As the planter was a man both of intelligence and circumstance—with three or four fine sons and as many grown-up girls—my halt at his house was far from being irksome; and perhaps I remained a day or two longer than exactly “squared” with my duty.
Be that as it may, I remember that I ate my Christmas dinner with them; and it was while procuring the pièce de résistance of that dinner—the wild turkey—that I became initiated into the peculiar mode of capturing these birds by “running them down.”
The custom of having turkey for the Christmas dinner has been transported by the colonists into the wilds of Texas; where it is as rigorously observed as in the “mother country”—the United States.
On the day preceding this Christmas holiday, a turkey hunt was got up—in order that a bird or two might be obtained for the table.
At an early hour we set forth—a party on horseback, consisting of the planter himself, his sons, and one or two friends on a Christmas visit to the plantation.
Each of the party shouldering his fowling-piece or rifle—though, as I was informed, not with any design to use these weapons against the “gobblers,” but, only as a providence in case of meeting with other and larger game.
Moreover, a Texan frontiersman without a gun over his shoulder—or carried across the pommel of his saddle—is a creature rarely to be encountered upon the prairies.
On that day the weapons, intended to be used against the turkeys, were horses and hounds; and as we rode forth out of the enclosure of the planter’s dwelling, I noticed some half score of the latter—an appanage of every Texan plantation—trotting along at the heels of our cavayard.
I was myself no little surprised, on being informed that this was the object for which the hounds were going out with us; and I did not quite comprehend how the quadrupeds were to bring a bird to bay.
I could form some conjecture, however—founded on a past experience in the art of venerie. I remembered, while deer-hunting in the forests of the Mississippi bottom, that the hounds, especially when ill-trained ones, were often led away from the trail of the stag by that of wild turkeys; and that the birds, although not seen among the underwood, frequently conducted the chase, for a mile or so, across the hills.