by Liz Welch
“Ayeee!” I said not too loudly, as I did not want to upset the eaglets. By now I was close enough that I could hear chirping, little high-pitched tweets, but still could not see them. The nest was around a sharp corner and I still had a way to go before I made it there. I kept moving slowly and methodically toward those tweets.
“I see the nest!” I shouted up to my father the moment I reached the rocky ledge. “The two eaglets are nesting side by side!”
I was so relieved to have made it that far, but then I realized that the true test was about to begin.
One eaglet was standing in the nest with its beak stretched open so wide, I could see its tongue. This one was already as large as a small dog, coming up to my knees in height and with a wingspan likely as wide as I was tall. The females are bigger than the males, so I knew immediately she was the one to take. Her gangly wings were flapping awkwardly. She was swaying back and forth, still unsteady, as she was so young. I could tell that she wanted to fly away but did not know how. Her brother was smaller—male eagles always are, which is why we like to capture the females—and stayed quiet, hunkered down in the nest, watching.
“Throw down the blanket!” I shouted to my father, who began to lower it in a bundle with another rope. I then knelt before the eaglet and pinched my right fingers together, as my father had instructed me to do, and started to make tiny circles with that hand in front of her sweet little face. The idea was to mesmerize her, and it seemed to work.
She became docile just as the blanket reached the nest. I quickly untied it, and all that movement must have panicked both birds as they hopped out of the nest, away from me, onto the ledge.
“They are getting away!” I cried up to my father.
“You must hurry, Aisholpan!” he yelled back down. “The mother is coming!”
I heard strong chirps from above and looked up to see a mature golden eagle circling in the distance, heading toward the nest.
“Use the rope!” my dad yelled. I made a lasso and was able to throw it over the head and shoulders of the female eaglet. I slowly and carefully maneuvered the rope down to her torso, beneath her wings, so as not to hurt her, and then was able to drag her back into the nest.
“I got her!” I shouted up, then unfolded the blanket and placed it over her startled head. I moved quickly, tying the blanket at the bottom once she was safely inside, before tugging on the rope and shouting, “Okay!” to my father, who gently pulled the eaglet up from her nest.
The mother eagle was now circling above me, and I knew I had to get out of there fast. But first, I had to place the ring in the nest. I grabbed it from my pocket and dropped it in, far from the baby boy eaglet, and then started my ascent, which was much easier than going down. My father hoisted me as I scrambled up the cliffside.
It was not until I was sitting next to my father that I felt I could really breathe. I made it.
“Let’s see what you have here,” my father said as he untied the blanket and took the eaglet out. She emerged, blinking and still stunned. He put her on his hand, prying her talons open to then wrap them around his wrist, and she just looked at him and then at me, taking it all in.
“What a fine specimen you have found, Aisholpan!” my father said. He was smiling so hard, I thought his cheeks would eclipse his eyes.
She was beautiful, with fluffy white feathers interspersed throughout her brown wings and her legs and belly, too. My father petted her head, and then I did, too.
She did not pull away.
“She already likes you,” my dad said with a proud smile.
My father wrapped the blanket around her wings, keeping her head exposed so she could see as we hiked back down the hill.
“That was stupendous!” Otto said as we approached him, with a smile as wide as my father’s. “I think we got all of it on film.”
I was not thinking about the film or Otto or anything but my eaglet, whom I decided to call White Feathers.
She was my eagle. I had caught her. I would train her. And she was what would finally make me an eagle huntress.
8
How to Train an Eagle
We got right to work. It was summer, which meant I had all day to learn how to train my eagle. The Golden Eagle Festival takes place the first weekend in October. I told my father that I wanted to enter it that same year.
“Aisholpan!” he said. “It takes years to become an eagle hunter.”
I think even he was shocked at my confidence. But I knew there was something special about my bird.
White Feathers was still a baby, so the bonding was immediate. I fed her little cubes of rabbit or lamb meat, placing them on long skewer sticks and putting them near her beak. Watching her peck and gobble the food made me so happy. She would then rub her beak on my hand or arm, which my father said was a sign of affection.
She was still too young to fly but would be ready to take flight by August. I spent that month practicing with the hood my father made for her, putting it on and pulling it off. I also placed the leather tethers, called balakhbau, on her ankles so that she could get used to them as well.
My father always says that golden eagles are like humans; if you try to train them after they are grown, they don’t do as well as the young ones, who are more malleable. Since we got White Feathers so young, she had to grow up trusting me. And so, my father’s first lesson was about love.
“If you are gentle and calm around your eagle, if you are good to her, then she will start to love you,” he explained. “Eagles have personalities, too. Some are feistier than others. Some are naturally calm.”
It soon became clear that White Feathers was a lot like me. Silent, strong, and calm. She rarely got spooked or even ruffled her feathers. But when she wrapped her talons around my wrist, I could feel her strength. I knew that if she wanted to, she could break my arm.
This is why my father kept lecturing me: “Be gentle with her, and then you won’t make her angry,” he’d say. “An eagle’s talons are so strong that it is impossible to get them to release if they don’t want to. You could attach a rope to a horse to try to pull that eagle off, and you wouldn’t be able to do that. It’s that strong.”
