Buzzard Hunting

Buzzard Hunting

In the 1950s, I was very young and living in East Texas, in a house at the edge of a town that itself seemed on the edge of a human diorama. From my house I could walk out of a brown grass yard, across a road emitting perpetually swirling dust and light bending heat waves and step onto what seemed an endless prairie. I could walk a short distance further and my small white house with red trimmed windows along with the world outside of my imagination disappeared from my view and my consciousness. The small buttes became mountains in a desert wilderness and the burnt blue sky framed no known horizon—I had entered the chimerical world of a child. Pat and I came here to trap a big bird—to latch onto a bony leg just above a monstrous talon. To do this we had a simple plan.

Buzzards, turkey vultures, were always circling overhead above the rounded, barren buttes. Thousands of feet up they rode thermals on wings spanning six feet...pretty and graceful. It wasn’t until they landed and folded away their elegant wings that the small, slick red head, bowed neck, and suspicious searching gate belied their majesty.

I knew they circled the dead, so I devised a plan for attracting and catching one. My friend Pat and I would spirit away bottles of ketchup from our ice boxes (that’s what we called refrigerators) at home and walk into the prairie and up the side of a butte. We would find a sun baked sandstone boulder and lie across it with ketchup dripping from our heads and arms. The buzzards would assume we were dead and begin to circle, eventually they would spiral down. We knew if we were patient enough they would land and try to pick our bones. It is then we would lash out and catch one. What we would do next was not planned; luring the buzzard, bringing it close enough to grab its crooked neck just below its tiny noggin was my only objective—tricking the buzzard was the thing.

We lay for a long time, breathing with shallow breaths to minimize movement. At last, eight-year-old Pat, in his Texas hick manner of speaking, said, “this ain’t never gonna work, Billy.”

“Yes it will. Now shut up, Pat,” I said. “Buzzards can see a mouse twitch its whiskers a mile away; they’ll see your lips move!” (Actually buzzards have unspectacular sight; it is their sense of smell that brings them to dinner…the putrid aroma of decaying flesh wafting along hot air currents is like to us an open window to a bakery.) Through squinted eyes and with great expectations we watched, ignoring trickling sweat and buzzing flies. One or two buzzards flew above us, passing by. No circle of birds ever formed. They were neither hungry nor fooled. In twenty minutes—a very long time to lay across hard rock in the blistering Texas sun—we gave up playing corpse, packed up our ketchup bottles and headed home. I assumed for a long time after that it was Pat talking or our impatience that foiled the hunt. In truth, I suppose it takes more than ketchup and an inert living body to fool a buzzard; very fortunate for us, I would learn later.

When I was a grown man, my Dad told me his buzzard story.

Dad grew up on a small farm in rural Texas in the 1930s. He had a neighbor that plowed rough dry ground with a three bottom plow and a mule. His neighbor was old (fifty maybe), rail thin, creased like an ancient desert Indian, and looked perpetually weary. He would plow long straight furrows in the hot sun for hours, then take a break and lie down in the shade of his mule, left hitched, for a short nap.

One day the neighbor must have been particularly done in because he fell into such a deep sleep he didn’t hear or sense the buzzard alight next to him. The mule did, and he danced in place nervously, only the weight of the plow preventing him from bolting. It would have been better if he had; then the old man may have awakened. But he didn’t. The old man slept like Rip Van Winkle as the buzzard strutted toward him. The sleeping man moved not at all…withered and dead he seemed through the buzzard’s beady eyes. The curious bird thought he caught the slightest delicious aroma of carrion. He sidled toward the sleeping farmer, growing more confident. Buzzards are not all that sharp, just macho. He hesitated only a moment before his neck sprang like a frog’s tongue after a hovering dragonfly. That quick he decided on eyeball for lunch. The old man stirred now, but not as fast as you might think. He awoke thinking he was in the throes of a headache from the sun now hitting his face when he saw, with one eye I suppose, the turkey vulture take flight with something dangling from its beak, glinting in the sun. The farmer’s boney hand went to the left side of his face to feel the blood stream at the same time that he closed his right eye to test the horrifying theory just dawning—that the buzzard had flown away with the left eye. It had.

This was, my Dad insisted, a true story. Man, I obviously didn’t know enough about buzzards to try hunting them that day long ago. What if one had landed on that sandstone next to me…would he have had my eye before I, his neck? Had we fooled them…there would be a story.