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
Armogossa 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 cañons,
or on the lookouts of lonely, table-topped mountains, three or four