Bone Song
The rain hadn’t stopped in a week, and they were starving. The squirrels and voles had all retreated to hidden burrows and the sheep that scaled the mountains had taken refuge in shelters unknown to him. Even the fish were either washed downstream by the swelling river waters or were nestled deep in the lake; either way, they were far from his reach.
It was not his hunger that troubled him however; it was the eaglets’ nestled under his mate’s brood patch. They had only entered the nest a few sunrises before the storm and were only just now beginning to look like proper creatures, albeit more white fluff than flesh. They were not yet old enough to quell their need to feed, so they kept his mate and him awake with their insistent squawking. The oldest, the strongest, had begun to make use of his legs, moving with wobbling hops across the nest to search for food that wasn’t there. His sister, the second hatched, was smaller and more content to sit and wait with unhappy screeches. The youngest and weakest simply lay and chirped.
This hunt was the first successful one in two days. The rain had lessened in a moment of mercy and the riverbank came alive with hungry prey. In their excitement of the hour, he had no trouble diving atop a feeding hare and cracking its skull with a squeeze of his talons. The prey around him scrambled for their burrows, shockingly thrown back into reality where a feast for them meant a feast for him. Claws tightened around the hare’s middle, he quickly returned to flight and fought against the increasingly heavier rainfall to rise to the crevice in the mountain their nest was tucked into.
Once arrived, he perched on the edge of the nest and poised to tear into the still-warm meat. Upon sighting the meal, the two strong chicks shrieked, opened their beaks, and tilted their heads upwards in overjoyed expectance. He tore into the hare’s soft underbelly and the nest filled with the steaming heat of the carcasses’ gasses. His gizzard contracted in selfish anticipation, but the incessant cries of his chicks overrode his own hunger; soon they were swallowing strips of intestine and stomach.
They had nearly devoured the entire belly of the hare when he buffeted them away with his wings and dragged the body over to his mate. He placed the hare at her talons expectantly, but his mate remained bent over and unresponsive, as if her crop were not empty too. Ignoring the still hungry chicks, he dipped his head in parallel with hers to look at the third chick lying in the center of the nest. The chick was limp-limbed and lethargic, beak agape and eyes slitted and dim. His mate emitted quiet whistling chirps as she turned her head back and forth in distress. He used his beak to nudge the chick halfway onto his back, but instead of catching himself, the chick flopped onto his side with the pull of gravity and lay still once again.
Almost frantically, he turned to the hare and ripped meat from its hindquarters and pressed it to the chick’s gaping beak. The little one remained still even when his father eased the sliver of rabbit so it reached into his throat. The eagle watched, still hoping for a response to the food, while the chick’s eyes closed and his sides raised so little it was nearly impossible to see the breath passing in and out of his body. He rolled the chick onto his back once again and he stayed there, his tongue making nearly inaudible clicks as the skin around his eyes paled. With a progression so slow it was almost deniable it was happening at all, the chick’s tongue began to still and his chest began to lie flat. The father rolled him back onto his side but quickly retracted his talon; all the warmth had gone from the tiny body.
His mate’s whistles became high-pitched cries and she lowered her chest over her chick to try and warm him again, but it was too late. He lay beneath her, forever cold.
When dawn came it was drowned by the rain. The land remained dismal and dark, the sky smoke grey and heavy. The chicks awakened with the hidden sun and beg for food, but the rabbit was all but devoured save for the hind leg he saved for his mate. She had not moved since settling over her lost chick and the meal left for her had not been touched.
She remained brooding over the body for two days, leaving the living chicks to him and hardly moving even to defecate, for she eats nothing to pass. He spent all the time he was confined to the nest by the storms preening her feathers and cooing, but she gave him no recognition in return. He left her in her mourning to hunt when the weather allowed, but returned empty clawed more often than not. Their chicks no longer had the robust impatience for food now and their mother largely ignored them, even denying them the warmth of her breast.
The third day the rain was so thick the trees could not be discerned from the sky. He was lying by his mate, beak combing through her dulling brown feathers, when movement caught his attention in his peripheral. A miniscule mite was crawling across the shaft of one of her scapular feathers. At once he was on his feet, screeching in alarm and stomping his claws aggressively at his mate. She raised her head and fixed him with a deadly glare, but the raptor persisted his harassment until she drew herself up to peck at him, revealing the gruesome scene under her.
The deceased eaglet’s swollen skin had festered in her body heat and turned deep purple. Its mouth and eyes were swarmed with mites and ants. They had left bites on his mate too; the bare skin exposed by her brood patch was a sickly and pale. The pair locked eyes and tension bristled between them as they tried to anticipate what the other would do. Their chicks retreated to the back of the nest and watched nervously.
He made the first move. He swept a wing in front of her and grabbed the body in his claws. She lunged for him, beak bearing down on his wing to bite, but days without food had weakened her severely and he was out of the nest and in the air within the second.
The rain slammed into him as he shot out from the nest, making each wing beat a laborious effort, but he kept his elevation and searched the ground with his eyes shielded by his third eyelid. Thunder broke above him as the river raced toward him, and his wings grew heavy with water as he circled above the flooded banks. A bolt of lightning lit the cumulus clouds and he released his son’s body so it dropped straight into the churning waters that swallowed it eagerly.
His mate was waiting for him at the mouth of the crevice, hackles and wings raised in a furious challenge. When he attempted to land and seek refuge from the rain, she barely missed his chest with a talon. More attempts to pass her proved futile, so, defeated, he turned and allowed the beating rainfall to carry him down to the treetops. He found a sheltered branch uninhabited and settled there to pass the night, the storm raging all the while.
