This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate de Malle.

This specimen was approximately 1.8 meters tall, weighing roughly 72 kilos.

Here was thick and brown in color at the time of observation, July 1817, in a field of

marsh grass located north northeast of Louisville, Kentucky.

This specimen demonstrated keen eyesight, and the capacity to move swiftly while maintaining

a quiet, stealthy bearing, so as best to track its prey.

Its vocalizations, while infrequent in this environment, as again, stealth was a vital

component in its hunting strategy, was notable for its varied tone, pitch, and volume,

and for its French accent, which was known to make the lady swim.

So it was when the specimen, born Jean-Jacques-Adubon, on a plantation owned by his parents in Haiti

in 1791, met Miss Lucy Bakewell at her parents' estate in Pennsylvania.

He was 18, a year her senior, and had emigrated to the states the year before, when he changed

his name to the more American sounding, Jean-James-Adubon.

In Lucy Bakewell had never met anyone like him before, with his long, flowing hair, with

the accent.

In this fire, this thing in his eyes, she certainly hadn't seen that thing in the men and

their own family, not in her stern, protrusion father, the English gentleman who preached

the virtues of discipline, of a quiet home and quiet daughters, who once caught Lucy

and her sisters weeping over the plight of doom lovers in a romance novel, and then

tossed it in the fire.

This young visitor, this peculiar boy, with the hair and the eyes in the Frenchman's

...