The quiet of night apparently still pervaded the street. High, and far behind it, rose the mystic, purple heights of the Newfound. On the side towards the south the scene was different. Mountains are here rolled so closely together that the valleys between them are hidden from sight. There are no pleasant vales, dotted with clearings or animated by a single column of cabin smoke. No evergreens are to be seen beyond the slope of the Balsams. That December morning the vast ranges looked black and bare under the cutting wind, and far off, 30 miles on a bee-line through space, rose Whiteside and its neighboring peaks, veritably white from snow mantling their summits. Medford had been right in his prediction; snow had fallen, but not in our immediate vicinity. Before noon, as we had good reasons to believe, the wintry character of the scene would be changed under the influence of the sun in an unclouded sky. As we descended into the low gap between Lone Balsam and the next pinnacle of the Balsams, Ickes, who had started in advance, came out in sight, on the ridge top, at a point some distance below us. Just at the moment he appeared, a turkey rose, like a buzzard, out of the winter grass near him, and was about to make good its flight for the iced forests beyond, when his gun came to his shoulder, a flash and a report succeeded, and the great bird whirled and fell straight downward into the firs. The mountaineers yelled with delight. Shot-guns being little used in this section, shooting on the wing is an almost unheard of art. Not one of those bear hunters had ever seen a shot of like nature, and the unostentatious young sportsman was raised to a high notch in their estimation. When we reached him, he had already descended into the grove and returned with his game. It was somewhat bruised, and feathers considerably ruffled from falling through tree-tops upon a rocky ground. A mountain turkey is no small game. This one was a magnificent specimen; a royal turkey-gobbler, that by stretching his brilliant neck would have stood four feet high. Stripped of his green and blue bronzed plumage, and prepared for the oven, he weighed 24 pounds. In the neighborhood of Waynesville I have bought the same birds about Christmas time for 50 cents a piece, and the hunter, who, with heavy rifle, had ranged the cold mountain top before day-break, and then brought his game eight miles down the winding trail, felt satisfied with this sum (all he had asked) as compensation for his labor and skill as a sportsman. Perhaps he weighed the fun of killing the bird on his side of the scales.