THE WILD TURKEY. 37 
excited and let your heart bump the gun out of your 
hand; nor must your eyes get so big that you see ten tur- 
keys instead of one. Keep cool, above all things; and if 
ever you get bald-headed keep your hat on, or the mos- 
quitoes and sandflies may tickle you so much that you 
will feel more like killing hem than the turkeys. Now, 
do you understand me plainly? ” 
“T think so.” 
“Then 1 have taught you the first lesson in turkey 
shooting; so we'll get inside the blind and see if you 
can’t bag the enchanted gobbler.” 
We entered accordingly, and having seated ourselves on 
\a fallen log, and loaded our guns with BBB shot, my 
cicerone indicated the various points at which he thought 
I could afford to risk firing at a bird, in case I got the 
chance. Having committed them to memory, I com- 
menced putting his advice mto practice by imagining 
that turkeys appeared on every special spot, and aimmg 
at them in the coolest manner possible. While I was 
engaged in this mental and physical exercise, the settler 
was carefully improving the blind, by inserting leaves 
and grass in the larger openings, so as to prevent the 
sharpest-eyed gobbler from detecting us, but before he 
commenced doing this I had to promise I would not 
shoot him, in my excitement, by fancying he was a turkey. 
He said that some greenhorns imagined stumps, and 
mules, and niggers were gobblers, and frequently killed 
them in their ardor to bag something, but when I said I 
would not make such a mistake, he pretended to feel safer. 
When everything was arranged to his satisfaction, he 
gave a coy yelp or two, then stopped to listen for an an- 
swer. Not receiving any, he rolled forth the seductive 
tones of the genume wild turkey with a loudness and 
distinctness that caused the forest to reverberate with 
numerous echoes, and then relapsed into silence, 
