One came, finally, dropping like the sound of an incoming shell and breaking, with doubled-forward pinions and feathered legs and talons thrust forward to hit Old Kite as though he were killing him. He then walked pompously around and started working in the cavity. The others came in more gently and heavy winged but with the same long feathered wings and the same thick necks, big heads and dipped beaks and golden eyes.
I lay there watching them eat at the body of my friend and partner that I had killed and thought that they were lovelier in the air. Since they were condemned I let them eat a while and quarrel and go pacing and mincing with their selections from the interior. I wished that I had a shotgun but I hadn’t. So I took the .22 Winchester finally and shot one carefully in the head and another twice in the body. He started to fly but could not make it and came down wings spread and I had to chase him up the high slope. Nearly every other bird or beast goes downhill when it is wounded. But an eagle goes uphill and when I ran this one down and caught his legs above the killing and holding claws and, with my moccasined foot on his neck, folded his wings together and held him with his eyes full of hatred and defiance, I had never seen any animal or bird look at me as the eagle looked. He was a golden eagle and full grown and big enough to take bighorn sheep lambs and he was a big thing to hold and as I watched the eagles walking with the guinea fowl and remembered that these birds walk with no one I felt badly about Miss Mary’s sorrow but I could not tell her what the eagles meant to me nor why I had killed these two, the last one by smacking his head against a tree down in the timber, nor what their skins had bought at Lame Deer on the Reservation.
We were out riding in the hunting car when we saw the eagles and the guinea together and it was in the open glades of the forest that had been so damaged when the great herd of more than two hundred elephants had come through early that year and pulled and butted the trees down. We had gone there to check on the buffalo herd and perhaps to run onto a leopard that I knew lived there in the big unharmed trees close to the papyrus swamp. But we had seen nothing except the overrunning of the caterpillars and the strange armistice between the birds. Mary had located a few more possible Christmas trees and I had been thinking too much about eagles and about the old days. The old days were supposed to have been simpler but they were not; they were only rougher. The Reservation was rougher than the Shamba. Maybe not. I did not really know but I did know that the white people always took the other people’s lands away from them and put them on a reservation where they could go to hell and be destroyed as though they were in a concentration camp. Here they called the reservations the Reserves and there was much do-gooding about how the natives, now called the Africans, were administered. But the hunters were not allowed to hunt and the warriors were not allowed to make war. G.C. hated poachers because he had to have something to believe in so he had taken to believing in his job. He would, of course, insist that if he did not believe in his job he would never have taken it and he would be right in that too. Even Pop in one of the greatest rackets of all, the safari swindle, had very strict ethics; the strictest. The customer must be taken for every possible cent but he must be given results. All Great White Hunters were touching about how they loved the game and hated to kill anything but usually what they were thinking about was preserving the game for the next client that would come along. They did not want to frighten it by unnecessary shooting and they wanted a country to be left so that they might take another client and his wife or another pair of clients into it and it seem like unspoiled, never shot-over, primitive Africa that they could rush their clients through giving them the best results.
Pop had explained all this to me one time many years before and said when we were up the coast fishing at the end of the safari, “You know no one’s conscience would ever let them do this to anyone twice. If they like them I mean. The next time you come out and get some transport, better bring it, and I’ll find you the boys and you can hunt anywhere you’ve been and you’ll work out new places and it will cost you no more than to hunt at home.”
But it had turned out that rich people liked how much it cost and they came back again and again and it always cost more and was something that others could not do so that it was increasingly attractive. Old rich people died and there were always new ones and the animals decreased as the stock market rose. It was a big revenue-producing industry for the Colony too and because of this the Game Department, which had control over those who practiced the industry, had, with its development, produced new ethics that handled, or nearly handled, everything.
It was no good thinking about ethics now and less good to think about Lame Deer where you sat on a mule deer hide in front of a teepee with your two eagle tails spread out with the under sides up so that the lovely white ends and the soft plumes showed and said nothing while they were looked at and held your tongue in the bargaining. The Cheyenne who wanted them the most cared nothing anymore except for tail plumes. He was beyond all other things or all other things had been removed. To him eagles on the land of the Reservation were as they circled high in the sky and unapproachable when they settled on a pile of gray rock to watch the country. Sometimes they could be found and killed in blizzards when they sat against a rock back against the driving snow. But this man was no good in blizzards anymore. Only the young men were and they were gone.
You sat and did not talk and did not talk and sometimes reached out and touched the tails and stroked the plumes very lightly. You thought about your horse and about the second bear that had come through the pass to the horse after the killing of the eagles while the horse was still a bear bait and how when you had shot him a little too low in the bad light, taking him from the edge of the timber where the wind was right, he had rolled over once and then stood and bawled and slapped both his great arms as though to kill something that was biting him and then come down on all fours and came bouncing like a lorry off a highway and you had shot him twice as he came down the hill and the last time so close you smelled the fur burn. You thought of him and of the first bear. The hide had slipped on him and you took the long cured grizzly claws out of your shirt pocket and laid them out behind the eagle tails. Then you did not talk at all and the trading started. There had been no grizzly claws for many, many years and you made a good trade.
There were not any good trades this morning but the best thing was the storks. Mary had only seen them twice in Spain. The first time was in a small town in Castile on our way across the high country to Segovia. This town had a very fine square and we had stopped there in the heat of the day and gone out of the blinding light into the cool darkness of the inn to get our wine skins filled. It was very cool and pleasant in the inn and they had very cold beer and in this town they had a free bullfight one day each year in the lovely square in which everyone who wished could fight the three different bulls that were turned loose from their boxes. People were nearly always wounded or killed and it was the big social event of the year.
On this particularly hot day in Castile Miss Mary had discovered the storks nested on top of the tower of the church which had looked down on so many tauric incidents. The wife of the innkeeper had taken her up to a high room of the house where she might photograph them and I was talking at the bar with the owner of the local transport and trucking company. We talked about the different Castilian towns which had always had storks’ nests on the churches and from all I could learn from the trucking man these were as plentiful as ever. No one had ever molested storks in Spain. They are one of the few birds that are truly respected and, naturally, were the luck of the village.