Hunting The Deceitful Turkey

HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY

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 child 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.

THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM

The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weather

to crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from

scandal to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject

of burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed

feeling. Whenever I perceive this sign on this man's dial, I comprehend

it, and lapse into silence, and give him opportunity to unload his

heart. Said he, with but ill-controlled emotion:

“I do not go one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain--not a single

cent--and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, we

found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not

knowing it. I was for enlightening the heathen with it, for I was always

unaccountably down on the heathen somehow; but Mrs. McWilliams said no,

let's have a burglar alarm. I agreed to this compromise. I will explain

that whenever I want a thing, and Mrs. McWilliams wants another thing,

and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants--as we always

do--she calls that a compromise. Very well: the man came up from New

York and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five

dollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we

did for awhile--say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I

was advised to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and

started toward the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with

a basket of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark.

He was smoking a pipe. I said, 'My friend, we do not allow smoking in

this room.' He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know

the rules of the house: said he had been in many houses just as good as

this one, and it had never been objected to before. He added that as far

as his experience went, such rules had never been considered to apply to

burglars, anyway.

“I said: 'Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think that

the conceding of a privilege to a burglar which is denied to a bishop is

a conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times. But waiving all that,

what business have you to be entering this house in this furtive and

clandestine way, without ringing the burglar alarm?'

“He looked confused and ashamed, and said, with embarrassment: 'I beg a

thousand pardons. I did not know you had a burglar alarm, else I would

have rung it. I beg you will not mention it where my parents may hear of

it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of

the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all

too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale

and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. May

I trouble you for a match?'

“I said: 'Your sentiments do you honor, but if you will allow me to say

it, metaphor is not your best hold. Spare your thigh; this kind light

only on the box, and seldom there, in fact, if my experience may be

trusted. But to return to business: how did you get in here?'

“'Through a second-story window.'

“It was even so. I redeemed the tinware at pawnbroker's rates, less cost

of advertising, bade the burglar good-night, closed the window after

him, and retired to headquarters to report. Next morning we sent for

the burglar-alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason the

alarm did not 'go off' was that no part of the house but the first floor

was attached to the alarm. This was simply idiotic; one might as well

have no armor on at all in battle as to have it only on his legs.

The expert now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged three

hundred dollars for it, and went his way. By and by, one night, I found

a burglar in the third story, about to start down a ladder with a lot

of miscellaneous property. My first impulse was to crack his head with a

billiard cue; but my second was to refrain from this attention, because

he was between me and the cue rack. The second impulse was plainly the

soundest, so I refrained, and proceeded to compromise. I redeemed the

property at former rates, after deducting ten per cent. for use of

ladder, it being my ladder, and, next day we sent down for the expert

once more, and had the third story attached to the alarm, for three

hundred dollars.

“By this time the 'annunciator' had grown to formidable dimensions. It

had forty-seven tags on it, marked with the names of the various rooms

and chimneys, and it occupied the space of an ordinary wardrobe. The

gong was the size of a wash-bowl, and was placed above the head of our

bed. There was a wire from the house to the coachman's quarters in the

stable, and a noble gong alongside his pillow.

“We should have been comfortable now but for one defect. Every morning

at five the cook opened the kitchen door, in the way of business, and

rip went that gong! The first time this happened I thought the last

day was come sure. I didn't think it in bed--no, but out of it--for the

first effect of that frightful gong is to hurl you across the house, and

slam you against the wall, and then curl you up, and squirm you like a

spider on a stove lid, till somebody shuts the kitchen door. In solid

fact, there is no clamor that is even remotely comparable to the dire

clamor which that gong makes. Well, this catastrophe happened every

morning regularly at five o'clock, and lost us three hours sleep; for,

mind you, when that thing wakes you, it doesn't merely wake you in

spots; it wakes you all over, conscience and all, and you are good for

eighteen hours of wide-awakeness subsequently--eighteen hours of the

very most inconceivable wide-awakeness that you ever experienced in your

life. A stranger died on our hands one time, and we vacated and left him

in our room overnight. Did that stranger wait for the general judgment?

No, sir; he got up at five the next morning in the most prompt and

unostentatious way. I knew he would; I knew it mighty well. He collected

his life-insurance, and lived happy ever after, for there was plenty of

proof as to the perfect squareness of his death.

“Well, we were gradually fading toward a better land, on account of the

daily loss of sleep; so we finally had the expert up again, and he ran

a wire to the outside of the door, and placed a switch there, whereby

Thomas, the butler, always made one little mistake--he switched the

alarm off at night when he went to bed, and switched it on again at

daybreak in the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchen

door, and enable that gong to slam us across the house, sometimes

breaking a window with one or the other of us. At the end of a week we

recognized that this switch business was a delusion and a snare. We also

discovered that a band of burglars had been lodging in the house the

whole time--not exactly to steal, for there wasn't much left now, but

to hide from the police, for they were hot pressed, and they shrewdly

judged that the detectives would never think of a tribe of burglars

taking sanctuary in a house notoriously protected by the most imposing

and elaborate burglar alarm in America.

“Sent down for the expert again, and this time he struck a most dazzling

idea--he fixed the thing so that opening the kitchen door would take

off the alarm. It was a noble idea, and he charged accordingly. But

you already foresee the result. I switched on the alarm every night at

bed-time, no longer trusting on Thomas's frail memory; and as soon as

the lights were out the burglars walked in at the kitchen door, thus

taking the alarm off without waiting for the cook to do it in the

morning. You see how aggravatingly we were situated. For months we

couldn't have any company. Not a spare bed in the house; all occupied by

burglars.

