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THE SCAVENGER

Who has not lost himself in rapt and reverent admiration as he has stood before A. T. A. Schenk’s great picture of ‘Anguish’ in the Melbourne Art Gallery? The dead lamb lying stiff and stark on the bleak and snow-wrapped moor; the grim circle of coal-black crows perched ominously round, craning their necks and flapping their wings in their impatience to blood their beaks and bury their talons in the banquet that awaits them; the tell-tale crimson blood-marks that splash the white, white snow; and, most affecting of all, the distracted mother, with eyes that would move the coldest onlooker to tears, standing sadly over her lifeless lamb, attempting, like Rizpah in the Bible story, to protect her precious charge from the avarice of the hungry birds. It is a pathetic painting; but it is not with its pathetic side that I propose to deal. I am the champion of the crows. And in order to help me to a better opening of my case, I propose to lay beside ‘Anguish’ another picture of a very similar kind, but in which the element of pathos is somewhat less pronounced.

Mr. E. T. Grogan is, as readers of From Cape to Cairo know, the Cambridge undergraduate who trudged right through Africa from the far north to the extreme south. ‘I envy you,’ wrote Cecil Rhodes ‘for you have done that which has been for centuries the ambition of every explorer. The amusement of the whole thing is that a youth from Cambridge during his vacation should have succeeded in doing that which the ponderous explorers of the world have failed to accomplish. There is a distinct humour in the whole thing. It makes me the more certain that we shall complete the telegraph and railway, for surely I am not going to be beaten by the legs of a Cambridge undergraduate!’ But to our picture! In the course of his trudge Mr. Grogan shot a zebra, and left it in the bush for lion-bait. Rising at daylight next morning, he took his gun, and crept cautiously towards it. ‘It would be difficult,’ he says, ‘to imagine a more perfect picture. In the background stretched the limitless plain, streaked with mists shimmering in the growing light of the rising sun. Clumps of graceful palms fenced in a sandy area where the zebra had fallen. Round its attenuated remains a strange group had gathered. In the centre I saw a grand old lion leisurely gnawing the ribs. Behind him were four little jackals squatting in a row. They were like four little images of Patience, sitting there whilst the lion, in all his might and matchless grandeur of form, leisurely chewed and scrunched the tit-bits. And around these, scarcely out of reach of the swish of the monarch’s tail, was a solid circle of some two hundred vultures, craning their bald necks and hustling one another. Loth to break the spell, I watched the scene for fully ten minutes. Then, as he showed signs of moving, I took the chance afforded of a broadside shot and bowled him over. He was a fine black-mane lion, and measured over ten feet — a very unusual length.’

Now, I appear — as the lawyers say in court — for the defendants. I represent the crows in the first picture; I am for the lion, the jackals, and the vultures in the second. And I think that I have a particularly strong case. It is not good that the carcase of the lamb should be left to pollute the field. My clients, the crows, did not kill the lamb. But now that it is dead, it is fit and proper that the body should be removed. Otherwise it will vitiate the air, and become a menace to living lambs, and perhaps bring anguish to other fleecy mothers. And so the crows have come to save the lives of those living lambs, and to preserve those other mothers from despair. They are Nature’s undertakers, sent to remove the object that will soon be a festering eyesore and a fruitful source of pestilence and peril. Again, it is not good that this dead zebra should, under a fierce African sun, sow every breeze that blows with the germs of frightful disease, and thus become a plague-spot in a paradise. And so my clients, the lion, the jackals, and the vultures, as shrewd and sensible sanitary officers, have come to remove a nuisance that threatens the life of both man and beast. They are God’s scavengers — these clients of mine — and, as Frank Buckland, the eminent naturalist, finely says: ‘If any creature deserves, more than any other, to be defended and protected, it is that creature which performs the duty of a scavenger, ‘And so, gentlemen of the jury, with a very good conscience and with a very strong case, I appear for the crows, and the vultures, and the hawks, and the wolves, and the hyenas, and the jackals, and the sharks, and for all the rest of those unfortunate creatures who, without rhyme or reason, are doomed to live beneath the scowl of mankind, in spite of the fact that they spend their whole time in cleaning up God’s world and in making it sweet and wholesome and habitable for the very people who scowl at them.

