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HAT we ought to have chosen the wild turkey, instead of the much-overrated and ill-natured eagle, to be the Bird of Freedom, no one who has studied the ways of winged things will doubt for a moment. Perhaps it were an invidious task, now that he has received the laurels, to show up the fortunate candidate in his true feathers, to prove that not only is he destitute of distinctive American characteristics, either as to race or habitat, but also of the least spark of originality — vide Cæsar's standards — and that he is a professional pickpocket, a bully, and untidy in his personal habits.

   The wild turkey, on the other hand, is an American to the backbone, notwithstanding the unspeakable impudence which has saddled him with a foreign name; he is no more a "turkey" than an Indian is an Indian; and if he is found elsewhere than in America, it is only as a colonist from the New World. He is one of the noblest of bird kind — a stately, graceful, powerful creature, swift as an arrow, with almost miraculous senses of sight, of hearing, and — so the hunters declare — of scent. Resplendent in black and red and purple and bronze, he stalks with his more modestly attired hens through the delectable mountains of the Virginias and the Carolinas, minding his own business in true American style, drinking from the purest springs of the hills, and feeding on the acorns and chestnuts and chinaberries to be found in the most inaccessible plateaus and deepest ravines. He might deserve some credit, too, in a contest with the eagle, for having ministered with his plump and toothsome breast to the dire wants of our very first American forebears, as the journals of Captain John Smith, William Byrd, and their contemporaries will attest. Not to dwell too long on his comparative virtues as a national emblem, might we not suggest, finally, that if he had received his due, it had not come to pass that the hoary impostor, "Old Abe," made game of fifty millions of people, and their years of confidence, by calmly laying an egg?

   It is not, however, as a disappointed but deserving figure-head that his closest acquaintances value this royal prototype of our Thanksgiving fowl. Compared with the times of which the Virginian, William Byrd, writes, there are few wild turkeys left in America; like the moose, they are entirely alien to civilized conditions. Sadly and silently they wing their way back to the yet untrammelled peaks, where for another season or two they may be beyond the sound of railroads and summer resorts. But here and there in the most beautiful and secluded glades and crags of the Alleghany and Blue Ridge mountains, in the Florida wilds, and on the plains of the far Southwest, there are shy flocks still fattening on the mast, to give a glorious chase to those who have much patience, tireless muscles, and "an unmarketable enthusiasm." It is easier to bring to the ground the fleet and timid Virginia deer than to bag a wild turkey by means which the codes of sportsmen call legitimate. Not only has he a pair of powerful wings which can bear his twenty pounds of weight to any point of safety in a few seconds; he also enjoys the luxury of legs to a degree that is fairly a revelation to one who for the first time sees him make a hundred-yard dash into the brush while one may yet be half a mile distant. A deer or bear or fox, which has not been startled, will come within all but arm's-length of the "still-hunter" who stands perfectly motionless among the dull tints of the forest, but a turkey always takes the benefit of the doubt to himself, and hustles up to the highest peak of the range at the first glimpse of such a queer-looking stump.

   The mountaineers esteem him the most cunning creature that inhabits the woods. They tell marvellous stories of his shyness and sagacity. And yet that he has his own pet little way of being silly as any goose is shown by one of their methods of circumventing him. When the native hunters find a lonely ridge where a "gang" uses, they sometimes build a great pen of logs, dig a commodious entrance under the bottom timber, and lead long "trails" of sparsely scattered corn from various points on the mountain through this aperture and into the trap. If all goes well, some hungry, frosty morning the turkeys "feed up" on the trail into the pen, and simply remain cooped up there because their foolish heads insist on trying to find a way out through the upper chinks of the logs, instead of through the low doorway standing there ready for them! Only less unsportsmanlike and destructive is the very common native trick of laying thin trails leading to a "blind." When the birds have finally been lured into the habit of feeding up to the ambush, it is manned by a mountaineer with the most capacious shot-gun in the neighborhood, to kill and maim the best part of the "gang." When the fall has brought but little mast, and the last chestnuts have been scratched from beneath the leaves, the pot-hunters may in this way bring to the city market the last of the rare birds from a whole region.

