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Updated: June 25, 2025
Above and beyond them towered the great Andes, and Tom, gazing up into the sky, which in places seemed almost pierced by the snow-covered peaks, saw some small black specks moving about. "Condors," said Mr. Titus, when his attention was called to them. "Some of them are powerful birds, and they sometimes pick up a sheep and make off with it, though usually their food consists of carrion."
To keep off the wolves and condors my companion made use of a very simple expedient, which I believe is often used in the North among your prairie trappers here. Several bladders were taken from the vicunas and inflated. They were then tied upon poles of maguey, and set upright over the carcasses, so as to dangle and dance about in the wind.
The biggest forest in the county now affords no refuge to any hawk above the size of a kestrel. Savernake is extensive enough, one would imagine, for condors to hide in, but it is not so.
"Condors are taken alive in traps and snares; but there is an excellent and somewhat curious method of capturing them alive, sometimes employed by the Indians of the Sierras. It is this: The hunter provides himself with the skin of some animal, such as an ox or horse, freshly taken off, and with a piece of the flesh adhering to it.
They are also very strong and difficult to kill, one of the condors having been known to walk about after it had been strangled and hung on a tree with a lasso for several minutes, and to keep on its legs after receiving three balls from a pistol. The vulture is wonderfully fitted by nature for the part it has to fill as "scavenger" abroad, this being the name they often go by.
Ludolphus puts as great hardships on them, to fight these Condors, as Vossius did, in making them fight Elephants, but not with equal Success; for Vossius's Pygmies made great Slaughters of the Elephants; but Ludolphus his Cranes sweep away the Pygmies, as easily as an Owl would a Mouse, and eat them up into the bargain; now I never heard the Cranes were so cruel and barbarous to their Enemies, tho' there are some Nations in the World that are reported to do so.
This habit is often the cause of its being discovered; for the condors wheeling in the air, every now and then descend to partake of the feast, and being angrily driven away, rise all together on the wing. The Chileno Guaso then knows there is a lion watching his prey the word is given and men and dogs hurry to the chase.
Then the coyote had bounded into the air, and the red-combed Desert condors, the scavengers of an outcast world, rose from their quarry; and Wayland, fevered, delirious, laughing, crying, kneeled over the body of a man lying on his face with his bloody hand clutched in death grip round an upright post driven into the alkali bottoms, a post with a drinking cup hung on the notched crotch, the Desert sign of a water spring beneath the drifted sands.
This habit is often the cause of its being discovered; for the condors wheeling in the air every now and then descend to partake of the feast, and being angrily driven away, rise all together on the wing. The Chileno Guaso then knows there is a lion watching his prey the word is given and men and dogs hurry to the chase.
"Thanks," said Tom, easily. "I'm glad I happened to be around. I supposed condors only went for things dead, but I reckon, as you say, it mistook the baby in the deer skin for a dead animal. And I guess it might have carried your little one off, or at least lifted it up, and then it might have dropped it far enough to have killed it.
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