The Hospital
An eagle in a cage wasn’t a whole lot different from an oak tree planted in a flowerpot. Or a salmon flipping around in a puddle after a good rain. He’d seen one a zoo once, a golden eagle in a cage so small if it’d flapped its wings once it would’ve hit the other side. Odd to be so near what had always been a wheeling shape overhead, a serrated fragment, something broken off and invisibly palmed by the wind. Nearly motionless on its perch in the zoo, it was a fallen lump deprived of its halo of cloud, its backdrop of sky. Drop golden from its name, and it was just a big tobacco-brown bird. Children saw no shimmering plumage, no monkey’s tricks, heard no sound from the hooked beak, and tugged on their mothers’ hands, eager to get to the next cage, an ice cream cone dripping along the way.
Although from time to time its head turned suddenly, inexplicably, he thought the eagle hadn’t seen him. But it had. It stared, its eyes like brass drill bits, into his. It said nothing—how could it? But he heard it anyway: Let me go.
It would’ve been useless to tell the eagle he didn’t have a key to the lock.
Let me go, cousin.
It would’ve been useless telling the eagle that even if he did, he’d get arrested for tampering with zoo property. It lived by an older, simpler code. If you are my cousin, send me home.
Its amber eyes looked at him as if he were one of those glass fish, guts and delicate bones visible, weak heart pumping to its own blind rhythm. The eagle had looked in and seen, had demanded—in the name of what had set both their hearts in motion—that this matter of a cage be set right.
Send me home.
When a Hopi sent an eagle home, it involved a sack or a blanket, corn meal, and choking the bird to death. One of the old ways of the mesa. Maybe it was still done, he didn’t know, but he was thinking the bird might have preferred a hood over its head to choke off the light first, then its beak shoved into corn meal, and finally to feel two hands—hands that knew how to put thumbs on the windpipe and squeeze without malice—might have preferred that to the cage.
His father, a mason with a mason’s hands, would have handled the job right, but he had known that as soon as those great wings started flailing, the legs kicking out at the air as if pushing against a wall that wasn’t there, he would’ve let go. The bird wouldn’t go home to ancestors roosting above the sky, wouldn’t bring word of the need for rain. It would still be in a zoo. He’d just have made an enemy of the bird. Which was how it wound up anyway. The eagle turned its head away and didn’t look at him again.
Maybe he wasn’t the eagle’s cousin anymore, but he must have been once. There was proof in his name. Although somewhere down the line it had been shortened into something less unwieldy, it had once been a bird call. Logan Feather Of The Eagle Hidden From The Sun his name might have been. Until Hidden From The Sun was shortened to Black. Logan Blackfeather.
When he was in the rec room, it was full of noise and smoke. Everybody but him, it seemed, held a burning cigarette between yellowed fingers. The smoke like a katsina unable to materialize, disintegrating even as it was forming, unable to cut a discernible figure or even disappear entirely. A Hard-Luck Katsina that stagnated near the ceiling, deprived of a return to its home among the San Francisco Peaks.
When the Hopi first emerged into the Fourth World, they were accompanied by two insect people, the mahu—oversized katydids, really. It was the mahu, leading the way, who were confronted by the eagle. A cool customer, the eagle had been on his perch since the Creation. He was in a position to make demands. Where had these newcomers been when the heavens had been disemboweled? When the steaming lump that had fallen through the gaping hole, through the wastes of starry space, had been given over to the hands of the god Sotuqnangu? A test, he decided, was what was called for.
For starters, he brought the point of an arrow so close to the mahu’s eye, it nearly touched. The mahu did not blink.
Not bad, the eagle admitted, not bad. But he decided to do one better. He pulled out a bow, drew back, and shot the first mahu through the body.
The mahu, with the arrow sticking through him, began to play a soft melody on a flute.
Well I’ll be. Although the eagle was impressed, he shot the other mahu through with an arrow for good measure.
The mahus sent song flowing through the canyons and stone clefts like water. Rock formations shifted to listen, the snake ceased its hunt, the bird gave up flight. Even the pierced bodies of the mahu were healed by the music.
The eagle not only gave in, he offered one of his own feathers as a token of his admiration. A prayer given a wing feather had less of a time reaching its heavenly mark. Comfortable being sandwiched by earth and firmament, the eagle became a half-willing go-between.
Logan had never seen a prayer feather, much less used one, but he’d heard of them.
Logan Prayerfeather.
Once, from somewhere near the bottom of the Grand Canyon, nothing of the sky visible but a jagged rift of blue, he’d watched an eagle spiral slowly up into the sun. With no fear of disappearing in a puff of fire. Just a trick played on the eyes, of course. Closer, though, than he’d ever get.
An eagle in a cage wasn’t a whole lot different from a river squeezed to a trickle by a dam. An oak tree planted in a flower pot. An Indian in a psychiatric hospital.