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. 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 perennialpastures
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? And put out
offal away from camp over night, and look next day at the foot