414 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[March 18, 1911. 
hour of daylight, so we went out to try to 
"roost” some turkeys. Whether his habits are 
the same elsewhere I do not know, but in the 
Mississippi swamps the wild turkey nearly al¬ 
ways roosts over water or in the tall cypress 
trees along the margin of a lake or bayou. 
As the surrounding country was very dry at 
the time, the chance that any turkeys ranging 
in that immediate section would roost some¬ 
where along the bayou on which we were 
camped was sufficiently strong to justify some 
hope of at least locating them that evening. 
One of us went up and the other down the bayou. 
When less than half a mile from camp I had 
the pleasure—and disappointment—of seeing a 
flock of four or six turkeys take wing when fully 
300 yards away, and fly in a course somewhat 
dpwn the bayou. Continuing cautiously along 
the bank, I saw a large bird perched on a limb 
a little beyond where the turkeys had go'tten up. 
lie did not look quite natural for a turkey, yet 
circumstantial evidence was against him. \\ atch- 
ing him closely for some minutes, I “took a 
tree” on him, and, after some patient manipula¬ 
tion, had a nearer view. He still looked a little 
like a turkey, and yet he did not. Thereupon 
followed this mental discussion of the situation: 
“No turkey has fallen to this trusty rifle for 
four long years. That may be a turkey. It is 
a good shot if he is. He looks a little like a 
turkey. Yet he does not look altogether like 
a turkey. He looks a little like a buzzard. Is 
it more honorable to lose a turkey or to kill a 
buzzard? Washburn would hear the shot. What 
then? Either lie and carry a conscience with 
too much ballast during the rest of the hunt, 
or do the Geo. W. act and go through life the 
one held in derision by all true woodsmen. 
The gun was reluctantly lowered, the hunter 
tried to creep nearer for a better view and the 
buzzard flew aw r ay. 
A quarter of a mile further down the bayou 
I heard a stick crack in the bushes on the oppo¬ 
site bank, and stopped by a large oak tree to 
listen and wait. The walking and scratching 
in the leaves sounded like turkeys, but the stick 
had sounded too large to be broken by a turkey. 
After a wait of probably twenty minutes, the 
noise in the leaves still continuing, the reward 
came. With more or less vocal sounds and stir¬ 
ring of leaves, an able-bodied turkey rose from 
the ground and flew to one of the larger limbs 
of a cypress tree fifty yards away. I was partly 
behind the oak tree from him, and slowly leaned 
and sidled until entirely out of sight. Safely 
concealed, there was then plenty of time to get 
ready. First, the right glove came off, and next 
the hat. The other glove might be a handicap, 
and it came off, too. Next I tried the sight 
against the sky, and it became evident that a 
bead would be hard to draw in the failing light. 
However, it would not get any lighter, and I 
leaned out from ambush far enough to see the 
turkey, but could not decide where it was turkey 
and where it was cypress limb, so dim had the 
daylight become. While trying to solve this 
difficulty I heard other wings and four more 
turkeys flew up, one alighting on a smaller limb 
in a nearer tree. Trying several times to draw 
a bead on him far enough aft not to spoil the 
breast, I had to give it up, and drawing down 
until the sight blurred, Mrs. Washburn had a 
large hen for Christmas dinner, and the breast 
was not spoiled, either. 
When Washburn came into camp I asked him 
to hand me something from the log at the back 
of the tent, and his eye fell on the turkey. “Well, 
I'll be -!” said he. 
Washburn can cook three things at once with¬ 
out burning them up and without any profanity, 
so he was cheerfully elected chief cook, while 
I undertook to boil the coffee, keep up a supply 
of water and wash dishes. Thus the evening 
passed pleasantly. 
Next morning the first dawn found us where 
the turkeys were expected to fly down, but the 
yelper would not bring them. Not knowing the 
range, we had gotten on the wrong side of a 
heavy canebrake, and the turkeys had gone down 
on the other side of it. He made a detour of 
half a mile one way, and I went through the 
cane at a point lower down the bayou and 
flushed the turkeys, again fully 300 yards away. 
Working through underbrush and cane in the 
direction they had flown, I found several fairly 
well marked deer trails and a few fresh tracks. 
