SMALL COUNTRY NEIGHBORS 415 



their bigger brothers. At dawn we listened to the lusty 

 hammering of the big logcocks, or to the curious cough- 

 ing or croaking sound of a hawk before it left its roost. 

 Now and then loose flocks of small birds straggled past 

 us as we sat in the blind, or rested to eat our lunch; 

 chickadees, tufted tits, golden-crested kinglets, creepers, 

 cardinals, various sparrows and small woodpeckers. 

 Once we saw a shrike pounce on a field mouse by a 

 haystack ; once we came on a ruffed grouse sitting motion- 

 less in the road. 



The last day I had with me Jim Bishop, a man who 

 had hunted turkeys by profession, a hard-working farmer, 

 whose ancestors have for generations been farmers and 

 woodmen ; an excellent hunter, tireless, resourceful, with 

 an eye that nothing escaped ; just the kind of a man one 

 likes to regard as typical of what is best in American life. 

 Until this day, and indeed until the very end of this day, 

 chance did not favor us. We tried to get up to the turkeys 

 on the roost before daybreak; but they roosted in pines 

 and, night though it was, they were evidently on the look- 

 out, for they always saw us long before we could make 

 them out, and then we could hear them fly out of the tree- 

 tops. Turkeys are quite as wary as deer, and we never 

 got a sight of them while we were walking through the 

 woods; but two or three times we flushed gangs, and my 

 companion then at once built a little blind of pine boughs 

 in which we sat while he tried to call the scattered birds 

 up to us by imitating, with marvellous fidelity, their 

 yelping. Twice a turkey started toward us, but on each 

 occasion the old hen began calling some distance off and 



