There is nothing that furnishes a perfect turkey-call except that bone.

Another of Nature's treacheries, you see.

She is full of them; half the time she doesn't know which she likes best--to betray her child or protect it.
In the case of the turkey she is badly mixed: she gives it a bone to be used in getting it into trouble, and she also furnishes it with a trick for getting itself out of the trouble again.

When a mamma-turkey answers an invitation and finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she does as the mamma-partridge does--remembers a previous engagement--and goes limping and scrambling away, pretending to be very lame; and at the same time she is saying to her not-visible children, "Lie low, keep still, don't expose yourselves; I shall be back as soon as I have beguiled this shabby swindler out of the country." When a person is ignorant and confiding, this immoral device can have tiresome results.

I followed an ostensibly lame turkey over a considerable part of the United States one morning, because I believed in her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who was trusting her and considering her honest.