ou shall see a real wild turkey in the tamest
old gobbler on the farm.

Watch him go to roost. Watch him get _ready_ to go to roost, I should
say, for a turkey seems to begin to think of roosting about noon-time,
especially in the winter; and it takes him from about noon till night to
make up his mind that he really must go to roost.

He comes along under the apple-tree of a December afternoon and looks up
at the leafless limbs where he has been roosting since summer. He
stretches his long neck, lays his little brainless head over on one
side, then over on the other. He takes a good _long_ look at the limb.
Then bobs his head--one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-_ten_
times, or perhaps twenty-two or -three times, and takes a still _longer_
look at the limb, saying to himself--_quint, quint, quint, quint!_ which
means: "I think I'll go to roost! I think _I'll_ go to roost! I think
I'll go to _roost_! I think I'll _go_ to roost! I think I'll go _to_
roost! I _think_ I'll go to roost!" He _thinks_ he will, but he hasn't
made up his mind quite.

Then he stretches his long neck again, lays his little witless head on
the side again, bobs and bobs, looks and looks and looks, says _quint,
quint, quint, quint_--"I _think_ I'll go to roost," but is just as
undecided as ever.

He does the performance over and over again and would never go to roost
if the darkness did not come and compel him. He would stand under that
tree stretching, turning, looking, bobbing, "squinting," _thinking_,
until he thought his head off, saying all the while--

One for the money; two for the show;
Three to get ready; and four to--_get ready to go!_

But after a while, along toward dusk (and awfully suddenly!)--_flop!
gobble! splutter! whoop!_--and there he is, up on the limb, safe! Really
safe! But it was an exceedingly close call.

And this is the very way the wild turkey acts. The naturalists who had a
chance to study the great flocks of wild turkeys years ago describe
these same absurd actions. This lack of snap and decision is not
something the tame turkey has learned in the farm-yard. The fact is he
does not seem to have learned anything during his 350 years in the
barn-yard, nor does he seem to have forgotten anything that he knew as a
wild turkey in the woods, except his fear of man.

Late in October the wild turkeys of a given neighborhood would get
together in flocks of from ten to a hundred and travel on foot