TURKEY SHOOTING 433 



us, judging by the sound. Somebody said turkeys. 

 The rest of us agreed. By common consent we jumped 

 up and went to a pair of bars where an old woods road 

 came out into the orchard, and stood looking in the 

 direction of the sound. 



"All at once out into the open, over the little valley, 

 away up above the trees, sailed a turkey. At first it 

 looked as if it were coming toward us, but almost in- 

 stantly we saw that it had turned down the valley and 

 was flying directly away from us, along the hillside. 

 Our eyes followed it as it kept on its way for about a 

 quarter of a mile, when suddenly up went its head 

 and down it came, 'deader'n a mackerel/ 



" 'He got it, after all/ said some one. 'He did/ said 

 Bill. 'Did you ever see anything like it ?' said Jake. 



"Then we returned to our lunch, and talked over the 

 wonderful thing we had seen. 



"Bill was quiet for a while. Presently he broke 

 the silence with, 'Say, do you suppose that fellow who 

 shot at that turkey saw it fall ? Do you think he had 

 any idea that he hit it?' That was quite a new idea 

 to us, and we caught at it at once. It would be easy 

 to follow the road in the woods and find out whether 

 the man with the gun had turned off to the right or 

 left anywhere. His tracks in the snow would tell us. 

 We had marked where the turkey fell, right alongside 

 of a monster pine which had been left when its breth- 

 ren were taken by the lumbermen. Some three hundred 

 yards along the road we saw where a man had come 

 down into the road, and saw, also, that his tracks, as : 



