Hunting The Deceitful Turkey

Hunting the Deceitful Turkey
Mark Twain
When I was a boy my uncle and his big boys hunted with the rifle, the youngest boy Fred and I
with a shotgun—a small single-barrelled shotgun which was properly suited to our size and
strength; it was not much heavier than a broom. We carried it turn about, half an hour at a time.
I was not able to hit anything with it, but I liked to try. Fred and I hunted feathered small game,
the others hunted deer, squirrels, wild turkeys, and such things. My uncle and the big boys were
good shots. They killed hawks and wild geese and such like on the wing; and they didn’t wound
or kill squirrels, they stunned them. When the dogs treed a squirrel, the squirrel would scamper
aloft and run out on a limb and flatten himself along it, hoping to make himself invisible in that
way— and not quite succeeding. You could see his wee little ears sticking up. You couldn’t see
his nose, but you knew where it was. Then the hunter, despising a “rest” for his rifle, stood up
and took offhand aim at the limb and sent a bullet into it immediately under the squirrel’s nose,
and down tumbled the animal, unwounded, but unconscious; the dogs gave him a shake and he
was dead. Sometimes when the distance was great and the wind not accurately allowed for, the
bullet would hit the squirrel’s head; the dogs could do as they pleased with that one—the
hunter’s pride was hurt, and he wouldn’t allow it to go into the gamebag.
In the first faint gray of the dawn the stately wild turkeys would be stalking around in great
flocks, and ready to be sociable and answer invitations to come and converse with other
excursionists of their kind. The hunter concealed himself and imitated the turkey-call by
sucking the air through the leg-bone of a turkey which had previously answered a call like that
and lived only just long enough to regret it. There is nothing that furnishes a perfect turkey-call
except that bone. Another of Nature’s treacheries, you see. She is full of them; half the time she
doesn’t know which she likes best—to betray her chid or protect it. In the case of the turkey she
is badly mixed: she gives it a bone to be used in getting it into trouble, and she also furnishes it
with a trick for getting itself out of the trouble again. When a mamma-turkey answers an
invitation and finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she does as the mamma-partridge
does—remembers a previous engagement—and goes limping and scrambling away, pretending
to be very lame; and at the same time she is saying to her not-visible children, “Lie low, keep
still, don’t expose yourselves; I shall be back as soon as I have beguiled this shabby swindler out
of the country.”
When a person is ignorant and confiding, this immoral device can have tiresome results. I
followed an ostensibly lame turkey over a considerable part of the United States one morning,
because I believed in her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who was
trusting her and considering her honest. I had the single-barrelled shotgun, but my idea was to
catch her alive. I often got within rushing distance of her, and then made my rush; but always,
just as I made my final plunge and put my hand down where her back had been, it wasn’t there;
it was only two or three inches from there and I brushed the tail-feathers as I landed on my
stomach—a very close call, but still not quite close enough; that is, not close enough for success,
but just close enough to convince me that I could do it next time. She always waited for me, a
little piece away, and let on to be resting and greatly fatigued; which was a lie, but I believed it,
for I still thought her honest long after I ought to have begun to doubt her, suspecting that this
was no way for a high-minded bird to be acting. I followed, and followed, and followed, making
my periodical rushes, and getting up and brushing the dust off, and resuming the voyage with
patient confidence; indeed, with a confidence which grew, for I could see by the change of
climate and vegetation that we were getting up into the high latitudes, and as she always looked
a little tireder and a little more discouraged after each rush, I judged that I was safe to win, in
the end, the competition being purely a matter of staying power and the advantage lying with
me from the start because she was lame.
Along in the afternoon I began to feel fatigued myself. Neither of us had had any rest since
we first started on the excursion, which was upwards of ten hours before, though latterly we
had paused awhile after rushes, I letting on to be thinking about something else; but neither
of us sincere, and both of us waiting for the other to call game but in no real hurry about it,
for indeed those little evanescent snatches of rest were very grateful to the feelings of us
both; it would naturally be so, skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not a bite in
the meantime; at least for me, though sometimes as she lay on her side fanning herself with
a wing and praying for strength to get out of this difficulty a grasshopper happened along
whose time had come, and that was well for her, and fortunate, but I had nothing—nothing
the whole day.
More than once, after I was very tired, I gave up taking her alive, and was going to shoot
her, but I never did it, although it was my right, for I did not believe I could hit her; and
besides, she always stopped and posed, when I raised the gun, and this made me suspicious
that she knew about me and my marksmanship, and so I did not care to expose myself to
remarks.
I did not get her, at all. When she got tired of the game at last, she rose from almost under
my hand and flew aloft with the rush and whir of a shell and lit on the highest limb of a
great tree and sat down and crossed her legs and smiled down at me, and seemed gratified
to see me so astonished.
I was ashamed, and also lost; and it was while wandering the woods hunting for myself that
I found a deserted log cabin and had one of the best meals there that in my life-days I have
eaten. The weed-grown garden was full of ripe tomatoes, and I ate them ravenously, though
I had never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since have I tasted
anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes. I surfeited myself with them, and did not
taste another one until I was in middle life. I can eat them now, but I do not like the look of
them. I suppose we have all experienced a surfeit at one time or another. Once, in stress of
circumstances, I ate part of a barrel of sardines, there being nothing else at hand, but since
then I have always been able to get along without sardines.
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