THE WILD TUKKEY. 37 



excited and let your heart bump the gun out of your 

 hand; nor must your eyes get so big that you see ten tur- 

 keys instead of one. Keep cool, above all things; and if 

 ever you get bald-headed keep your hat on, or the mos- 

 quitoes and sandflies may tickle you so much that you 

 will feel more like killing them than the turkeys. Now, 

 do you understand me plainly? " 



"I think so." 



"Then 1 have taught you the first lesson in turkey 

 shooting; so we'll get inside the blind and see if you 

 can't bag the enchanted gobbler." 



We entered accordingly, and having seated ourselves on 

 a fallen log, and loaded our guns with BBB shot, my 

 cicerone indicated the various points at which he thought 

 I could afford to risk firing at a bird, in case I got the 

 chance. Having committed them to memory, I com- 

 menced putting his advice into practice by imagining 

 that turkeys appeared on every special spot, and aiming 

 at them in the coolest manner possible. While I was 

 engaged in this mental and physical exercise, the settler 

 was carefully improving the blind, by inserting leaves 

 and grass in the larger openings, so as to prevent the 

 sharpest-eyed gobbler from detecting us, but before he 

 commenced doing this I had to promise I would not 

 shoot him, in my excitement, by fancying he was a turkey. 

 He said that some greenhorns imagined stumps, and 

 mules, and niggers were gobblers, and frequently killed 

 them in their ardor to bag something, but when I said I 

 would not make such a mistake, he pretended to feel safer. 



When everything was arranged to his satisfaction, he 

 gave a coy yelp or two, then stopped to listen for an an- 

 swer. Not receiving any, he rolled forth t]ie seductive 

 tones of the genuine wild turkey with a loudness and 

 distinctness that caused the forest to reverberate witlj 

 numerous echoes, and then relapsed into silence, 