And, now that I have taken up the case, I shall not be content with a bare verdict of Not Guilty. Indeed, I shall be grievously affronted and wounded and insulted if, after presenting my case, I merely secure a verdict of Not Guilty. It will not be enough for the judge to inform my innocent clients that they leave the court without a stain upon their characters. The judge and the jury must inform my clients frankly that the court is profoundly impressed by the distinguished services that my clients have for so long, and with so little recognition, rendered to mankind. The judge must turn to my clients, the crows, and he must say, ‘The court finds that so far from your having done any injury to this dead lamb, or its poor distressed mother, you and your predecessors actually made life possible for both the lamb and the mother. The court is convinced that had earlier generations of crows not been hard at work in keeping the fields cleansed from all things putrid and corrupt, plagues and pestilences would have annihilated the entire race of sheep long ago. The court desires, on behalf of both men and beasts, to thank you for the valuable services that you have rendered. Indeed, the court feels that, had there been no crows, there could have been no court. The court owes to you, and to those like you, its very existence.’ I shall not be satisfied, I repeat, unless my clients — the crows, the vultures, the wolves, and the jackals — leave the court with some such musical words as these ringing in their oft-insulted ears.

I like to think that when the great Lord of all the worlds, who always sees the best even in the worst of us, paid His wondrous visit to this little world, He paid His tribute to the value of the services rendered to humanity by these clients of mine. ‘Wheresoever the carcase is,’ He said, ‘there shall the vultures be gathered together.’ ‘Horrible!’ cries some short-sighted ignoramus. But what is horrible? That is what I want to know. What is horrible — the carcase or the vulture? It is the carcase that is horrible. And that is why the vultures set to work to remove it. And the Lord of the birds and the beasts paid His fine tribute to the prompt and effective service that my clients render. ‘In the East,’ says a well-known writer, ‘if any beast of burden falls and dies, though the moment before the whole horizon may have been clear, with not a bird in sight, a stream of vultures suddenly appears as if by magic and crowd round the spot.’ And Longfellow, in Hiawatha, tells us of the same phenomenon in the West:

Never stoops the soaring vulture
On his quarry in the desert,
On the sick or wounded bison,
But another vulture, watching
From his high aerial look-out,

Sees the downward plunge, and follows;
And a third pursues the second,
Coming from the invisible ether,
First a speck, and then a vulture,
Till the air is dark with pinions.

‘Away in the western sky,’ says Dan Crawford, in Thinking Black, ‘Lo I a dozen dark vultures hovering for the funeral of an antelope. The official mourners these, come to bury a denizen of the plains. More than mourners, they are the African grave-diggers; and more than grave-diggers, they themselves are the graves, the spades their own beaks.’ Bravely done and bravely spoken! And so the desert is kept sweet and clean and fresh — the desert that, but for the vultures, would reek with foul disease. ‘Wheresoever the carcase is, there shall the vultures be gathered together.’ It is a fine tribute to the skill, efficiency, and promptitude of my long misunderstood clients!

He — the great Master and Lord — applied it to the long drama of the world’s history. Nations, like men, die; and empires, like individuals, decay. And when life is extinct, they become corrupt, pestiferous, abominable. And whenever nations so pollute God’s fair world, He has His scavengers at hand to keep the planet sweet. Think of the Canaanitish peoples, with their abominable vices and superstitions; and the great empires of antiquity that became first voluptuous and then vile. What an imposing and impressive pageant could easily be cited! The carcase is there; and therefore, as it is written, the vultures are gathered together. The fault is not with the birds; the fault is with the body.

This great saying about the carcase and the vultures is the finest illustration I know of the blending of the divine justice and love. It is out of the divine tenderness that the crows are commanded to cluster round the dead lamb and save other lambs from pestilence. It is part of the divine care that leads the lion and the jackals and the vultures to gather round the dead zebra, and remove from the plain a hot-bed of disease. God’s judgements, both in natural history and in human history, take ugly forms; but they are wonderfully wise and no less wonderfully kind.

Yes, I hold a brief for the crows, and the vultures, and the hawks, and the wolves, and the hyenas, and the jackals, and the sharks, and for all God’s scavengers. If it were not for them I should not be here to hold the brief for them; and the jury to which I now so confidently appeal would not be here to hear me. And yet, and yet — even whilst I defend them I confess that I am frightened of them. They are a terrible crowd, these unlovely clients of mine. Even as I defend and belaud them, their frightful fangs, their blooded beaks, their dripping talons, their gleaming tusks, make me shudder. As I lay down my brief I am grateful — profoundly and ceaselessly thankful — for two things. Firstly, I am thankful, even whilst I praise them, that they only bury their hideous faces in that which is putrid and corrupt. The living sheep in the picture does not fear the crows. ‘Wheresoever the carcase is, there shall the vultures be gathered together.’ And, secondly, I am thankful — more thankful than words can tell — that I need never become their prey. ‘He that believeth,’ said their great Lord and mine, ‘he that believeth hath everlasting life.’ ‘He that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.’ ‘Never die! Never die! NEVER DIE!’ That is grand! It is a gospel worth preaching. I hurl that great triumphant word into the terrible faces of my ugly clients, and, with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, I leave my case with the court.

​F.W. Boreham, 1914.