9 6 Wild Turkey. 



plains country may be worth reading. The following 

 is an extract from a letter written to me by my brother, 

 in December, 1875, while he was in Texas, containing an 

 account of some of his turkey-hunting experience in that 

 State. The portion relating how the birds are coursed 

 with greyhounds is especially markworthy ; it reminds 

 one of the method of killing the great bustard with gaze- 

 hounds, as described in English sporting books of two 

 centuries back. 



" Here, some hundred miles south and west of Fort 

 McKavett, are the largest turkey roosts in the world. 

 This beautiful fertile valley, through which the deep, 

 silent stream of the Llano flows, is densely wooded 

 with grand old pecan trees along its banks ; as are 

 those of its minor tributaries which come boiling down 

 from off the immense upland water-shed of the staked 

 plains, cutting the sides of the ' divide ' into narrow 

 canyons. The journey to this sportsman's paradise was 

 over the long-rolling plains of Western Texas. Hour 

 after hour through the day's travel we would drop 

 into the trough of some great plains-wave only to toil 

 on up to the crest of the next, and be met by an endless 

 vista of boundless, billowy-looking prairie. We were fol- 

 lowing the old Fort Terret trail, its ruts cut so deep 

 in the prairie soil by the heavy supply wagons that these 

 ten years have not healed the scars in the earth's face. 

 At last, after journeying for leagues through the stunted 

 live oaks, we saw from the top of one of the larger divides 

 a dark bluish line against the horizon, the color of 

 distant leafless trees, and knew that it meant we should 