It would be an accident if the turkeys were 
found again, but with a slight chance for a deer 
I worked along carefully, stopping frequently to 
look and listen. About 9 o’clock, having stood 
for perhaps five minutes in one place, I heard 
what was unmistakably a deer walking. There 
was a good deal of underbrush, but a fairly open 
place of seventy yards diameter just ahead of 
me, and there was barely time to drop to one 
knee when the deer walked into this opening. 
It evidently saw something suspicious, for it 
stopped and turned quartering toward me, about 
when I was on the point of stopping it by bleat¬ 
ing or whistling. The head had not been clearly 
seen and I thought it was a doe and questioned 
whether to let it pass and hope for a buck to 
follow, but quickly decided on securing what was 
in sight, if possible. At the shot it turned and 
ran in a labored way, but with its tail slanting 
high up. A hundred yards away it was lost to 
view, and was supposed to have crouched and 
sneaked off. Waiting motionless for about ten 
minutes I then crept cautiously toward the place 
where he had disappeared, and found a dead 
buck with a fairly good head. 
The soft-nosed .30-30 bullet had entered at the 
point of one shoulder, torn a large hole through 
the heart and stopped under the skin about the 
middle of the opposite side. 
While I skinned and cut up the deer, Wash¬ 
burn brought a wagon from the mill and we 
sent the meat to town. 
Next day, after a fruitless effort for more 
turkeys, we broke camp at noon and carried the 
packs to the mill, where we were disappointed 
to find that the wagon we had counted on had 
gone an hour before, and as the miil had shut 
down for Christmas, no other wagon would go 
in for a week. The road was muddy and slip¬ 
pery from a rain the night before, but we man¬ 
aged to make the six miles from the mill to 
town in about three hours, frequently resting and 
changing packs. 
The following week, on an invitation from a 
friend to occupy his houseboat on Old River, 
the doctor and I with a refilled knapsack, drove 
twelve miles one afternoon and had plenty of 
time to cook supper and clean up, and then an 
hour to spare before bed time. This was some¬ 
thing of a “gentleman’s” outing. J. has a gaso¬ 
lene launch on Old River, and a boathouse built 
on thirty-six oil barrels, for its housing. In 
one end of the boathouse is a room about 16 
by 16, with cots and bedding, a small cook stove, 
plenty of utensils, dishes and enough groceries 
to run a hotel. The launch was not working, 
but there were several canoes and rowboats of 
which we could have our pick. 
Turkeys had been seen about two miles down 
the lake or Old River that evening, and we went 
to the spot early next morning. There was 
plenty of sign, and I got one or two indifferent 
yelps, but saw no turkeys until, about 11 o’clock, 
Doctor not having returned to the appointed 
place, I had started out to try to find him, and 
was entirely off guard when a turkey flushed 
and flew across a body of water. 
The reason that the Doctor did not get back 
to the meeting place is worth relating. The 
sketch shows the situation. Neither of us knew 
the ground well. He took the course shown by 
the dash line, thinking, until he came in sight 
of the boathouse, that he was returning along 
Dustin Pond, as the dotted line runs. 
At 12130 I got in the canoe and returned to 
the boathouse, expecting to get all the negroes 
on J.’s plantation, if necessary, to find Doctor, 
We had never hunted together and I did not 
know whether he was a woodsman or not. The 
day was cloudy and he had no compass. Round¬ 
ing the bend just west of the boathouse, I heard 
signal guns and agonizing shouts from the woods 
opposite, and soon rescued the Doctor from the 
end of the dash line, where he was marooned. 
As we touched the boathouse and I stepped 
forward in the canoe, something happened—just 
how, no one will ever know. I felt myself fall¬ 
ing backward over the gunwale, and in a flash, 
realized that to try to save myself meant to turn 
over the entire craft with the Doctor and two 
good guns in fifteen or twenty feet of water. 
I gave a slight “boost” with both feet and made 
a backward plunge well clear of the boat. In 
perhaps two seconds I was “righted up” and 
the Doctor says my head came up through the 
same hole that it made going in. The water was 
icy cold, but time must be taken to go hand 
over hand along the gunwale of the canoe and 
pull up by the boathouse, as it again meant a 
capsize if I tried to climb into the canoe. An 
abject being got inside and “shucked off.” 
In the afternoon we went to where my turkey 
of the forenoon was last seen and waited de- 