   But to fairly stalk and outwit this feathered monarch of the forests is the most thrilling, as it is the most difficult, achievement of the man who loves the open air, the trees, and a gun. You will shoulder a rifle, if you are ambitious — but if you are wise it will be a shot-gun, and if you are in addition iron as to your muscles, it will be a big 12 pound 10 bore — and sally forth in the numbing air which the mountain breathes a good hour before the break of an autumn dawn. For by sunrise you want to be far away from the nearest cabin, in the heart of the huge peaks that dimly loom up to the stars. If you do not know the thousand ravines and ridges in them by long acquaintance, stop after a mile of plunging stride, and call out to a little shanty of mud and logs for Jim, the guide, who knows the woods and nothing else. He appears with his five feet of old mountain rifle — sure up to a hundred yards, with a trigger that a puff of wind will pull; six words dispose of your destination, the hunting qualities of the weather, and the amenities of the day; and on you tramp, through pines and oak and hickory and chestnut, over the mountain "road," which is getting more and more difficult to distinguish.

   Now there is no more semblance of a path, and after a swift walk of six miles you are before the first dark high wall of a great ridge that is to be the day's hunting-ground. For another half-hour you skirt along its base until a possible angle of ascent is reached — the path that the deer take before the hounds — and then comes a long hard climb with two legs and as many arms as can be spared from the gun.

   The keen chill of the morning has disappeared, the blood is rushing through your veins, and your heart is beating like a trip-hammer when the steepest part is below and you stop to catch breath before getting down to business. The prodigious fan of roseate flush that was in the east has now faded into a whiter light, and the sun is about to shove its molten blade above a range of the distant Blue Ridge. The frost lies heavily on the leaves and hushes your careful footsteps. A cartridge of buckshot goes into your left-hand barrel, a heavy load of No. 1 into your right, and you step ahead of Jim, with your "wing-shooter," as he calls it, resting in the hollow of your left arm.

   Now there is no more steadying of one's self with rustling sapling, nor quick nervous efforts to make headway; you shun a telltale bunch of dead leaves as if it held the plague; every footstep is half-consciously considered, that it may not fall on a dried twig, and that it may be muffled in any friendly bank of moss or sodden wooden punk, where perhaps a peckish bear has torn a decayed stump into bits, with an eye to grubs. The foot settles softly in its fall, the weight to be shifted easily from heel to toe if a concealed stick gives the alarm, and leaves the track as quietly. But these precautions must be felt, for the eye is roving restlessly ahead and to either side, taking note of every leaf that falls, suspecting every half-hidden remnant of last year's fire, as far as it can penetrate over the brown leaves and through the brownish-red flags and green laurel bushes. A half-mile of this requires that part of an hour; but you feel yourself in the secret of the mountains; you are a part of the forest, and what the most favored of its furry and feathered citizens see and know, you may also see and know. The crest of a short ridge commands a vast upward sweep of chestnut and oak; you halt, and your silent rear-guard halts, and both, speechless and motionless, hearken. The sweet sharp air tingles against your skin, and deep draughts of it go to your head like sparkling wine. Your nerves and muscles are alert, are strung to the last degree; but they are your servants. You are tilled with an exultant confidence that anything may happen, even the best thing, and all things seem to be good.

   Off to one side a bushy-tailed gray squirrel rasps out his morning bark, then scampers wildly after his mate down the hickory, over the leaves, and in a few moments is leaping along the log upon which rests your gunstock. Five yards away he stops, is electrified with an unknown terror, his bright eyes bulge out towards the two intruders, and back he flies to the high tree, from which a defiant note comes, a few moments later, to say that he is laughing off his own fear. A sudden rhythmic flash of red and white and black draws your eye to a great cock-of-the-woods making his undulating flight from the adjacent mountain range to light on the tall dead oak above you. From its top sounds presently his tremendous tattoo, echoing strangely from the big hills and across the wide deep valleys into the quiet of the morning.

   In the shadow of the huge bowlders there, where crystal springs start up through the moss on their way to the river, whose gracile curves shine out like a silver ribbon miles away and below, a fussy busybody of a wren hops from stone to stone — a queer little housekeeper to be up here in the greatness and the solitude of the mountains. The diminutive brown butterball, her jaunty tail stuck in the body at an absurd angle, flutters over to you presently and makes a jerky tour of the dogwood you are leaning against, without a sign of fear, and even perches on the rim of your shooting-cap. But no telltale rustling of strong legs and feet greets your expectant ears, and presently the march is continued in single file as before. Now you have left the dividing "backbone," and climb up and down a never-ending succession of ridges and "drafts," as the ravines are called. The up grades are taken slowly and deliberately, and just before the top of each local ridge is attained you pause until your heart is quiet enough for a shot, and then tip noiselessly to the summit, where there is another halt, and a searching reconnoitre of the next long draft opened to view.

