They Keep To The Southerly Sierras, And Are Bold
Enough, It Seems, To Do Killing On Their Own Account When No
Carrion Is At Hand.
They dog the shepherd from camp to camp, the
hunter home from the hill, and will even carry away offal from
under his hand.
The vulture merits respect for his bigness and for his bandit
airs, but he is a sombre bird, with none of the buzzard's frank
satisfaction in his offensiveness.
The least objectionable of the inland scavengers is the
raven, frequenter of the desert ranges, the same called locally
"carrion crow." He is handsomer and has such an air. He is nice
in his habits and is said to have likable traits. A tame one in a
Shoshone camp was the butt of much sport and enjoyed it. He could
all but talk and was another with the children, but an arrant
thief. The raven will eat most things that come his way,--eggs and
young of ground-nesting birds, seeds even, lizards and
grasshoppers, which he catches cleverly; and whatever he is about,
let a coyote trot never so softly by, the raven flaps up and after;
for whatever the coyote can pull down or nose out is meat also for
the carrion crow.
And never a coyote comes out of his lair for killing, in the
country of the carrion crows, but looks up first to see where they
may be gathering. It is a sufficient occupation for a windy
morning, on the lineless, level mesa, to watch the pair of them
eying each other furtively, with a tolerable assumption of
unconcern, but no doubt with a certain amount of good understanding
about it. Once at Red Rock, in a year of green pasture, which is
a bad time for the scavengers, we saw two buzzards, five ravens,
and a coyote feeding on the same carrion, and only the coyote
seemed ashamed of the company.
Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild
creatures, and their cognizance of the affairs of their own kind.
When the five coyotes that range the Tejon from Pasteria to
Tunawai planned a relay race to bring down an antelope strayed from
the band, beside myself to watch, an eagle swung down from Mt.
Pinos, buzzards materialized out of invisible ether, and hawks came
trooping like small boys to a street fight. Rabbits sat up in the
chaparral and cocked their ears, feeling themselves quite safe for
the once as the hunt swung near them. Nothing happens in the deep
wood that the blue jays are not all agog to tell. The hawk follows
the badger, the coyote the carrion crow, and from their aerial
stations the buzzards watch each other. What would be worth
knowing is how much of their neighbor's affairs the new generations
learn for themselves, and how much they are taught of their elders.
So wide is the range of the scavengers that it is never safe
to say, eyewitness to the contrary, that there are few or many in
such a place. Where the carrion is, there will the buzzards be
gathered together, and in three days' journey you will not sight
another one. The way up from Mojave to Red Butte is all
desertness, affording no pasture and scarcely a rill of water. In
a year of little rain in the south, flocks and herds were driven to
the number of thousands along this road to the perennial pastures
of the high ranges. It is a long, slow trail, ankle deep in bitter
dust that gets up in the slow wind and moves along the backs of the
crawling cattle. In the worst of times one in three will
pine and fall out by the way. In the defiles of Red Rock, the
sheep piled up a stinking lane; it was the sun smiting by day. To
these shambles came buzzards, vultures, and coyotes from all the
country round, so that on the Tejon, the Ceriso, and the Little
Antelope there were not scavengers enough to keep the country
clean. All that summer the dead mummified in the open or dropped
slowly back to earth in the quagmires of the bitter springs.
Meanwhile from Red Rock to Coyote Holes, and from Coyote Holes to
Haiwai the scavengers gorged and gorged.
The coyote is not a scavenger by choice, preferring his own
kill, but being on the whole a lazy dog, is apt to fall into
carrion eating because it is easier. The red fox and bobcat, a
little pressed by hunger, will eat of any other animal's kill, but
will not ordinarily touch what dies of itself, and are exceedingly
shy of food that has been man-handled.
Very clean and handsome, quite belying his relationship in
appearance, is Clark's crow, that scavenger and plunderer of
mountain camps. It is permissible to call him by his common name,
"Camp Robber:" he has earned it. Not content with refuse, he pecks
open meal sacks, filches whole potatoes, is a gormand for bacon,
drills holes in packing cases, and is daunted by nothing short of
tin. All the while he does not neglect to vituperate the chipmunks
and sparrows that whisk off crumbs of comfort from under the
camper's feet. The Camp Robber's gray coat, black and white barred
wings, and slender bill, with certain tricks of perching, accuse
him of attempts to pass himself off among woodpeckers; but his
behavior is all crow. He frequents the higher pine belts, and has
a noisy strident call like a jay's, and how clean he and the
frisk-tailed chipmunks keep the camp! No crumb or paring or bit of
eggshell goes amiss.
High as the camp may be, so it is not above timberline, it is
not too high for the coyote, the bobcat, or the wolf. It is the
complaint of the ordinary camper that the woods are too still,
depleted of wild life. But what dead body of wild thing, or
neglected game untouched by its kind, do you find?
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