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And Sister learned a few things before she had raised "that raft of poults," as Mother Atterson called them. Turkeys are certainly calculated to breed patience especially if one expects to have a flock of young Toms and hens fit for killing at Thanksgiving-time.
Now how was I to let her know even that much of the matter, without breaking compact? But Master Stickles assured her that the King's writ often had that effect, and the symptom was a good one. "Now, Master Stickles, when must we start?" I asked him, as he lounged in the yard gazing at our turkey poults picking and running in the sun to the tune of their father's gobble.
Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright variety of pure white and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon-plumed pigeons. Irresistible spectacle to Shirley!
It had been dark an hour and more, then, and the poults should long since have been hovered in the coop. Had some marauding fox, or other "varmint", run the young turkeys off their reservation? That seemed improbable at this time of year and so early in the evening. Foxes do not usually go hunting before midnight, nor do other predatory animals.
I found my Werter-Guskov in the middle of a tiny kitchen-garden, a few steps from the lodge, near the old framework of a never-finished hut, overgrown with nettles. On the mildewed upper beams of this skeleton hut some miserable-looking turkey poults were scrambling, incessantly slipping and flapping their wings and cackling. There was some poor sort of green stuff growing in two or three borders.
The woman shrank back and almost dropped the kettle she had filled to the pump-bench. Her eyes glared. Somewhere in the house a baby squatted; then a door banged and Hiram heard Dickerson's heavy step descending the stair. "You have a coop of poults down there, Mrs. Dickerson," continued Hiram, confidently, "that I know belongs to us.
The turkey hen, though much alarmed, having gathered her poults under her wings, stood ready to defend them bravely. Uncle Denis said that she had probably got into the pen directly after he had last seen it, and he recollected having left inside a quantity of corn, with which he was going to bait some other pens in the neighbourhood.
The old turks roosted upon the limbs of the beech at night; they were already up and away, hunting grasshoppers for breakfast. But quite a few poults were running and peeping about the coops, with two hen turkeys playing guard to them. Hiram saw where a wagon had been driven in here, and turned, too. The tracks were made recently.
At first the girl had kept the young turkeys and their foster mother right near the house, so that she could watch them carefully. But poults are rangy, and these being particularly strong and thrifty, they soon ran the old hen pretty nearly to death. So Hiram had built a coop into which they could go at night, safe from any vermin, and set it far down in the east lot, near the woods.
And one of the coops was shut tight, although he knew by the rustling within that there were young turkeys in it. It was too dark within the hutch, however, for the youth to number the poults confined there. He strolled back across the fields to the rear of the Dickerson house.
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