and how to balance your flight when you are laden
with your prey. But you remember the taste of more delicious food; I
have often regaled you with the flesh of man." "Tell us," said the young
vultures, "where man may be found, and how he may be known; his flesh is
surely the natural food of a vulture. Why have you never brought a man
in your talons to the nest?" "He is too bulky," said the mother; "when
we find a man, we can only tear away his flesh, and leave his bones upon
the ground." "Since man is so big," said the young ones, "how do you
kill him? You are afraid of the wolf and of the bear, by what power are
vultures superior to man? is man more defenceless than a sheep?" "We
have not the strength of man," returned the mother, "and I am sometimes
in doubt whether we have the subtilty; and the vultures would seldom
feast upon his flesh, had not nature, that devoted him to our uses,
infused into him a strange ferocity, which I have never observed in any
other being that feeds upon the earth. Two herds of men will often meet
and shake the earth with noise, and fill the air with fire. When you
hear noise and see fire, with flashes along the ground, hasten to the
place with your swiftest wing, for men are surely destroying one
another; you will then find the ground smoking with blood, and covered
with carcasses, of which many are dismembered and mangled for the
convenience of the vulture." "But when men have killed their prey," said
the pupil, "why do they not eat it? When the wolf has killed a sheep, he
suffers not the vulture to touch it till he has satisfied himself. Is
not man another kind of wolf?" "Man," said the mother, "is the only
beast who kills that which he does not devour, and this quality makes
him so much a benefactor to our species." "If men kill our prey and lay
it in our way," said the young one, "what need shall we have of
labouring for ourselves?" "Because man will, sometimes," replied the
mother, "remain for a long time quiet in his den. The old vultures will
tell you when you are to watch his motions. When you see men in great
numbers moving close together, like a flock of storks, you may conclude
that they are hunting, and that you will soon revel in human blood."
"But still," said the young one, "I would gladly know the reason of this
mutual slaughter. I could never kill what I could not eat." "My child,"
said the mother, "this is a question which I cannot answer, though I am
reckoned the most sub