Just a line to tell you what a nice time we had at Pine Knot. Mother was
as happy as she always is there, and as cunning and pretty as possible.
As for me, I hunted faithfully through all three days, leaving the house
at three o'clock one day, at four the next, and at five the next,
so that I began my hunts in absolute night; but fortunately we had a
brilliant moon on each occasion. The first two days were failures. I
did not see a turkey, and on each occasion when everybody was perfectly
certain that I was going to see a turkey, something went wrong and the
turkey did not turn up. The last day I was out thirteen hours, and you
may imagine how hungry I was when I got back, not to speak of being
tired; though fortunately most of the time I was rambling around on
horseback, so I was not done out. But in the afternoon at last luck
changed, and then for once everything went right. The hunter who was
with me marked a turkey in a point of pines stretching down from a
forest into an open valley, with another forest on its farther side. I
ran down to the end of the point and hid behind a bush. He walked down
through the pines and the turkey came out and started to fly across
the valley, offering me a beautiful side shot at about thirty-five
yards--just the distance for my ten-bore. I killed it dead, and felt
mighty happy as it came tumbling down through the air.