“Finally, I got up a cure of my own. The expert answered the call, and

ran another ground wire to the stable, and established a switch there,

so that the coachman could put on and take off the alarm. That worked

first rate, and a season of peace ensued, during which we got to

inviting company once more and enjoying life.

“But by and by the irrepressible alarm invented a new kink. One winter's

night we were flung out of bed by the sudden music of that awful gong,

and when we hobbled to the annunciator, turned up the gas, and saw the

word 'Nursery' exposed, Mrs. McWilliams fainted dead away, and I came

precious near doing the same thing myself. I seized my shotgun, and

stood timing the coachman whilst that appalling buzzing went on. I knew

that his gong had flung him out, too, and that he would be along with

his gun as soon as he could jump into his clothes. When I judged that

the time was ripe, I crept to the room next the nursery, glanced through

the window, and saw the dim outline of the coachman in the yard below,

standing at present-arms and waiting for a chance. Then I hopped into

the nursery and fired, and in the same instant the coachman fired at the

red flash of my gun. Both of us were successful; I crippled a nurse, and

he shot off all my back hair. We turned up the gas, and telephoned for

a surgeon. There was not a sign of a burglar, and no window had been

raised. One glass was absent, but that was where the coachman's charge

had come through. Here was a fine mystery--a burglar alarm 'going off'

at midnight of its own accord, and not a burglar in the neighborhood!

“The expert answered the usual call, and explained that it was a 'False

alarm.' Said it was easily fixed. So he overhauled the nursery window,

charged a remunerative figure for it, and departed.

“What we suffered from false alarms for the next three years no

stylographic pen can describe. During the next three months I always

flew with my gun to the room indicated, and the coachman always sallied

forth with his battery to support me. But there was never anything to

shoot at--windows all tight and secure. We always sent down for the

expert next day, and he fixed those particular windows so they would

keep quiet a week or so, and always remembered to send us a bill about

like this:

Wire ............................$2.15

Nipple........................... .75

Two hours’ labor ................ 1.50

Wax.............................. .47

Tape............................. .34

Screws........................... .15

Recharging battery .............. .98

Three hours’ labor .............. 2.25

String........................... .02

Lard ............................ .66

Pond's Extract .................. 1.25

Springs at 50.................... 2.00

Railroad fares................... 7.25

———

19.77

“At length a perfectly natural thing came about--after we had answered

three or four hundred false alarms--to wit, we stopped answering them.

Yes, I simply rose up calmly, when slammed across the house by

the alarm, calmly inspected the annunciator, took note of the room

indicated; and then calmly disconnected that room from the alarm, and

went back to bed as if nothing had happened. Moreover, I left that room

off permanently, and did not send for the expert. Well, it goes without

saying that in the course of time all the rooms were taken off, and the

entire machine was out of service.

“It was at this unprotected time that the heaviest calamity of all

happened. The burglars walked in one night and carried off the burglar

alarm! yes, sir, every hide and hair of it: ripped it out, tooth and

nail; springs, bells, gongs, battery, and all; they took a hundred and

fifty miles of copper wire; they just cleaned her out, bag and baggage,

and never left us a vestige of her to swear at--swear by, I mean.

“We had a time of it to get her back; but we accomplished it finally,

for money. The alarm firm said that what we needed now was to have her

put in right--with their new patent springs in the windows to make false

alarms impossible, and their new patent clock attached to take off and

put on the alarm morning and night without human assistance. That seemed

a good scheme. They promised to have the whole thing finished in ten

days. They began work, and we left for the summer. They worked a couple

of days; then they left for the summer. After which the burglars moved

in, and began their summer vacation. When we returned in the fall, the

house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been

at work. We refurnished, and then sent down to hurry up the expert. He

came up and finished the job, and said: 'Now this clock is set to put on

the alarm every night at 10, and take it off every morning at 5:45.

All you've got to do is to wind her up every week, and then leave her

alone--she will take care of the alarm herself.'

“After that we had a most tranquil season during three months. The bill

was prodigious, of course, and I had said I would not pay it until the

new machinery had proved itself to be flawless. The time stipulated was

three months. So I paid the bill, and the very next day the alarm went

to buzzing like ten thousand bee swarms at ten o'clock in the morning.

I turned the hands around twelve hours, according to instructions, and

this took off the alarm; but there was another hitch at night, and I had

to set her ahead twelve hours once more to get her to put the alarm on

again. That sort of nonsense went on a week or two, then the expert came

up and put in a new clock. He came up every three months during the next

three years, and put in a new clock. But it was always a failure. His

clocks all had the same perverse defect: they would put the alarm on in

the daytime, and they would not put it on at night; and if you forced

it on yourself, they would take it off again the minute your back was

turned.

“Now there is the history of that burglar alarm--everything just as

it happened; nothing extenuated, and naught set down in malice. Yes,

sir,--and when I had slept nine years with burglars, and maintained an

expensive burglar alarm the whole time, for their protection, not mine,

and at my sole cost--for not a d---d cent could I ever get THEM to

contribute--I just said to Mrs. McWilliams that I had had enough of that

kind of pie; so with her full consent I took the whole thing out and

traded it off for a dog, and shot the dog. I don't know what you think

about it, Mr. Twain; but I think those things are made solely in the

interest of the burglars. Yes, sir, a burglar alarm combines in its

person all that is objectionable about a fire, a riot, and a harem, and

at the same time had none of the compensating advantages, of one sort or

another, that customarily belong with that combination. Good-by: I get

off here.”