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35 The Buzzard What do you do for a buzzard with a busted wing? After all that pity for a crippled fox, it’d be bigotry not to help the thing. They held it in the field glasses from the front door— death’s authentic dark gargoyle, all right, trampling the hilltop over the mailbox. Was there something in the graveyard it was waiting for? —And then they saw the one wing dragging the dirt. He put on his boots and his jeans and his checked shirt, and took two towels in case it wanted to fight (to wrap his arm up in like a falconer’s), and strung his neck with bumping binoculars. It was a pleasant hunt in the downhill light, an excuse to visit the creek and look at roots where the floods had laid them bare as old men’s veins, and think what had its warrens where they wound, and think of spiders wintering underground— but always there was that buzzard shadowing his thoughts, and nothing but finding it would really do. They met at last in a stand of green bamboo sprung up from rubble-heap hillside moraines: crack-leathered shoes, the burst hull of a tire whose sidewall held a little stagnant rain, half-buried bottles dreaming in their moss, tin cans brittle as beetle-eaten pine bark, and one dead buzzard, maybe, by the time it got dark. A green light blossomed frailly in the cane that meant, he knew, the red sun’s bulge and loss unseen: a sky like fire’s exhaust on fire. The moment prompted and the two of them began a halting and intermittent stampede which only ended when the creature ran headlong into a forgotten fence’s wire a tree held partly out of earth, and so ensnarled its neck no yanking could get it freed. 36 He squatted for a look in the last grey glow. That wicked, rumpled beak, the naked head . . . Was it like a hawk? And if so, how much? He put out a hesitant, trial hand, and jerked it back in an electric dread when the buzzard shifted. It might have been, no matter what he would have let on then, his own death he put out a hand to touch. That was before he was able to understand, before they’d left it in the tub all night as in the mind’s aseptic analysis— one wretched blot on all that glaring white every time he came in and swtiched on the light. He’d torn a T-shirt into strips, held the knot with his teeth and breathed through his lips, but hadn’t had the nerve to call a vet. He would have bet whatever you wanted to bet not one would have been willing to handle this. Who would believe him if he were to swear this oddment, fragment from that broken vortex, that black, revolving augury in air that sends such shudders through our orderings— see how he ducks at a fancied attack?— is just a poor, big, worried-looking chicken, a bureaucrat and black-robed clerk, with wings? In the morning they transferred it to the shed, where it remained and did not seem to weaken, and showed a stomach for the dog food they fed (no need to worry whether it might spoil). But one day he came out, and there it was, dead. And so he had another guilt on his head— to have forced it from a proper funeral-soil and made it die in prison on a dirt floor, lightless but for chink-dazzle as the sun sank lower— to carry with him into how many springs, into a life that seemed wider and more gentle, if somewhat lonelier and more accidental, stopped in the woods by the whump of big black wings, his kinsmen laboring up from their soup and strings. ...

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