Legend

Tallulah Totonka picked up an eagle’s feather only when the eagle itself had dropped it over the river. She never hunted eagles. She said it was they who taught people how to hunt.

Once a hunter came down to the river with a full quiver and a sack of hides on his back. He killed more than he could eat, and the hides rotted in his shed.

“Give me eagle feathers,” he demanded. “Let my arrows never miss.”

Tallulah led him up to the cliff beneath the nest. The eagle circled over a river teeming with fish, and stooped only once. It rose again with a single fish in its talons.

“Leave half your arrows here,” said Tallulah.

The hunter laughed and walked away with his quiver full.

He came back many years later, grey and stooped. The forests around his village had emptied, and it had been a long time since he brought anything home.

“The eagle doesn’t take everything it sees,” said Tallulah. “It takes what it can carry. That is why the sky still bears it up.”

She gave him a single feather. The hunters of the river still leave one arrow in the forest after every hunt – an offering to the Eagle Feathers.