It Is The Old, Indubitable
Water Mark Of The Shoshones.
One still finds it in the desert
ranges in Salt Wells and Mesquite valleys, and along the slopes of
Waban.
On the other side of Ceriso, where the black rock begins,
about a mile from the spring, is the work of an older, forgotten
people. The rock hereabout is all volcanic, fracturing with a
crystalline whitish surface, but weathered outside to furnace
blackness. Around the spring, where must have been a gathering
place of the tribes, it is scored over with strange pictures and
symbols that have no meaning to the Indians of the present day; but
out where the rock begins, there is carved into the white heart of
it a pointing arrow over the symbol for distance and a circle full
of wavy lines reading thus: "In this direction three [units of
measurement unknown] is a spring of sweet water; look for it."
THE SCAVENGERS
Fifty-seven buzzards, one on each of fifty-seven fence posts at the
rancho El Tejon, on a mirage-breeding September morning, sat
solemnly while the white tilted travelers' vans lumbered down the
Canada de los Uvas. After three hours they had only clapped their
wings, or exchanged posts. The season's end in the vast dim valley
of the San Joaquin is palpitatingly hot, and the air breathes like
cotton wool. Through it all the buzzards sit on the fences and low
hummocks, with wings spread fanwise for air. There is no end to
them, and they smell to heaven. Their heads droop, and all their
communication is a rare, horrid croak.
The increase of wild creatures is in proportion to the things
they feed upon: the more carrion the more buzzards. The end of the
third successive dry year bred them beyond belief. The first year
quail mated sparingly; the second year the wild oats matured no
seed; the third, cattle died in their tracks with their heads
towards the stopped watercourses. And that year the
scavengers were as black as the plague all across the mesa and up
the treeless, tumbled hills. On clear days they betook themselves
to the upper air, where they hung motionless for hours. That year
there were vultures among them, distinguished by the white patches
under the wings. All their offensiveness notwithstanding, they
have a stately flight. They must also have what pass for good
qualities among themselves, for they are social, not to say
clannish.
It is a very squalid tragedy,--that of the dying brutes and
the scavenger birds. Death by starvation is slow. The
heavy-headed, rack-boned cattle totter in the fruitless trails;
they stand for long, patient intervals; they lie down and do not
rise. There is fear in their eyes when they are first stricken,
but afterward only intolerable weariness. I suppose the dumb
creatures know nearly as much of death as do their betters, who
have only the more imagination. Their even-breathing submission
after the first agony is their tribute to its inevitableness. It
needs a nice discrimination to say which of the basket-ribbed
cattle is likest to afford the next meal, but the scavengers make
few mistakes. One stoops to the quarry and the flock follows.
Cattle once down may be days in dying. They stretch out their
necks along the ground, and roll up their slow eyes at longer
intervals. The buzzards have all the time, and no beak is dropped
or talon struck until the breath is wholly passed. It is
doubtless the economy of nature to have the scavengers by to clean
up the carrion, but a wolf at the throat would be a shorter agony
than the long stalking and sometime perchings of these loathsome
watchers. Suppose now it were a man in this long-drawn, hungrily
spied upon distress! When Timmie O'Shea was lost on Armogosa
Flats for three days without water, Long Tom Basset found him, not
by any trail, but by making straight away for the points where he
saw buzzards stooping. He could hear the beat of their wings, Tom
said, and trod on their shadows, but O'Shea was past recalling what
he thought about things after the second day. My friend Ewan told
me, among other things, when he came back from San Juan Hill, that
not all the carnage of battle turned his bowels as the sight of
slant black wings rising flockwise before the burial squad.
There are three kinds of noises buzzards make,--it is
impossible to call them notes,--raucous and elemental. There is a
short croak of alarm, and the same syllable in a modified tone to
serve all the purposes of ordinary conversation. The old birds
make a kind of throaty chuckling to their young, but if they have
any love song I have not heard it. The young yawp in the nest a
little, with more breath than noise. It is seldom one finds a
buzzard's nest, seldom that grown-ups find a nest of any sort; it
is only children to whom these things happen by right. But
by making a business of it one may come upon them in wide, quiet
canons, or on the lookouts of lonely, table-topped mountains, three
or four together, in the tops of stubby trees or on rotten cliffs
well open to the sky.
It is probable that the buzzard is gregarious, but it seems
unlikely from the small number of young noted at any time that
every female incubates each year. The young birds are easily
distinguished by their size when feeding, and high up in air by the
worn primaries of the older birds. It is when the young go out of
the nest on their first foraging that the parents, full of a crass
and simple pride, make their indescribable chucklings of gobbling,
gluttonous delight. The little ones would be amusing as they tug
and tussle, if one could forget what it is they feed upon.
One never comes any nearer to the vulture's nest or nestlings
than hearsay.
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