“We couldn’t help ourselves,” said they. “Some very large creature brought us here just now. We came from a darker place than this.”
The mother was very much puzzled. She knew that she had not hatched them, and that they could not belong to her sisters, who had begun sitting after she did. There was no way of taking them to any other place for the night, so she decided to do the kind thing and care for them herself. She was quite right in this. One is never sorry for having done the kind thing, you know, but one is very often sorry for having done the unkind thing. “Crawl right under my wings,” said she, “and cuddle down with these other Turkey Chicks. I will try to cover you all.”
She managed very well and the night was warm, so that although a few of the Chicks were not wholly covered all the time, they got along very comfortably indeed. By the next morning the mother loved the four as much as she did her own ten. “It really doesn’t matter in the least who hatched them,” she said, “or even who laid the eggs. They need a mother and I can love them all. It would be a shame if I couldn’t stretch my wings a little more for the sake of covering them.” She never knew that they had been hatched in the incubator from the four eggs which she had laid, but which the Man had thought she could not cover. You see she was really adopting her own children without knowing it.
Turkey mothers are hungry creatures, and do not understand that they should not eat the hard-boiled eggs which are the best food for their Chicks when very small. So the Man had either to shut this mother in the shed and place the food for the Chicks outside, where she could not reach it, or else find some other way of keeping it from her. He thought a Turkey who had sat so closely on her nest for four weeks should be allowed to stretch, so he put the food for the children in a coop and left the mother free. The little ones could run in and out whenever they wanted to eat, and the mother had plenty of corn and water outside, so they were all well cared for and happy. The Gobbler said unkind things to them each time he passed, but they were too happy and sensible to mind that very much, and it did not seem long before the Chicks’ tail-and wing-feathers were showing through their down, and they were given porridge and milk instead of hard-boiled egg. This made them feel that they were growing up very fast indeed, and they kept stretching their tiny wings and looking around at their funny little tails to watch their feathers lengthen.
On the day when they had their first porridge, their aunts and their newly hatched cousins were brought in to share their yard with them. You can imagine what happy times they all had, playing together and visiting through the wire fence with their next-door neighbors, the White Plymouth Rock Chickens.
The Gobbler used to pass by and try to make them and their mothers unhappy by telling them of the pleasure they missed by being shut up. “There is fine food in the lower meadow,” he said, “and the upper one is even better. There are delicious Bugs to be found by the side of the road. But these are for me, and not for silly Hen Turkeys and their good-for-nothing Chicks.”
One day the outer gate of the empty yard next to theirs was left open and some fine corn strewn inside, just as the Gobbler came along. He strutted in to eat the corn, thinking a little of it would taste good before he started for the meadow.
He stood with his back to the gate while eating, and quite often he stopped between mouthfuls to tell the Hen Turkeys how fine it was outside. Soon he noticed the Man opening the gate of their yard and letting the oldest flock pass through with their mother. He took one hurried last mouthful and turned to leave. The gate of his yard was shut, and he was too fat and old to fly over the fence.
THE HAPPY TURKEY MOTHER PAUSED ON HER WAY. [Page 113]