   Soon your eye catches a spot of bare earth where the leaves have been scratched and thrown about. They are turkey "signs," but you see that the frost has been on them; if you refer to Jim, he will tell you that it is the frost of one night only. Thicker and thicker are the signs; whole acres of the forest carpet under this luxuriant ceiling of oaks and hickories and chestnuts have been scratched up. More and more wary you become as the summits of the ridges are attained; and as for Jim, there is no sound to tell you that he follows within a few feet. He gives a short, insectlike hiss, and turning, you see him regarding a "sign" that bears no trace of frost. Here is another, and still another. Every few yards now you pause and listen. Suddenly a faint though distinct rustle transforms you into a statue. It comes nearer. You cock your gun without making the click, and are all eyes and ears and nerves. On patter the footsteps, far too regular for a squirrel, and scarcely like a feeding turkey. Ah! by moving your eyes in their sockets, without any motion of the head, you see emerging from the laurel growth on one side a villain of a gray fox, sneaking home after a night of marauding in the settlement. On he comes, in a swift, graceful trot, within gunshot, within half gunshot, within — but he has seen Jim's rifle raised, and then your gun, to cover him; the sly old fellow makes a frightened leap, and increases his pace until he seems simply to have faded away, while your gun speaks not for fear of frightening the turkeys.

   But it is a mistake not to have bagged him, for he startles the alert birds anyhow, and you arrive on the scene of their late déjeuner only to conclude that they have gone up to the top of the mountain. It is one of their peculiarities that they always run or fly up the mountain, no matter what the obstacles, when they are leaving dangerous ground. The very highest peak of the range is what they want at these times, and they generally get it.

   So you trudge along, headed for the high ground, marking now and then a rabbit that squats in his form beneath a stump, peering into rocky caverns for a possible bear, or starting a stupid old owl from her "ancient, solitary reign" in some recondite crevice.

   You have traversed along "backbone," and stand listening and somewhat wearied near the edge of a steep ravine, hundreds of feet deep, across which appears the broad breast of another mountain. Far down below you can hear the tinkling of a stream. For many minutes you scan the opposite ridge, examining every detail of its beetling gra rocks, its open woods, and the laurel bushes here and there. Your eyes, almost simultaneously with Jim's, become fixed. Something is in motion; now the trees hide it; now, as your gaze becomes better accustomed to the difficult task, you can almost distinguish dark forms slowly moving about and scratching in the leaves. They are only five hundred yards away in a bee-line, but to go down into the ravine and up the other side is twice this distance, and it cannot be done without the certainty of frightening the wary fellows. Indeed, ten steps more would probably cause their instant and mysterious disappearance for the day. After a softly breathed council of war you turn back in your tracks until entirely out of sight, make the best time possible down the side of the mountain, and then struggle up their ridge, above thorn and far in the rear — a détour of miles.

   But now you are on the backbone of their ridge, and are creeping along at a snail's pace, hoping to turn the brow of the mountain above them softly enough to get, at any rate, a wing shot. Presently you can hear them, faintly, a few hundred feet away, tearing up the ground for acorns, with a sound which can be duplicated by grasping again and again with distended fingers into a matting of leaves. You stop with the devout hope that they may be feeding toward you; but it does not seem so, and on you creep, studying every step. Now they must be almost within gunshot, though they cannot be seen. A few yards more gained, and the rustlings detonate through your excited brain as if they were cannon-shots. The crack of a single twig now would send the turkeys for miles without giving you a glimpse, for the rascals take care to dart behind the brush before they fly. If they would only show themselves you could rake them with the buckshot, for it can scarcely be more than forty yards. Yet a little nearer you work your way; you suspect a movement in the low laurel bushes; but a vigilant gobbler has found that something is out of joint, the rustling ceases, and the air is suddenly beaten by mighty wings to get the start that the turkey needs for flight. One unlucky hen shows herself as she sails straight away, and both barrels go after her in a long shot, while there are harrowing, far-away, and unprofitable glimpses of great black gobblers shooting over to the opposite mountain. But to your great joy the hen tumbles, badly winged, into the ravine a thousand feet away; and after a diligent hunt you "kick her up," out of a bunch of thick laurel, for the coup de grace, and have a little revival meeting with Jim over her plumpness and spread of wing.

   Jim has hopes of doing some work by "yelping" on the back track, so after a bite of apple-butter sandwich and a pull at the icy chalybeate water of the stream, he produces from his vest pocket the small bone of a turkey's pinion, carefully hollowed and cleaned. This is to be used in case they have scattered, for then they call to each other towards sundown, and get together for the night.

