Cage arrived at Crown Point in January 1978 with the “sense that I was not an artist, that I couldn’t draw…really…anything.” For his first print project, he found source material in the small ink drawings of natural phenomena in the poet-philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s journals. The selection (hawk feather, hazelnut, rabbit tracks, and so on), position, orientation, scale, and color of the drawings were calculated by what Cage called chance operations. Despite his initial misgivings, Cage later acknowledged that his composition had aesthetically transformed Thoreau’s empirical drawings and they “became beautiful.”