The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories Read online

  HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY

  When I was a boy my uncle and his big boys hunted with the rifle, theyoungest boy Fred and I with a shotgun--a small single-barrelled shotgunwhich was properly suited to our size and strength; it was not muchheavier 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 andI hunted feathered small game, the others hunted deer, squirrels, wildturkeys, 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 theydidn't wound or kill squirrels, they stunned them. When the dogs treeda squirrel, the squirrel would scamper aloft and run out on a limband flatten himself along it, hoping to make himself invisible inthat way--and not quite succeeding. You could see his wee little earssticking up. You couldn't see his nose, but you knew where it was. Thenthe hunter, despising a "rest" for his rifle, stood up and tookoffhand aim at the limb and sent a bullet into it immediately underthe squirrel's nose, and down tumbled the animal, unwounded, butunconscious; the dogs gave him a shake and he was dead. Sometimes whenthe distance was great and the wind not accurately allowed for, thebullet would hit the squirrel's head; the dogs could do as they pleasedwith that one--the hunter's pride was hurt, and he wouldn't allow it togo into the gamebag.

  In the first faint gray of the dawn the stately wild turkeys would bestalking around in great flocks, and ready to be sociable and answerinvitations to come and converse with other excursionists of their kind.The hunter concealed himself and imitated the turkey-call by suckingthe air through the leg-bone of a turkey which had previously answereda call like that and lived only just long enough to regret it. There isnothing that furnishes a perfect turkey-call except that bone. Anotherof Nature's treacheries, you see. She is full of them; half the time shedoesn't know which she likes best--to betray her child or protect it.In the case of the turkey she is badly mixed: she gives it a bone to beused in getting it into trouble, and she also furnishes it with a trickfor getting itself out of the trouble again. When a mamma-turkey answersan invitation and finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she doesas the mamma-partridge does--remembers a previous engagement--and goeslimping and scrambling away, pretending to be very lame; and at the sametime 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 thisshabby swindler out of the country."

  When a person is ignorant and confiding, this immoral device canhave tiresome results. I followed an ostensibly lame turkey over aconsiderable part of the United States one morning, because I believedin her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one whowas trusting her and considering her honest. I had the single-barrelledshotgun, but my idea was to catch her alive. I often got within rushingdistance of her, and then made my rush; but always, just as I made myfinal plunge and put my hand down where her back had been, it wasn'tthere; it was only two or three inches from there and I brushed thetail-feathers as I landed on my stomach--a very close call, but stillnot quite close enough; that is, not close enough for success, but justclose enough to convince me that I could do it next time. She alwayswaited for me, a little piece away, and let on to be resting and greatlyfatigued; which was a lie, but I believed it, for I still thought herhonest long after I ought to have begun to doubt her, suspecting thatthis was no way for a high-minded bird to be acting. I followed, andfollowed, and followed, making my periodical rushes, and getting up andbrushing the dust off, and resuming the voyage with patient confidence;indeed, with a confidence which grew, for I could see by the change ofclimate and vegetation that we were getting up into the high latitudes,and as she always looked a little tireder and a little more discouragedafter each rush, I judged that I was safe to win, in the end, thecompetition being purely a matter of staying power and the advantagelying with me from the start because she was lame.

  Along in the afternoon I began to feel fatigued myself. Neither of ushad had any rest since we first started on the excursion, which wasupwards of ten hours before, though latterly we had paused awhile afterrushes, I letting on to be thinking about something else; but neither ofus sincere, and both of us waiting for the other to call game but in noreal hurry about it, for indeed those little evanescent snatches of restwere very grateful to the feelings of us both; it would naturally beso, skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not a bite in themeantime; at least for me, though sometimes as she lay on her sidefanning herself with a wing and praying for strength to get out of thisdifficulty a grasshopper happened along whose time had come, and thatwas well for her, and fortunate, but I had nothing--nothing the wholeday.

  More than once, after I was very tired, I gave up taking her alive, andwas 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 stoppedand posed, when I raised the gun, and this made me suspicious thatshe knew about me and my marksmanship, and so I did not care to exposemyself to remarks.

  I did not get her, at all. When she got tired of the game at last, sherose from almost under my hand and flew aloft with the rush and whirof a shell and lit on the highest limb of a great tree and sat down andcrossed her legs and smiled down at me, and seemed gratified to see meso astonished.

  I was ashamed, and also lost; and it was while wandering the woodshunting for myself that I found a deserted log cabin and had one ofthe best meals there that in my life-days I have eaten. The weed-growngarden was full of ripe tomatoes, and I ate them ravenously, though Ihad never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since haveI tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes. I surfeitedmyself with them, and did not taste another one until I was in middlelife. I can eat them now, but I do not like the look of them. I supposewe have all experienced a surfeit at one time or another. Once, instress of circumstances, I ate part of a barrel of sardines, there beingnothing else at hand, but since then I have always been able to getalong without sardines.