California Condors

California Condors are among the birds Tiratore Scelto learned to shoot as a boy, and they become the most imposing measure of the beauty and violence bound together in his memories of hunting. The narrator recalls their immense wings and stately flight even while describing how he and his father helped kill them in numbers; their later rarity gives that recollection an added weight.

Identity and Description

The birds were scavengers, not direct threats to the family’s livestock or Sheep. Yet Tiratore Scelto’s father regarded them as filthy and repulsive, creatures whose existence seemed unjustified, and his hatred extended to the raptors he believed descended on their animals. The boy’s account places the condors within a broad category of birds his father disparaged and ordered him to shoot, although the condors’ scavenging habits distinguished them from birds that attacked livestock.

Their scale sets them apart in the memory. The narrator recalls black wing feathers and a bright white row beneath each wing, which looked like a second pair. One bird measured three meters across its wings. Their calls, long circling glides, and rocking motion in the air made them formidable not only as targets but as presences in the sky.

The Hunts

At eleven, Tiratore Scelto was first taken into the prairie by his father to shoot what the older man called birds of prey. The father gave the order to fire, and the two shot together. The boy became known for his skill despite his age, earning the names Tiratore Scelto and sometimes Soldier. In this family practice, the condors were not spared: the narrator says that when he was young there were hundreds, and that he and others took pleasure in bringing them down.

The recollection conveys the mechanics and growing reach of the hunts without separating skill from harm. The narrator remembers the birds’ size and flight as vividly as the shooting, but their grandeur did not protect them. Their numbers also made them a mark of abundance to the hunters: when Golden Eagles and California Condors were plentiful, killing them was part of the boyhood activity; in the narrator’s later perspective, both had become rare.

Flight, Memory, and Rarity

The condors’ flight complicates the narrator’s account of them as targets. They circled slowly and rocked from side to side; when they finally descended to feed, other birds sometimes appeared suddenly, seemingly from beyond the reach of human sight. That unexpected arrival gives the condors a quality of remoteness and abundance that contrasts with the hunters’ attempt to command the sky from below.

The passage does not soften the violence: the boy recalls shooting the birds, while also conceding their power and beauty. The sharpest contrast is between the hundreds he remembers from childhood and their rarity in the narrator’s later present. California Condors therefore stand in the memory both as magnificent creatures and as casualties of a practice once treated as sport and proof of masculine skill.