18 THE HIVE OF THE BEE-HUNTER. 
Of all turkey-hunters, our friend W 
experienced ; he is a bachelor, lives upon his own planta- 
is the most 

tion, studies, philosophizes, makes fishing tackle, and 
kills turkeys. With him, it is a science reduced to cer- 
tainty. Place him in the woods where turkeys frequent, 
and he is as certain of them as if already in his pos- 
Session. 
He understands the habits of the bird so well, that 
he will, on his first essay, on a new hunting-ground, give 
the exact character of the hunters the turkeys have been 
accustomed to deal with. The most crafty turkeys are 
those which W 
inhabiting uncultivatable land, and always in more or 

seeks, hemmed in by plantations, 
less danger of pursuit and discovery, they become, under 
such circumstances, wild beyond any game whatever. 
They seem incapable of being deceived, and taking 
every thing strange, as possessed to them of danger— 
whether it be a moth out of season—or a veteran hunt- 
er—they appear to common, or even uncommon ob- 
servers, annihilated from the country, were it not for 
their footprints occasionally to be seen in the soft soil 
beside the running stream, or in the light dust in the 
beaten road. 
A veteran gobbler, used to all the tricks of the 
hunter’s art—one who has had his wattles cut with 
shot; against whose well-defended breast had struck the 
spent ball of the rifle—one who, though almost starved, 
would walk by the treasures of grain in the “ trap” and 
