Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/158

150 and posted in a wood, while our Indians ranged about to beat up the game. In the dry, dead woods, which in this dry season much resemble our Northern forests in autumn, we waited for hours. My only visitors were a brown and golden hummingbird, a chachalaka, and some inquisitive blue-jays; but the Doctor got a shot at a flying gobbler, which escaped; and that ended the hunt. We walked back to the rancho in the heat, covered with garrapatas, ticks that are so small as to be hardly visible, yet bite like red ants. In the evening we strolled through the town, seeing many pretty faces, as at that time the ladies appear, and sit in their doorways, and chat and smoke.

The next morning the Indians brought in three turkeys, the result of our inciting them to hunt for them, and among them was one fine old gobbler, whose plumage was resplendent with sheen of polished copper and gold, who had two buckshot through the lungs. This was undoubtedly the one the Doctor had shot, and which the wily Indians had tracked to its hiding-place after our departure. This magnificent bird, representing the finest of his race, the Doctor presented to me as a souvenir of the occasion; his assistant aided me in skinning and preserving it, and it is now smallrefs