesque dairy farms. “I deem it good luck, too, that my birth fell in April, a month in which so many other things find it good to begin life,” Burroughs wrote in My Boyhood. “Father probably tapped the sugar bush about this time or a little earlier; the blue-bird and the robin and song sparrow may have arrived that very day.”9

While he was growing up, Burroughs’s life revolved around the Roxbury harvest cycle. Enthralled by the cool sweep of the Catskills, he adopted the upstate woodlands as his own “open-air panorama.”10

By the time he was nine or ten years old, birds—of all kinds—became Burroughs’s fixation. One spring day, he later recalled, a cloud of passenger pigeons descended on a grove of beeches. The birds’ collective noise in his pasture sounded like a gust at sea or a tornado.11 Not long afterward—while visiting the U.S. Military Academy at West Point—Burroughs, who had started to style himself as a backwoods ornithologist, dipped into a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America in the library and couldn’t put it down.12 The beauty of Audubon’s flamingos and wild ganders was beyond stimulating. (Years later, in 1902, while Theodore Roosevelt was president, Burroughs wrote a biography of Audubon. Its purpose was to restore Audubon’s place as the premier American literary naturalist by virtue of his voluminous journals.13) Yet Burroughs noticed that Audubon had also written a ghastly essay on how farmers were slaughtering passenger pigeons by setting tree traps and filling water pots with sulfur. How much more beautiful was the cooing of live passenger pigeons than the heaps of dead birds local farmers used to feed hogs!

To earn a living, Burroughs decided to be a rural schoolmaster. He worked first in New Jersey, not far from the Atlantic coast. When he was twenty years old he traveled to Chicago and had his daguerreotype taken; it shows a rare handsomeness. His longish hair was slicked back, and his straightforward gaze suggested deep wisdom. But Burroughs was always most comfortable in rural settings. Whenever he found himself in New York or Chicago, he would clutch his wallet, worried that pickpockets might spot him as an easy mark. Struggling to find steady work, Burroughs moved to Washington, D.C., in 1862, during the height of the Civil War, and clerked in the Currency Bureau of the Treasury Department. Before long he was befriended by the poet Walt Whitman, who was also living in Washington.

It’s unclear whether Whitman fell in love with Burroughs’s physical beauty or