   Back over the ridges you toil during the afternoon, being encouraged by the "jumping" of a buck deer, though he offers but little chance for Jim's bullet speeding after him. When the sun gets low you listen anxiously for the turkey's call, and finally there is a far-away "ky-ouck ky-ouck ky-ouck ky-ouck, ky-ouck ky-ouck ky-ouck" — the first four notes mildly, interrogatively, almost plaintively crescendo, while the three concluding ones are sharp and impatient and loud. You dispose yourself behind the "antique roots" of a great oak; Jim covers the unmouthed end of his yelper with both hands, and with a peculiar sucking action on that instrument gives the same call with mystifying fidelity. A long pause comes before the answer. Again Jim yelps, and the call shows that the wanderer is coming up the mountain! The next few minutes are quite as thrilling as any buck-fever experience. Now the old gobbler seems to be coming into the snare; now he is coy, and backs off a little. Jim yelps more softly as he approaches, to hurry him up; but he is not to be hurried. Your heart stands still at every answering call, and your brain pictures twenty-pounders stalking in from all points of the compass, so eagerly are your eyes strained to catch that stately form striding over the leaves. Ah, there he is, far away in the open woods! What a magnificent picture as he straightens himself up until you wonder when his neck will stop, to listen critically and silently to the yelper! Satisfied with the performance, he runs forward a few steps, pensively picks up an acorn, gives his own call, and then again proudly lifts his head on high. Did more grace and strength and pride ever walk in feathers?

   You scarcely breathe, but you do not dare hope such a magnificent old chieftain as that will walk straight up to an ambush; rarely can any but the young and foolish be deceived by the most skilful yelpers. Sure enough, long before he is within gun range, the wary fellow scents danger in the air, pauses a moment to be sure of the direction, and then rushes into flight and away to another mountain. What a fine sight he is, the broad tail spread like a fan, and the great gray wings thrashing the air like windmills until he gets above the trees, when he quietly sets them and sails off straight as a die.

   This is the fair way of dealing with the wild turkey, and if he were always "stalked" on his native heath, the hunter would never kill more than he is entitled to, and there would be turkeys so long as there are mountains with trees on them. Many of the mountaineers take out a little "fice" dog, which runs after the flock when they are flushed, and barks so vigorously that they may be sure to scatter. Then the hunter hastily improvises a "blind" of pine boughs, and "yelps them up" if he can. Sometimes, too, when the harvest-moon is big and bright, the roosts are located, and the murderer deliberately shoots the big birds from the tree in their slumbers. A queer feature of this abattoir proceeding is that so long as the butcher always aims at the bottom turkey the others simply perk their heads about and wait their turn; but if one falls from above them, off they are.

   Unlike "bob-white" and the ruffed grouse, the wild turkey loves snow, and can stand any quantity of it. Although in the deep storms his larder is apt to become wofully lean, he is too long-legged and strong to suffer any serious inconvenience. Nor has the gobbler much to fear from foxes and the smaller animals of prey, though the wild-cat sometimes has a famous meal on a luckless bird. But the young are much harried by carnivora. In the Virginia and Carolina mountains not the least of the causes which are leading to the extinction of the turkeys is the custom of burning over the mountains in the spring about the time the birds are nesting. This is done in the interests of the cattle-men, who wish to pasture their stock in the big woods, and who have found that burning the leaves will allow the grass to grow better. Forest fires not only drive the turkey from her nest and utterly annihilate her domestic arrangements, they also bum up the small bushes and vines, on the berries of which she and her lord and master are depending for next winter's food supply. After a season's extensive fires whole gangs of the birds will be driven into paying periodical visits to the more secluded of the back pastures and old fields. If there is a quiet last year's stubble-field near their safe mountain home they will repair to it every morning about sunrise, and return after feeding for an hour or so. But every one of them seems to be filled with ears and eyes as soon as they get into the open, and unless their habits are carefully studied, it is hard indeed to surprise them there. The very last bird the writer killed was bagged by chance from a flock that were "using" in the stubble under these conditions, after an exciting campaign that remains very vividly in my memory.

   Three hundred yards ahead of us rose the sheer height of Beard's Mountain, a palisade so steep that its rank growth of evergreen trees seemed to make scarcely any angle with its slope; and close at its foot wound the sycamore-fringed Wallawhatoolah River. We had crawled on our hands and knees out of Sawney's Ridge, a quarter of a mile behind, where wo had lain in ambush since the break of day, and then, as the sun metamorphosed into jewels the millions of dewdrops on the broad mountain pasture, we had seen a dozen dark forms glide down from the fastnesses of Beard's Ridge and move in an industrious procession through the low-lying stubble near the river.

