At Fort Union they built a Mackinaw barge forty feet long, which they christened the "Union," and on the 16th of August they started for St. Louis, which was reached in safety on the 19th of October. There they unloaded, and "sent all things to Nicholas Berthoud's warehouse." "Reached home," said Audubon, "at 3 p. m., November 6th, 1843, and thank God, found all my family quite well." When Audubon was returning by the canal route from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, he was sought out by a young traveler, who afterwards related the following incident.[194] The naturalist, he was told, was under "a huge pile of green blankets and fur," which he had already noticed on one of the benches, and had taken for the fat pile of some western trader. Having waived his choice of a berth in Audubon's favor, he observed that "the green bale stirred a little,—half turned upon its narrow resting place, and after a while sat erect, and showed us, to our no small surprise, that a man was inside of it. A patriarchal beard fell white and wavy down his breast; a pair of hawk-like eyes glanced sharply out of a fuzzy shroud of cap and collar." When this stranger, drawn by a sense of irrepressible curiosity, had ventured near enough to recognize the "noble Roman countenance" thus obscured, he saw that it was Audubon in his wilderness dress; he was "hale and erect, with sixty winters upon his shoulders, and like one of his old eagles, feathered to the heel." Audubon's conversation, said this writer, was impulsive and fragmentary, but he showed him with pleasure some of his original drawings of animals, as well as a living collection of foxes, badgers and Rocky Mountain deer, which he was bringing home. To follow this narrator further: The confinement we were subjected to on board the canal-boat was very tiresome to his habits of freedom. We used to get ashore and walk for hours along the tow-path ahead of the boat; and I observed with astonishment that, though over sixty, he could walk us down with ease.... His physical energies seemed to be entirely unimpaired.... Another striking evidence of this he gave us. A number of us were standing grouped around him on the top of the boat, one clear sunshiny morning; we were at the time passing through a broken and very picturesque region; his keen eyes, with an abstracted, intense expression, peculiar to them, were glancing over the scenery we were gliding through, when suddenly he pointed with his finger towards the fence of a field, about two hundred yards off. "See! Yonder is a Fox Squirrel, running along the top rail. It is not often I have seen them in Pennsylvania." Now his power of vision must have been singularly acute, to have distinguished that it was a Fox Squirrel; for only one other person ... detected the creature at all.