Vultures were circling overhead when Chris Bird arrived to a call of a horse stuck in deep mud near a pond in Rockaway Beach.
As Bird, the assistant fire chief for Western Taney County Fire Protection District, spotted a scavenger perched on the steed's back, he wondered if the crew was too late.
"I thought the horse was dead," Bird told the News-Leader in a phone interview Monday. "It was so still. When I walked over, the buzzard flew off then the horse just turned and looks at me like, 'I'm glad you're here.'"
The horse, Bird later learned, escaped from its home a mile away about a day-and-a-half prior.