butternut tree in front of Tom's house--in the very top of it, and
by day they wandered about the edges of the clearings in quest of
beech-nuts, which were very plentiful that fall.

All went well till the last week in October, when, on taking the
census one morning, a turkey was found to be missing; the
thirty-one had become thirty since nightfall the previous evening.
It was the first one we had lost.

We proceeded to look for traces. Our suspicions were divided. Tom
thought it was "the Twombly boys," nefarious Sam in particular. I
thought it might have been an owl. But under the tree, in the soft
dirt, where the potatoes had recently been dug, we found
fox-tracks, and two or three ominous little wads of feathers, with
one long tail feather adrift. Thereupon we concluded that the
turkey had accidentally fallen down out of the butternut--had a
fit, perhaps--and that its flutterings had attracted the attention
of some passing fox, which had, forthwith, taken it in charge. It
was, as we regarded it, one of those unfortunate occurrences which
no care on our part could have well foreseen, and a casualty such
as turkey-raisers are unavoidably heirs to, and we bore our loss
with resignation. We were glad to remember that turkeys did not
often fall off their roosts.

This theory received something of a check when our flock counted
only twenty-nine the next morning. There were more fox-tracks, and
a great many more feathers under the tree. This put a new and
altogether ugly aspect on the matter. No algebra was needed to
figure the outcome of the turkey business at this rate, together
with our prospective profits, in the light of this new fact. It was