14 WILD SPORTS IN THE SOUTH. 



of representing it in language, though the negroes have 

 a song that ends in a turkey chorus, which might be 

 written thus : Chug-u-logga, chug-u-logga, chug-u-logga- 

 chug. In the liquid negro patois it is not dissimilar. 

 Having taken the bearings of the turkey by his sound, 

 and mentally estimated his distance, I ran on ahead, dur- 

 ing a time equal to the interval between his calls, and 

 then stopped and listened. In a moment the call 

 resounded through the woods near me. I walked care- 

 fully forward, sheltering myself behind clumps of alders 

 and trunks of trees, and having gone what I thought was 

 a sufficient distance, waited and watched attentively. 

 Again the note sounded, but it seemed in the air. I cast 

 my eye upward, and there, perched on the dead and top- 

 most boughs of a tall sycamore, from whence he could 

 overlook the surrounding forest, stood my friend. His 

 erect and slender form was drawn up to its full height, 

 his little head turned quickly to the right and the left as 

 he surveyed the forest below him, lit up by the same 

 early sun that was burnishing his own glossy breast. I 

 could imagine the view he was eying, and it must have 

 been the conscious pride of a chieftain viewing his native 

 heaths and hills that drew his form to such stately pro- 

 portions. From where he sat he overlooked river and 

 lake, broad lagoon and open ocean, and hundreds of low 

 lying islands ; he saw savannahs covered with reeds and 

 osiers, and shady with tapering canes, where bred the 

 orab, and trailed the snail and centiped ; he heard the 

 pattering rain of pecan and of beech-nuts on the upland, 