The morning brought light. The backs of his eyelids were illuminated with orange and he drowsily blinked awake. The sky was hardly spotted with clouds- and only wisps at that- and the almost forgotten blue sent the forest into a waking euphoria. Bird song and bug chatter filled every wavelength, but he could only focus on one thing. The hunger in his gizzard was beginning to cause him pain, so it was that he propelled himself from the branch and navigated through the trees until he reached the uncovered stretch of land around the river bordered behind him by the forest and on the other by the mountain he made his home. A water vole scurried along the edge of the river where it had overtaken bushes and reeds, and as it stretched to reach a berry hanging just over the water, he snatched it in one fell swoop.
His mate was glad for the food. The blue sky and potential of prey seemed to have greatly elicited her grace, for she let him in the nest without trouble and took the vole to feed the chicks herself. Then, once their children’s bellies were full, he offered the sky to her with a gesture and they took flight above the river bottom together. Their shadows followed them along the ground as they soared and surveyed the land below for prey suitable for two full-grown eagles. It seemed an eternity of searching had passed and his mate had begun to look weary from exhaustion and malnutrition when they finally spotted the perfect target: a red fox stalking a thrush. He dipped a wing to signal to her before tucking his wings tight to his body and dropping out of the sky.
His mate went before him, coming down straight atop the thrush and crushing its neck. The fox had just enough time to snarl in frustration at her and lay its ears flat before he bore down on its back, flinging his wings open and sinking his talons into the base of the fox’s skull. The fox struggled with canine yelps before he hopped and jerked the fox with him, silencing it. His mate carried the thrush over to him and together they feasted.
It was late afternoon when they took flight again and clouds had begun to gather on the horizon once more. The heaviness in his crop and stomach left no room for worry however, and his mate had already regained some gleam to her feathers. Leaving little of the fox behind, they took again to the skies and headed for home. In the air he teased her with taps on her wings with his feet, and she gave chase to him across the river bottom like the young love struck eagles they once were.
She reached the nest before him, much to her delight, and while she entered he circled and let one last thermal column carry him higher and higher into the sky. Eventually he descended, and as he neared the nest his mate lets out a trembling shriek. He landed and was confronted with his mate, her eyes wide and distressed. She sounded soft calls as he looks behind her and-
The nest was empty.
White down was scattered around the nest, the moss and sticks lining the top of the nest were in disarray, and the air reeked of fear. His mate paced through the center of the nest and increased the volume of her calls, frantically pushing aside bits of the nest in search of her chicks. He walked to her and whistled, but she pushed past him and flew from the nest. He follows her back out while she shrieks into the lazy spring afternoon. He searched the ground rather than joining her screeches, and eventually his eyes found the sluggish slithering of a snake on a ledge on the base of the mountain. With an alarmed cry, he jerked his flight path around to intercept the snake. He landed on the ledge sloppily, nearly toppling off, and he only just had time to register the two large bulges in the rattler’s body before his mate has landed atop the serpent. The rattlesnake had hardly enough time to shake its tail before she was ripping into it with her talons and beak, turning the snake into a pulpy resemblance of what it once was.
As he stood by while his mate tore into the snake, a low scream sounded from below them and echoed off of the cliff walls. He stood rigid and alert, hackles raised, but his mate did not react, completely consumed by her vengeance. The scream sounded again, this time closer and louder, and whistled to her, then again when she paid him no attention. When she still gave no acknowledgement, he pushed against her with his chest and screeched. She looked at him with a beak full of snake meat and screeched back at him double the volume. Before he could return the favor his vision was blurred by tawny and black and he was tumbling off of the ledge.
He hit rock with his back further down the mountain, and watched, stunned, as his mate was held limp in a lion’s jaws, her beak open in a silent cry and her eyes still open and angry. The lion tightened its teeth around her windpipe and crushed it, then looked down at where he lay on his back, breathless and petrified. They held eye contact for heartbeats, the sky darkening and the world stilling more and more with each moment. Finally, the lion turned away and stalked to a flat level of the mountain base to settle down and eat his mate. He did no more than flip onto his stomach while the lion ate, and the sun was absent and the cumulus clouds had returned by the time the lion was satisfied and left.
The eagle at last stood and flew to his mate’s ravaged carcass. The moonlight made her bones shine and blood glisten. Distraught, he begins calling the way she did for their chicks and circles he laid by her body, continuing his beckoning coos through the night and into the next day.
It was not until the man emerged from the forest that he left her body. The man was dressed in tawny like the lion, and he carried a stone talon. The forest was left silent where he walked, and his arrival sent the eagle fluttering into the nearest tree, where he could watch without danger.
The man approached his mate’s remains and after he examined them, he cooed and took the fur from his back and placed her body inside. He opened his beak to scream a warning to the man and take back his mate, but found no energy to muster the ferocity. And so he left.
But the eagle did not. He remained in the tree, eating nothing unless it passed directly under him or wandered into his mouth. He slept and woke but did not move; he no longer kept track of the sunrises, and most days the returned rain smothered the daybreak.
Then, one night, the man returned. The forest and even the rain fell quiet when he walked, but the eagle broke his silence at the sight of him. He cried out and the man paused before continuing on to where his mate had lain in death. The man sat cross-legged and drew a long object from his tawny fur and brought it to his lips. The object shined in the small sliver of light the partially concealed moon provided. The man blew into the object and the high-pitched whistles of the eagle’s mate filled the forest and weaved between his every feather. So they sat, listening to the song of eagles pass through the trees and rain, through the river bottom and the mountainside, and his wings lifted, long and mighty by his sides, and they found the wind again.
