This new venture promised to be both hazardous and uncertain, and as Mrs. Audubon and Rozier were not on the friendliest terms, Audubon decided to leave his family at Henderson, where a home for his wife and infant son could always be had under the hospitable roof of Dr. Adam Rankin, who became one of the naturalist's staunchest friends. If their stock in trade at this time actually consisted of "three hundred barrels of whisky, sundry dry-goods and powder," as Audubon affirmed, the keel boat which they then engaged was certainly calculated to bear a goodly load.[207] At all events the partners, with young Pope, their clerk, set out bravely, in a snow storm, in December, 1810. They floated with the current at a rate of about five miles an hour, while they helped their craft along by means of four oars in her bow and steered it with the aid of a slender tree trunk, "shaped at its outer extremity like the fin of a dolphin." This journey of upwards of 165 miles lasted altogether more than nine weeks. It proved adventurous enough, but it was of no use to Audubon except in furnishing him with drawings of new birds and the raw materials for many "Episodes." The journal of his experiences on the great rivers during that eventful winter of 1810 and 1811 is interesting for the sidelights which it throws both upon his character and upon the state of the country at an elder day. Held up by the ice for several weeks at Cash Creek, near the mouth of the Ohio, to his own delight but to Rozier's sorrow, Audubon tramped the country and hunted wild swans and larger game with the friendly Shawnee Indians. "When one day's sport was over," he said, "we counted more than fifty of these beautiful birds whose skins were intended for the ladies of Europe. There were plenty of geese and ducks, but no one condescended to give them a shot." This was Audubon in 1810, when such "sport" was regarded as legitimate enough, and the feather-hunting of such Indians was not considered the nefarious trade that it proved to be. If we shift the scene to twenty years later, when William MacGillivray needed thousands of specimens of American birds for his studies upon their anatomy and variability, we find Audubon supplying him liberally, but he could not then bear to see them killed wantonly or for mere sport; more than once, out of compassion for individual birds that he chanced to be studying, whether in Florida or in Labrador, he would not permit them to be shot even when needed for his collections.