I practiced holding, petting, and hooding White Feathers every day. I fed her every fourth day and watched in amazement as the meat went down her throat to the top of her chest, where it would sit for a day digesting before it descended to her belly, which would puff up a little when it was full.
She got stronger and stronger every day, flapping her wings as I put her on my arm and walked around. I also practiced placing her on her saddle perch, which looked like the one we kept in our home for her, but this one was smaller and slid into a slot on the saddle to keep it upright when we were riding. She took to it naturally, with no drama at all. Calm. So calm.
It was late August when my dad could tell that she was ready to fly. It was time to train her to come to me when I called.
We saddled our ponies and took White Feathers to a hilltop not far from home. My dad had packed a rabbit skin in his bag.
“We will first teach her how to track the rabbit,” he said.
He took White Feathers and instructed me to ride down the hill and drag the rabbit pelt behind me on my pony.
Once I was in the right position, he called down, “When you call her, make the sound huu-kaa! Eagles can feel that sound in their stomachs, almost like goose bumps. That is the hunter’s signal that she should get ready to fly and catch her prey.”
I had seen my father and brother do this countless times, and had even started doing it with my brother’s eagle. But this was different. This was my eagle.
I gave him a thumbs-up so he knew I was ready, and then I started trotting my pony, dragging the rabbit behind me on a very long rope that I had looped around its neck.
“Huukaa!” I shouted, trotting in one direction and looking back at White Feathers, who was not leaving my dad’s arm, just looking left and right and then back at me.
&nb
sp; “Try again!” my dad yelled down.
I turned my pony around to go back toward my start position.
From there, I tried again, trotting a bit faster, yelling a bit louder. This time, White Feathers looked at me. My heart skipped a beat. “Huu-kaa!” I shouted, making the hu extra-guttural and the kaa… stretched out and bumpy with each trot.
I looked back at White Feathers, who spread her wings and looked ready to launch. But then she decided against it and folded her wings back into her body.
This was harder than I’d imagined.
“Make your voice even more forceful, Aisholpan!” my dad yelled down from the hilltop. “That sound calls her to attention. She has to identify it as you, your sound. No one else’s. Make it special!”
I took a deep breath and shouted, “Hu-ka!” hitting the “ka” extra hard. My dad shook his head. My bird did not budge. Then I tried elongating both the huuuu and the kaaaaa. Still nothing.
I tried one more time—strong, confident, and loud. White Feathers pricked up her head and pointed her beak toward me.
“That is it, Aisholpan!” my dad said. “I could feel in her body that she recognized you!”
I trotted back to the starting place, determined to get it this time. I threw the rabbit out behind my pony and started trotting forward, not looking back but only ahead, and mustered all my thought and focus on my call:
“HUUKAA!” I shouted, loud and strong.
And then again. “HUUKAA.”
I sensed her movement before even turning my head, and when I did turn, she was soaring right at me, wings spread, beak pointed toward the rabbit, which she landed on without making a sound.
“Good, Aisholpan!” my dad yelled from the hilltop. “Good!”
We did this exercise several more times that afternoon, and each time, White Feathers got to the rabbit a little more quickly, with a little more precision.
“The sound of each hunter is different,” my dad explained on our ride back home. “She knows your sound now. She is a smart bird. An excellent bird. She will make you proud.”
I was already so proud, and I let her know. Every time I would go to take White Feathers off the rabbit pelt that day, I petted her neck and told her what a good bird she was, and then I rewarded her with a small piece of meat. She chirped back at me, as if to say thank you, and my father explained to me that, just as hunters have their own sounds, so do eagles.
It depends on their size, how thick or thin they are. But each one chirps differently, and a good hunter can recognize the sound of his or her bird just as the bird recognizes the sound of their hunter.
“This is very important, Aisholpan,” my father explained as we were riding down the hill. “Especially at the Golden Eagle Festival, where there are sixty or seventy hunters and as many eagles. You win based on how well you know your bird and she knows you.”
As he was talking, White Feathers was chirping. We were riding home, and she had her hood on, but I think she was happy and proud of how well she had done that day.
I was, too.
We kept practicing with the rabbit pelt, and I had gotten so good that when Otto came back to visit, he filmed me working with White Feathers. He could not believe how well she was doing. My father could. He kept saying, “This is a great eagle.”
My dad has had eight eagles in his lifetime. We keep them for several years and then let them fly to the sky. They are not our birds. We just have the privilege to live with them.
Otto found this intriguing and was eager to understand what made an eagle great.
“The great eagles,” my dad explained, “have very special eyes. Some eagles’ eyes are dull—but others, you can see this flame instead of a pupil. It is so intense that you are almost afraid. It’s like the sun—you can’t look straight into it.”
Otto was listening intently, as was I.
I went outside to check on White Feathers. She was on her perch and had her hood on. I slipped it off, curious. I had seen her eyes so many times before but had never thought of them as flames. I had never thought to look into them directly. When I did, I understood what my father meant. They did not burn me, but I did see the flicker. It was as if she were looking deep inside me. Into my past and my future.
