I have always noticed that if the turkeys grow up very fat and strutty and suggestive of Thanksgiving, Jonathan calls them “our turkeys,” but in the spring, when they are committing all the naughtinesses of wild and silly youth, he is apt to allude to them as “those young turkeys of yours.”
I rose wearily. “No. They never go in all right when they get out at this time—especially on wet nights. I’ll have to find them and stow them.”
Jonathan got up, too, and laid down his pipe. “You’ll need the lantern,” he said.
We went out together into the May drizzle—a good thing to be out in, too, if you are out for the fun of it. But when you are hunting silly little turkeys who literally don’t know enough to go in when it rains, and when you expected and wanted to be doing something else, then it seems different, the drizzle [pg 063] seems peculiarly drizzly, the silliness of the turkeys seems particularly and unendurably silly.
We waded through the drenched grass and the tall, dripping weeds, listening for the faint, foolish peeping of the wanderers. Some we found under piled fence rails, some under burdock leaves, some under nothing more protective than a plantain leaf. By ones and twos we collected them, half drowned yet shrilly remonstrant, and dropped them into the dry shed where they belonged. Then we returned to the house, very wet, feeling the kind of discouragement that usually besets those who are forced to furnish prudence to fools.
“Nine o’clock,” said Jonathan, “and we’re too wet to sit down. If you could just shut in those turkeys on wet days—”
“Shut them in! Didn’t I shut them in! They must have got out since four o’clock.”
“Isn’t the shed tight?” he asked.
“Chicken-tight, but not turkey-tight, apparently. Nothing is turkey-tight.”
“They’re bigger than chickens.”