Kingdom of Carrion

by john clare

Lord Micco Aura sat upon the highest limb of the largest bald cypress, his court of lesser Cathartes aura and Caragyps atratus upon the lower branches, in order of rank, quietly awaiting orders. Lately, the Kingdom of Carrion had fallen upon the lean years, affecting the entire realm. Even the Double-crested Cormorant down to the secretive Bittern felt the blight, daily supplicating the heavens with his upturned bill.
And to add further to the collected misery, from the Northern Slave River rapid regions, the White Pelican had arrived to compete for the depleting pooled fish, herding collectively the imprisoned schools of shad and brim, taking upwards of four pounds apiece daily. Lord Micco Aura quietly observed all this below from his bleached white throne and brooded deeply.
Even to the South and North, in the realm of the human habitation, their trails offered a decreasing supply of kill as the metal skinned ones plied their straight paths at a more cautious pace.
So into this graying sky of winter Lord Micco Aura gave the call to soar, to search again the rising thermals for the sweet aroma of decay. In circling funnels they resembled a gentle tornado coming, the black and turkey vulture, interspersed with the solitary Bald Eagle and occasionally passing Sand hill Crane, chiding Lord Micco Aura that it looked as if his Kingdom was falling, that soon, the lowest Anhinga would sit upon the white-bleached throne.
This further disturbed the Micco of the once grand Kingdom of Carrion, as the thought of his offspring taking the lesser branches under the realm of the worm-infested Anhinga and his ally, the Cormorant, was a future too bleak for even the blackest Vulture.
For the days of death he yearned, the days when throughout the vast land, the dying was regular, the decay bountiful. Plenty of putrid flesh for all to find in an ordered fashion. No need for the current frenzied, uncivil tearing of the flesh that reduced the once stately Vulture to the lowest levels of Nature.
Today the lone scent from a discarded wild boar, his hocks cut from him, was spotted along a dirt man trail. As Vultures of a new order, they no longer waited for Lord Micco Aura to make the ceremonial first slit of the soft underbelly. The covering of the swine was sudden and complete. It was each Vulture for himself.
In the end, as they perched and preened in the surrounding pines, wings outstretched to dry the blood and kill the bacteria, they realized each in silent thought, they had become what they never dreamed. Mere scavengers, mad at the scent of death, of decay, never satisfied, never enough, always in search of the smell of carrion, ranging further and further from the home they once gathered to.
Individual loners, wandering in ever decreasing soaring patterns, alone in a dispersed Kingdom once abounding, but now yielding only
a frail life clung onto tightly.