In early September, my father felt it was time to try to catch a fox.
In the past, I was the one who would go and scare the fox, and my father would send his eagle to catch it. This time, my father wanted White Feathers to do the hunting—with me as the hunter.
As we rode out to a spot my father knew would be good for hunting, he began to explain how an eagle hunts.
“An eagle can see twice as well as a human, so when she is up in the air, circling, she is scanning for movement,” he explained. “Sometimes the eagle circles the fox so high, the fox does not even see her. That is the eagle playing a trick. She is hovering high up, waiting. When the fox thinks it is safe, the eagle makes her move. And that is when she strikes. The best eagle hunters just let the eagle be the best hunter she already is.”
I soaked up every word. It all made sense to me: I was not training my eagle. She was training me.
We arrived at the spot where my father was sure we would find foxes. He told me to go with White Feathers to the highest plateau. Once we were there, I took off her hood and moved her from the perch to my arm. I had gotten used to her weight by then. We both started to scan the horizon as my father trotted back and forth in zigzag motions, shouting and kicking up rocks and dust to scare any foxes out of hiding.
As I watched him in the distance, I heard his lessons in my head. “Whenever she is hunting a fox, a good eagle knows automatically what to do: when to fly, where to look, how to spot, and when to swoop. Foxes hide in the crevices of rocky mountains. The eagle knows to sit and wait for the hunter to make the signal.”
I was waiting for the signal.
Then I saw it, a flash of silver fur scurrying across the brown-red earth. My eagle saw it, too. “Huu-kaa!” I shouted, and felt goose bumps all over. I could see her body tense up, poised to take flight. I watched her zoom in on the fox, and then felt the lift. This was my moment to gently push her into the air, like a springboard, as my father had instructed me.
Watching her launch into the air, her wings spread wide, was thrilling. She climbed up, up, up into the bright blue sky and began to soar and circle, searching for her target. As soon as she spotted it, she circled again, planning her attack, and then dived straight at it like a bullet shot from a gun.
I was so excited, I almost forgot that my job was to gallop down to meet her. I saw my dad already heading that way, and so I shouted, “Hiya!” to my pony and headed straight for White Feathers. When I arrived, she was hunched over the fox, her talons wrapped tightly around its neck and heart. Its fur was still intact. My dad was already there, waiting for me.
“The great eagle thinks more than people do sometimes,” he explained. “This one is so smart, she killed the fox quickly—but she did not ruin the skin during the kill. She doesn’t eat it. She is waiting for you.”
When I moved closer to her, I saw her wings relax, lowering an inch. I knelt next to her and praised her while my father instructed me to get the rabbit leg out of my bag.
I grabbed the skinned leg and held it in one hand, and then I used it to lure her off the fox and onto my gloved hand.
She ate with gusto!
“She must be hungry!” I said as she tore at the purple-red meat.
“She is feeling victorious!” my father said. “She caught her first fox!”
I was feeling victorious, too. My father picked up the fox, which was half as tall as me and had the most beautiful silvery pale-orange fur.
“Your first fox, Aisholpan!” he said as he handed it to me.
I held the still-warm fox in my hands and looked up at the sky to give thanks for its sacrifice. Then I presented it back to my father.
“This is for you,” I said, and bowed my head. “You have taught m
e well.”
My father took the fox and smiled hard before he responded. “She has taught us both.”
When we returned home, my mom was eager to hear how it went. When she saw the fox pelt tied to my father’s saddle, she knew we had succeeded.
We sat down to dinner and started eating the bone broth soup with dumplings she had made. After four hours of hunting, I was famished.
Between bites, I told my mother, sister, and baby brother about the hunt. Not about what I did, but about what White Feathers had done. “She was magnificent!”
“That is great!” my mother said. “Will she be ready for the festival?”
It was only several weeks away and we had one hunt thus far. We would go out a few more times before I would enter a ring surrounded by tourists and compete against the best eagle hunters in the region. But I knew that she would be ready, just as I knew she would catch that fox. I knew there was nothing for me to do but trust her. She knew how to hunt, just as my people, the Kazakhs, knew how to hunt with them.
After dinner, I went outside to say good night to White Feathers. And to thank her—for trusting me.
She was sitting on her perch with her hood on. She turned her head toward me before I even said a word. She knew it was me.
“Nice work, White Feathers,” I whispered as I took off her hood. I looked into her eyes, and they did sparkle like embers in a fire. “Rakmet.”
9
Blessings and Opinions
My grandfather was one of the greatest eagle hunters in Mongolia. Getting his blessing was important.
There were eagle hunters within our community who believed girls should not hunt—that girls were not strong or talented enough. My father knew this was not the case for me. He knew I could do it. But he wanted to know how my grandfather felt, as I would be the first female eagle huntress in our family line.
My father explained this to my grandfather one day as they sat outside in the warm sun, and waited for his response. My grandfather considered this for a moment before he said, “We have been hunting with eagles from our forefathers. My father and his father were trained by their fathers. It is in our blood.”
