With Axe and Rifle | Page 9

the entrance had
been discovered. My mother, more to please Uncle Denis than from
any expected pleasure to herself; agreed to accompany him, and to my
great delight, they promised to take me.
We were to perform the trip in two or three days, and Uncle Denis said
that in the meantime he would try and find means of amusing us. We
went all over the farm, on which he grew tobacco, maize, and other
cereals. He was a great sportsman, besides which he had a fancy for
trapping birds and animals, and taming them, when he could. In this he
was wonderfully successful; he had a large menagerie of the feathered
tribe as well as numbers of four-footed beasts which he had trapped and
contrived to domesticate. His ambition was to tame a panther, a bear,
and a wolf; but as yet he had not succeeded in taking any of them
young enough, as he said, to be taught good manners.

"Perhaps if you had a lady to help you, you would be more successful,"
observed my mother, "like Orpheus of old, who charmed the savage
beasts. She would with her voice produce a greater effect on their wild
natures than any man can do."
"I'll think about it," said Uncle Denis, looking up and laughing.
My mother's great wish was to see Uncle Denis married happily,
though where to find a wife to suit him, or, as she would have said,
"good enough for him," was the difficulty. There were no lack of
excellent girls in Kentucky, daughters of settlers, but they could seldom
boast of much education or refinement of manners, and Uncle Denis
was a gentleman in every sense of the word; at the same time that he
had as much spirit and daring as any Kentuckian born.
It must be understood of course, that at the time I speak of, I was too
young to understand these matters, but I heard of them afterwards from
my mother, and am thus able to introduce them in their proper place in
my history.
Uncle Denis took great delight in showing us his various traps and
snares, as well as other means he employed for capturing birds or
animals.
The traps had been greatly neglected during his illness. I remember
being especially delighted with what he called his "pens," which he had
erected for the capture of wild turkeys, with which the neighbouring
woods abounded. The two first we came to contained birds lately
caught; the third was empty, and the fourth had been broken into by a
hungry wolf, which had carried off the captive.
"There is another I built the day before I was taken ill, further away in
the forest. No one but myself knows of it," observed Uncle Denis;
"we'll pay a visit to it, though I am much afraid if a bird has been
caught, it must have starved to death by this time."
The pens Uncle Denis was speaking of were simple structures formed
like a huge cage by poles stuck in the ground sufficiently close together

to prevent a bird from getting out. They were roofed over by boughs
and leaves, and were without doors or windows. It will then be asked,
how can a bird get in? The trap is entered in this way.
A passage or trench is cut in the ground twelve or fourteen feet in
length, passing under the wall of the hut and rising again in its centre.
Inside the wall and over the trench, a bridge is thrown. To induce the
bird to enter, grain is strewn along the trench and scattered about its
neighbourhood, while a larger quantity is placed on the floor inside the
hut. The unwary turkey, on seeing the grains of corn, picks them up,
and not suspecting treachery follows the train until it finds itself inside
the pen; instead however of endeavouring to escape by the way it
entered, it, like other wild birds, runs round and round the walls of the
hut, peeping through the interstices and endeavouring to force its way
out, each time crossing over the bridge without attempting to escape by
the only practicable outlet. In this way Uncle Denis said that he had
caught numbers of birds, one and all having acted in the same foolish
manner.
"Hereabouts is my forest pen," he said. "Hark! I hear some curious
clucking sounds. There's more than one bird there, or I am much
mistaken." Stepping forward he peered over the branches, when he
beckoned us to advance, and, he lifting me in his arms, I saw not only a
hen turkey in the pen, but a brood of a dozen or more turkey poults
running in and out among the bars, while the hen was evidently calling
to them,