“Like the fighter planes?” Beth asked.
“No, ma’am. Birds. Some falconers—eagle tamers, basically—from different parts of the world, all come together to work on this thing I can’t talk about in West Texas. But these eagles have been brought up around humans and trained to use their eagle superpowers in certain ways—”
“Bald eagles?” Mary demanded to know.
“No. Golden.”
Mary nodded decisively. “Good.”
Beth was nodding too. “Because fuck those things.”
What was being referred to here was a long history of ambivalent feelings toward U.S. patriotic imagery, with bald eagles and the Stars and Stripes at the top of the list. Lots of Indians in this part of the country had served in the military and spent their careers saluting that flag, but they were all perfectly aware of the fact that effigies of bald eagles, and the red, white, and blue, were the last things that many of their ancestors had ever seen.
“That’s my understanding,” Rufus said hastily. “That when Comanches related to eagles it was always goldens. Balds were not part of the picture for us.”
Mary nodded. Beth exchanged a few muttered words with her, including pia huutsu, which Rufus was pretty sure was the word
for bald eagle, and kwihnai, which he knew for sure was the word for goldens. Then they looked at him expectantly.
“But that don’t clear the picture up for me, ma’am,” Rufus continued. “I get that y’all got no time for pia huutsu and that y’all have reverence for kwihnai. But that might just make the situation worse, if you see what I’m saying, if I am mixed up in a project where the kwihnai are being, for lack of a better term, used.”
Beth totally got the picture and nodded. She discussed it with Mary for a minute or two in a rapid-fire mix of drawling Oklahoma English and Comanche.
“Our ancestors never did what these falconers do. Training them that way. We just captured them and held them captive,” Mary said. “For eagle medicine—because, you know, for some people, their personal medicine was eagle medicine—and for feathers.”
“Right! So do you think it’s okay to—”
“You said these falconers came from all over the world,” Beth said. “None of these people are Comanches, right?”
“Of course not.”
“So we don’t really have an opinion as to whether they should train golden eagles. It’s a different group of people, different religion, none of our dang business.”
“Yeah, but I’m involved and I don’t want y’all to think I’m being disrespectful.”
“What are these kwihnai being used for?” Mary asked. “What are they doing?”
“Catching rabbits?” Beth asked. “Isn’t that what falconers usually do?”
“Fighting,” Rufus said. “Fighting off invaders, I guess you could say.”
“Oh, that’s no problem then!” said his grandmother.
There had been some concern that spinning rotors might injure the birds’ talons. Piet, like Tsolmon, wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but it was easy to draw him out on this topic. He encouraged Rufus to reach out and grab Skippy’s perch and compare the
size of his hand to the eagle’s foot. If you included the long curving talons, the bird’s digits were as long as Rufus’s fingers.
Not that Rufus would have relished shoving his hand into the rotors of a drone in flight. The blades of those things were extremely lightweight, but they spun quickly. They didn’t pack enough of a punch to break a finger, but they could draw blood, and the impact hurt.
He now perceived an opportunity to be of service. Actually wrangling eagles was not a thing that he was ever going to learn. It was a whole world of fussy veterinary procedures, weird social man/bird interaction, and messing around with small dead raw animals that did not appeal to him and that he never would have become good at. Even if he were to somehow master all those skills, the fact was that the eagles they actually had at the Marble Mine had all bonded with specific human beings who were not Rufus.
But if the goal of this Special Project was to reboot the canceled Schiphol Airport Eagle vs. Drone project, then there were ways he could be of service. First of all by building practice drones, the sole purpose of which was to be ripped out of the air by eagles, using rotors with pivoting blades that would be less likely to damage the feet of an attacking eagle. These would make it possible for the falconers to train their eagles safely.