Nature's Funeral

“And they shall beat their swords into plowshares.” – Isaiah 2:4

I saw this driving through Hebbronville on my way back to Kingsville from Laredo. It was a spring morning and the trees and grasses were a lush green but something bright, brilliant and large caught the corner of my eye. I slowed to a stop. Getting out of the car, I said to myself, “I have got to see this!” It was a compelling silent command even before I got close to the scene.

This view was not too far inside the fence. It is what you are seeing here, the complete, opened carcass of a dead bovine, the stumps of its legs thrust heavenward. Sitting on its limbs, and on the mesquite limbs surrounding it were the buzzards feeding. The drama of the scene was in the death of a large animal, its red, white, and agate browns set like a stone ringed in lush spring greens studded roundabout with marble black buzzards with red gobblers and yellow eyes. It presented to me a scene as beautiful in its color as it was horrific in its aspect.

I stared awestruck and there was perfect silence. I was the sole human visitor to this event. The buzzards did not move but held their vigil. There was an ordered solemnity, a contradiction of what we think of as “the pitiless law of the jungle,” of the devoured and devouring in frenzied opposition. As I contemplated this very thought, I saw something, swooping in from my right, a white buzzard, completely albino. He flew in and landed on the ground between me and the dead bovine. A piece of bloody meat dangled, earthworm-like from his beak. For a few moments, he strutted around making large circular movements on the ground, as if addressing the partakers of this scene, as if he were some white robed high priest, making the gestures of an offering.  And then he swooped away to my right, in the same direction from which he came. The whole ceremony lasted not more than ten seconds, but it was emblazoned in my memory with the vividness of hallucination. Indeed, I wondered if that was what I saw, an illusion, but it was not an illusion. I saw this and I know I saw it, just as I have painted it.        

Can there be conscious ceremony in nature? Is there some momentary reverence in the animal kingdom for the passing of life into death? Three things impressed themselves indelibly upon me in this scene: its horror, rawness, and the sheer beauty of its spring setting as part of its ordered, and solemn, ceremonial progression. It must be a common occurrence in the vast and still wild expanses of South Texas. Yet it is probably not often witnessed by us two-legged folks. No one talks much about it. But out of all that was lush and horrid, I came away feeling that I had witnessed.