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Wizards have dared to smite blood upon the gateways of the king. Dig in the burrows of the earth and find them, ye rats! Fly through the paths of the air and find them, ye vultures! Smell at the gates of the people and name them, ye jackals! ye hunters in the night! Drag them from the caves if they be hidden, from the distance if they be fled, from the graves if they be dead.

In 794 came another flock of these vultures of the sea, who robbed a church and a monastery, plundering and killing, and being killed in their turn when a storm wrecked their ships and threw them on shore.

"Suppose you saw Basil at a great distance off on the prairie, could you not tell by his actions when he had started game, and was in pursuit of it?" "Oh! yes! I could easily." "Well, then, the vultures, who have far keener sight than you, understand each other's movements thoroughly even to the shaking of a feather so that they can easily tell when one of their number has a good dinner in sight.

It was just the place for a hunted band of robbers to turn upon their pursuers for a last life and death struggle, here where even the bodies of the slain would never be found. For not once in two years does a wanderer chance to come this way, and long before that time the wolves and the vultures will have dispersed the bones of the fallen.

Only the starving lay in huddled heaps as before ominously still; while above them vultures and eagles circled, expectant, ink-black against the immense radiance beyond.

The earth changed to ocean, and the ocean was blood, and the ocean seemed deep as the seas where the whales sport in the North, but the surge rose not to the knee of that measureless image. And the ravens came round it from all parts of the heaven, and the vultures with the dead eyes and dull scream.

The boys of the village lie in wait, and shoot them with bow and arrow; and vultures have consequently acquired such a dread of these weapons, that they may be often kept off by hanging a bow from the rafters of the kitchen. As the dry season advances, the hosts of Urubus follow the fishermen to the lakes, where they gorge themselves with the offal of the fisheries.

The Matuku soldiers had left their comrades to be buried by the vultures. I descended the gully into which poor Gobo had fallen, and searched for his body, but in vain, although I found the spot where he and the other man had struck, together with the bones of the latter, which I recognized by the waist-cloth.

Hawks and vultures are exceedingly numerous both at Jenna and this place, the former are bold and disgusting birds, but the latter are so hungry and rapacious that they pounce fearlessly in the midst of the natives when at their meals.

Our operation with Jupiter Equilateral is no different from an independent miner's operation. We aren't different kinds of people." Tawney smiled. "When you get right down to it, we're both exactly the same thing ... scavengers in space, vultures picking over the dead remains to see what we can find. We come out to the asteroids, and we bring back what we want and leave the rest behind.