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 legs and, using a fence rail as a pry, worked with the carcass until it went crashing over the brink. The noise startled Tuck, who looked around uneasily.

Returned to the stable he sadly salted the hide, while Tuck, surprised to find an empty stable, nickered and whinneyed and waited impatiently for his friend.

The buzzards did the rest.

For days they hung in the air over the gully. From the kitchen window Judith could see them moving on widespread wings. They would circle a while in one spot, then fly off a little distance and circle again, as though loath to give up their habits of search. The motion of these silent creatures, slow and steady, with no perceptible vibration of the sweeping, horizontal wings, was as beautiful as the flight of sea gulls. When they tilted, the sunlight caught the under side of the black wings and turned them gleaming silver. Watching the stately grace, the balanced dignity of their movements as they circled alone in the wide emptiness of the winter sky, Judith felt herself enfolded in a deep sense of calm, as though Nature had laid upon her brow a firm, soothing hand and told her to be at peace. The flight of the birds added beauty and dignity to the thought of death; and for the first time in her life it seemed a thing to be looked upon with calmness. She was affected as she might have been by a Greek tragedy or by Bach's coldly austere music. She felt no sense of shrinking, but rather a solemn uplift of the heart in the thought that some day she too would return to the ground; and that always, when she was no longer there to see it, sunshine in winter would be a lovely thing, and other buzzards, foul smelling birds though they were, would soar and tilt with incomparable grace and stateliness over other dead horses and dead dogs that like her had had their day.

After the buzzards were gone, she was still followed by the thought of death. But it was no longer a beautiful thought. She shrank from it and tried to turn her thoughts to other things.

The horse's death brought them many visits of condolence.