After G.C. and his people were gone I was alone with Miss Mary’s sorrow. I was not really alone because there was also Miss Mary and the camp and our own people and the big mountain of Kilimanjaro that everyone called Kibo and all the animals and the birds and the new fields of flowers and the worms that hatched out of the ground to eat the flowers. There were the brown eagles that came to feed on the worms so that eagles were as common as chickens and eagles wearing long brown trousers of feathers and other white-headed eagles walked together with the guinea fowl busily eating the worms. The worms made an armistice among all the birds and they all walked together. Then great flocks of European storks came to eat the worms and there would be acres of storks moving on a single stretch of plain grown high with the white flowers. Miss Mary’s sorrow resisted the eagles because eagles did not mean as much to her as they did to me.
She had never laid under juniper bush up above timberline at the top of a pass in our own mountains with a .22 rifle waiting for eagles to come to a dead horse that had been a bear bait until the bear was killed. Now he was an eagle bait and then afterwards he would be a bear bait again. The eagles were sailing very high when you first saw them. You had crawled under the bush when it was still dark and you had seen the eagles come out of the sun when it had cleared the opposite peak of the pass. This peak was just a rise of grassy hill with a rock outcropping at the top and scattered juniper bushes on the slope. The country was all high there and very easy traveling once you had come this high and the eagles had come from far away toward the snow mountains you could have seen if you had been standing instead of lying under the bush. There were three eagles and they wheeled and soared and rode the currents and you watched them until the sun spotted your eyes. Then you closed them and through the red the sun was still there. You opened them and looked to the side limit of the blind of the sun and you could see the spread pinions and the wide fanned tails and feel the eyes in the big heads watching. It had been cold in the early morning and you looked out at the horse and his too old and too exposed now teeth that you had always had to lift his lip to see. He had a kind and rubbery lip and when you had led him to this place to die and dropped the halter he had stood as he had always been taught to stand and when you had stroked him on the blaze on his black head where the gray hairs showed he had reached down to nip you on the neck with his lips. He had looked down to see the saddled horse you had left in the last edge of the timber as though he were wondering what he was doing here and what was the new game. You had remembered how wonderfully he had always seen in the dark and how you had hung on to his tail with a bear hide packed across the saddle to come down trails when you could not see at all and when the trail led along the rimrock in the dark down through the timber. He was always right and he understood all new games.
So you had brought him up here five days before because someone had to do it and you could do it if not gently without suffering and what difference did it make what happened afterwards. The trouble was, at the end, he thought it was a new game and he was learning it. He gave me a nice rubber-lipped kiss and then he checked the position of the other horse. He knew you could not ride him the way the hoof had split but this was new and he wanted to learn it.
“Good bye, Old Kite,” I said and held his right ear and stroked its base with my fingers. “I know you’d do the same for me.”
He did not understand, of course, and he wanted to give me another kiss to show that everything was all right when he saw the gun come up. I thought I could keep him from seeing it but he saw it and his eyes knew what it was and he stood very still trembling and I shot him at the intersection between the cross lines that run from opposite eye to opposite ear and his feet went straight down under him and all of him dropped together and he was a bear bait.
Now lying under the juniper I was not finished with my sorrow. I would always feel the same way about Old Kite all of my life, or so I told myself then, but I looked at his lips which were not there because the eagles had eaten them and at his eyes which were also gone and at where the bear had opened him so that he was sunken now and the patch the bear had eaten before I had interrupted him and I waited for the eagles to come down.
One came, finally, dropping like the sound of an incoming shell and breaking, with doubled-forward pinions and feathered legs and talons thrust forward to hit Old Kite as though he were killing him. He then walked pompously around and started working in the cavity. The others came in more gently and heavy winged but with the same long feathered wings and the same thick necks, big heads and dipped beaks and golden eyes.
I lay there watching them eat at the body of my friend and partner that I had killed and thought that they were lovelier in the air. Since they were condemned I let them eat a while and quarrel and go pacing and mincing with their selections from the interior. I wished that I had a shotgun but I hadn’t. So I took the .22 Winchester finally and shot one carefully in the head and another twice in the body. He started to fly but could not make it and came down wings spread and I had to chase him up the high slope. Nearly every other bird or beast goes downhill when it is wounded. But an eagle goes uphill and when I ran this one down and caught his legs above the killing and holding claws and, with my moccasined foot on his neck, folded his wings together and held him with his eyes full of hatred and defiance, I had never seen any animal or bird look at me as the eagle looked. He was a golden eagle and full grown and big enough to take bighorn sheep lambs and he was a big thing to hold and as I watched the eagles walking with the guinea fowl and remembered that these birds walk with no one I felt badly about Miss Mary’s sorrow but I would not tell her what the eagles meant to me nor why I had killed these two, the last one by smacking his head against a tree down in the timber, nor what their skins had bought at Lame Deer on the Reservation.