   Twelve full-grown turkeys had flown from the mountain to feed within a few hundred yards of us, in absolutely open ground; but we had not climbed the mountains after them for five days without knowing that to all intents and purposes they were safe, and that we should probably again miss getting a fair shot. A hat incautiously shown would send the whole "gang," like arrows shot from a bow, far back into the big ridges. To have made a long circuit to creep up behind the fringe of sycamores would have been simply an amateurish attempt to outwit the wiliest of hunted creatures. We had come to the conclusion that there was a slight rolling swale in the centre of the big field, and had wormed ourselves through the frosty stubble and dewberry bushes to the last safe point by the comfortable process of lying prone on the ground and pushing along with one leg. Three hundred yards of this supine progress had left us with hands entirely too numb to feel the prick of the briars in them, with muddy guns, and, worst of all, with three gunshot lengths still between us and the turkeys. There we lay, now and then peeping hatless over the gently rising knoll. Never in my hunting career have I been in a more tantalizing situation, nor have I had such another opportunity to study the home life of one of the shyest birds in the world.

   Eight were hens, scarcely one-third the size of the four magnificent "gobblers," who every now and then paused in their feeding to hold their heads high up in statuesque suspicion, on general principles. What majestic birds they are! As one straightens himself proudly up in rigid attention, until he seems fairly as tall as a man, his feminine convoy stop their dainty peckings to lend him their ears, until he is slowly satisfied with the situation, and begins again his keen-eyed search for ragweed seed and last year's wheat, or with a quick low "cur-rt" runs swiftly forward to a fancied bonanza. Presently, as the rising sun creeps over the field, and reaches their valley too, one of the bearded fellows suddenly ruffles up his whole panoply of dew-brushed feathers to catch the first pure rays, until he "looks as big as a barn," according to Bob's ecstatic whisper; even at this distance we can see the blaze of the bronze and green and gold iridescence on the powerful neck and back. Now two of these dark-tinted champions have a little altercation over a most unmistakable preference shown by a coquettish hen, and their dignity is for the moment entirely lost in a series of awkward, even ridiculous antics preparatory to a battle, that is cut short by a warning attitude on the part of the patriarch, who has looked on, or rather hasn't looked on, the scuffle with the greatest contempt.

   There seemed to be nothing for us to do but to wait and hate ourselves for not bringing rifles instead of shot-guns. We discussed in the sign language the possibilities of making a sudden charge, which might give a faint chance of a wing shot as they made for the river. But we had seen turkeys run and fly before, and we decided that was not even a forlorn hope.

   Before long it was evident that the enemy had about finished their breakfast; they moved slowly away from us toward the river-bank. "I wonder if they won't take a drink?" I gesticulated over to Bob, feeling a ray of hope. "If they do, we'll charge," he flashed back. Sure enough, presently they disappeared one by one in the brush along the river. We were on our knees, when suddenly up bobbed the head of the rear-guard, and we flattened out again, to see the whole flock reappear and make their way a few yards down the stream. When this was repeated again and again we were more wary, and finally, after they had been swallowed up about a hundred heart-beats, we jumped on our cramped legs, made the sprint of our lives to the river, plunged through the bush into the sycamores, with eyes straining in every direction, and were rewarded by hearing a rush of powerful wings beating the air as the great birds took to the mountains. Only of the very last one did I catch a glimpse, as he shot down the bend of and across the river with curved wings; a load of buckshot went tearing through the tree-tops in the desperate hope of reaching some point in his orbit about the same time that he did, and a heavy plunge in the river brought me bucking through the underbrush away from Bob's lamentations. The lucky snap-shot had stopped a big gobbler in mid-flight, and he was wildly beating the shallows on the farther side of the narrow river. He was the first bird after a week of fruitless hunting, and never did I take an ice-water bath so blithely as in the sortie through the Walla whatoolah to capture that turkey. As I fetched him across, held by the great strong legs over my shoulder, his rich feathers ruffled back, and his long neck trailed out behind on the water, Bob certified exultingly from the bank that it was the patriarch.

   He was trussed up to a dogwood-tree out of the way of four-footed thieves, and we hunted happily for the rest of the day without a shot.

   All the scratches and bruises and arduous climbs taken in stalking and killing a glorious bird such as this nineteen-pounder endear the trophies which remain after the discussion of him in the roasted state — the strong gray wings and spreading tail beribboned into fans to adorn the wall, and the glossy luxuriant plumes from the back. These last particularly are affected by the ladies of one's acquaintance in Virginia to do duty in the adornment of hats — which charming fact will sufficiently answer any persons of equable temperament who may be disposed to question the profit of such labors as the wild turkey exacts from his admirers.