Hunting the Deceitful Turkey

Mark Twain (1835–1910)
From Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910

Interesting Links

“Mark Twain's Latest Autobiography” (Jerome Loving, Humanities)

“Mark Twain, Josephine Hobby, and Collaborative Autobiography” (Michael J. Kiskis, Kiskis Log)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn,” Mark Twain
• “Cookery: Meat Department,” Harriet Beecher Stowe
• “The Enchanted Bluff,” Willa Cather
• “The Original and Only,” Robert Frost

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“Wild Turkey,” plate 6 in The Birds of America (1827–38), hand-colored engraving and aquatint on paper by French American ornithologist John James Audubon (1785–1851). (North Carolina Museum of Art)

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During the last five years of his life, Mark Twain dictated to three typists, primarily to stenographer Josephine S. Hobby, more than half a million words’ worth of material for his autobiography. The sessions “produced not a conventional narrative marching inexorably toward the grave, but rather a series of spontaneous recollections and comments on the present as well as the past, arranged simply in the order of their creation,” as Harriet Elinor Smith summarized the massive typescript in the introduction to the authoritative three-volume edition published a century after his death. Or, as biographer Jerome Loving put it, Twain’s plan for the book, such as it was, “was to avoid talking with absolute candor about himself and instead to talk about others. Whenever he tired of one subject, he would simply switch to a different one.”

During one session in May 1907, Twain described the clash earlier in the decade between, on the one hand, William J. Long and other “nature fakers” and, on the other, his friends Theodore Roosevelt and the naturalist John Burroughs. Long, a Congregationalist minister, published several books specifically for schoolchildren, and he was heavily criticized by scientists for anthropomorphizing animal behavior and for “observing” feats that defied common sense. In one of his more infamous anecdotes, Long claimed to have witnessed, twenty years earlier, a woodcock that seemed to have “a broken leg and had deliberately put it into a clay cast to hold the broken bones in place until they should knit together again.” Other naturalists mocked Long’s “proofs” and deductions and disdainfully pointed out that twenty years earlier, when the woodcock incident allegedly occurred, Long was fifteen years old. “They are all the inventions of Mr. Long,” Burroughs wrote in a thorough takedown of the phenomena recounted in one book. “Of the real secrets of wild life, I do not find a trace in his volume.”

Both the self-healing woodcock and the ensuing debate were tempting morsels Twain couldn’t resist, and he responded during one dictation with an even more preposterous tale of his own:

I know of a turkey-hen that tried during several weeks to hatch out a porcelain egg, then the gobbler took the job and sat on that egg two entire summers and at last hatched it. He hatched out of it a doll’s tea-set of fourteen pieces, and all perfect, except that the tea-pot had no spout, on account of the material running out. I know this to be true, of my own personal knowledge, and I do as Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Burroughs and Jonah and Aristotle, and all the other naturalists do—that is to say, I merely make assertions and back them up with just my say-so, offering no other evidence of any kind. I personally know that that unusual thing happened; I knew the turkey; I furnished the egg, and I have got the crockery. It establishes, once and for all, the validity of Mr. Long’s statement about his bird—because it is twice as remarkable as that bird’s performance and yet it happened.

Tall tales about turkeys might have been on Mark Twain’s mind that spring because he had just published—twice—an altogether different yarn about a turkey with anthropomorphic qualities.

Twain had written the tale years earlier, when he was in Vienna for the winter of 1897–98. He and his family were still reeling from his personal bankruptcy two years earlier and the death of his daughter Susy in August 1896. “I do not come up out of my misery and desolation in the least degree yet; but presently I shall submerge myself and my troubles in my work,” he wrote to his close friend Henry Tuttleston Rogers, a Standard Oil executive who helped Twain rehabilitate his financial situation.

At the end of 1897 Twain confided to William Dean Howells:

I couldn't get along without work now. I bury myself in it up to the ears. Long hours—8 and 9 on a stretch, sometimes. And all the days, Sundays included. It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year. It was because of the deadness which invaded me when Susy died.

Among the surviving works from his winter in Vienna is a 90-page unfinished manuscript titled “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” a loose collection of vignettes and reminiscences grounded on boyhood experiences. The latter half of the work recalls summers he spent on the Florida, Missouri, farm of his uncle John A. Quarles, whose eight children included Benjamin and James (nine and eight years older than Mark, respectively) and William Frederick, who was two years older.

I remember the squirrel-hunts, and prairie-chicken hunts, and wild turkey hunts, and all that; and how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go. A toot on a tin horn brought twice as many dogs as were needed, and in their happiness they raced and scampered about, and knocked small people down, and made no end of unnecessary noise. At the word, they vanished away toward the woods, and we drifted silently after them in the melancholy gloom. But presently the gray dawn stole over the world, the birds piped up, then the sun rose and poured light and comfort all around, everything was fresh and dewy and fragrant, and life was a boon again. After three hours of tramping we arrived back wholesomely tired, overladen with game, very hungry, and just in time for breakfast.

Although Twain had been telling friends, publishers, and journalists that the autobiography would not be published until well after his death, in the summer of 1906 he decided to allow George Harvey, the editor of the North American Review, to assemble bits and pieces from among the 250,000-plus words of material written or dictated thus far, excluding material that might prove too political or controversial or that revealed personal or sensitive information about people. Harvey published twenty-five installments of “Chapters from My Autobiography” in consecutive issues of the journal from September 1906 to December 1907. The material from Twain’s Vienna manuscript about summers on his uncle’s farm appeared as the thirteenth chapter in the March 1 issue and concluded with a much-embellished recollection of an entire day spent chasing one worldly-wise turkey. Three months earlier, however, this final section had also been published as a story, “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” in the Christmas 1906 number of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and that is the version of Twain's turkey tale that we present below.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs

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 mean time; 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.

Originally published in the December 1906 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine