The young girl can perceive that they are not flying in any particular direction, but swooping in circles, as if over some quarry that lies below.

Whatever it is, they do not appear to have yet touched it.

All keep aloft, none of them alighting on the ground, though at times stooping down, and skimming close to the tops of the sage-bushes with which the plain is thickly beset.
These last prevent the huntress from seeing what lies upon the ground; though she knows there must be something to have attracted the concourse of zopilotes.

Evidently she has enough knowledge of the desert to understand its signs, and this is one of a significant character.

It not only challenges curiosity, but calls for investigation.
"Something gone down yonder, and not yet dead ?" she mutters, in interrogative soliloquy.