The Eagle Huntress

by Liz Welch

  It worked.

  I immediately spotted the pale orange-brown creature outlined by the pristine snow. My heart started racing as I took White Feathers’s hood off and gave her the command. She shot up and circled before seeing the fox, but then seemed to hesitate. I don’t know if she got nervous or too cold, but in that hesitation, I realized, maybe she couldn’t do it.

  I heard my dad yelling, which reminded me to urge her on.

  “Huu-kaa!” I yelled as I started cantering toward her. It was stunning to watch her reengage with the fox and then prepare for her attack. As she zoomed in, the fox turned and stood on two back legs, in attack mode. White Feathers shifted her body suddenly from a nosedive—beak forward, wings tucked into her body—to a thrust with her feet in front of her, so that her talons were extended toward the fox. She landed one claw on its face, her talons slicing through its mouth, which left a bloody trail in the snow. At that moment, its teeth sunk into her thigh. This must have startled her, as she let go of the fox and landed about five feet away, standing there, stunned, as the fox ran off, its face bloodied.

  All the air left my body. My first worry was that White Feathers had been badly hurt! I had been so focused on becoming a huntress, I forgot that she was just a baby. Not yet one year old. Was I expecting too much from her? Why else would she stop fighting? Maybe she was not such a great eagle, after all? Maybe it was really just by luck that we had won the contest.

  My father had ridden up next me. “The fox is a very sly animal, not wanting to give up its life.” I knew he was trying to make me feel better. But as I scanned the horizon, breathing deeply so as not to cry, I saw how many mountain peaks surrounded us. It felt endless. I could not help but feel a bit hopeless.

  “So many mountains!” I said. “The fox could be hiding in any one!”

  “Your eagle is still a baby, Aisholpan,” my father said. “But she has talent. She just needs her moment. She will get the next one.”

  I felt a mix of emotions—disappointed that the fox got away and worried that White Feathers was hurt. As I put her hood back on, I asked, “Were you scared, my dear? Is it too hard to hunt so far away from home?”

  My father overheard me and said, “Even the greatest eagles make mistakes, Aisholpan.”

  We started heading back to Dalaikhan’s house as the winter sun was already beginning to set.

  “Tomorrow, we will find another fox,” my dad said as we rode toward the village. “And White Feathers will catch it this time. She will know, If I come like this, the fox is going to jump over and I need to come from this way. She’s learning.”

  I kept quiet, hoping what he said was true.

  The next day was more of the same: We spotted one fox, but White Feathers did not even try to attack it. She just circled once or twice and then came back to me. She seemed sluggish, and I was starting to think it was too cold for her. Dalaikhan had mentioned the night before that this could be why she was struggling.

  We had many more days like this. But I couldn’t give up. I wouldn’t.

  I kept going out into the mountains with White Feathers. And Otto and his team kept coming, too. A few days became a week, became another week… until finally, one day, we set out again to another part of the mountain range and were several hours in when we saw fresh fox tracks in the snow.

  “Go to the mountaintop there,” my father said. “I will see if I can scare it out from hiding.”

  I galloped to the top and waited for my father’s call.

  “Hooda! Hooda!” he began to shout.

  I quickly slipped White Feathers’s hood off, just as I spotted the fox.

  The frigid artic air carried my voice, which propelled White Feathers up into the sky.

  I held my breath as I watched her scan the tundra. In a flash, she spotted the fox and started her attack, wings spread, beak pointed, like a bow and arrow, aimed right toward the fox. She swooped so close that the fox jumped to one side just as her wing grazed his back. Once again, White Feathers paused, as did my heart. In that instant, the fox dashed away.

  I was ready to give up.

  But then I heard my father shout, “Hooda!”

  I saw the fox dash across a nearby ridge and shouted, “HUKA!”

  White Feathers leaped into flight, and this time she went straight for the fox. She struck with both feet first, just as the fox also sprang back on its hind legs. What followed was wrestling and gnashing, fox versus eagle. The fox bit her, which spurred White Feathers to go in for the final kill, with one claw on its neck and the other on its heart.

  As I galloped toward her, I could see her hovering over it, using all her power to squeeze.

  By the time I got to her side, the fox was dead, and I was fighting back proud tears.

  “Good girl,” I said as I pried her talons off the fox. “You did it. You did not disappoint. I should have never questioned you.”

  My father had arrived by then. “I am proud of you, Aisholpan,” he said. “You are the eagle huntress I always knew you would become.”

  13

  Famous in Mongolia—and Beyond

  Otto flew back to the United States from Ölgii and promised to be in touch when the film was done. He had no idea when that would be, so my father and I put it out of our minds. We were happy to return to our normal life. I did not know then that there was no returning to the life I had known before.

  Word had traveled fast throughout Bayan-Ölgii and greater Mongolia that I was the girl who had won the Golden Eagle Festival. I was in newspaper and magazine articles, and as a result, not long after I’d won the contest, several private schools in Ölgii offered me scholarships to come study with them. I even got invited to go to Dubai to attend a falcon contest where falconers from all over the world come to compete.

  That was in December, one month before I set out on the winter hunt with my father and a camera crew. It was a busy time for me and White Feathers. She did not come with me to Dubai, but my parents did. That was my first time ever on an airplane—theirs, too. We all prefer our feet on the ground.

  But it was on that flight, as we left the ground, that I remember looking down over the shrinking landscape from my perch in the sky and wondering, Is this how White Feathers sees the world? Snow-blanketed mountains for miles; vast, uninhabited, white-rippled terrains as far as I could see. Eventually, no tire tracks or even road to be seen.

  I returned and chose a school. My father had heard that the Turkish school offered an excellent education—and a full scholarship. Plus, I knew two other girls from Altansogts who went there. I would at least have two friends.

  Everything was so different—the school was much bigger and the kids were a mix of Mongolian, Chinese, Turkish, and some Kazakh, too, but not many nomads or rural country people. I showed up in my best country clothes—jeans, a sweater, boots, and my hair braided and tied with lace bows. But I was the only person dressed that way. All the girls in that school were wearing dark skirts that reached their ankles and long-sleeved yellow-and-black tunic tops. At first, I thought, Wow, so many teachers!

  The next day, I was given my own uniform. I was stunned—I rarely wore a skirt and found it very uncomfortable. How do you walk? Or run? Forget about riding a horse or wrestling. It was torture. The other kids did not seem to mind. Several were chosen by the teachers to sit in the hallways and monitor people, saying things like, “No running in school,” or asking for hallway passes. I was amazed! I was too shy to talk to anyone, let alone boss people around.

  That was the main difference between me and most of the kids who went to this school, who were mostly rich city kids. Countryside girls and boys are very different from city kids, even now. It was a shock to me. The city kids were so mean. They made fun of the country kids—about the way we dressed and smelled. They made animal jokes and thought we were not as smart as they were.

  That first day was really overwhelming, and I was so grateful when a Mongolian girl named Norov asked me to sit next to her.
She taught me how to say different things in Turkish, such as dormitory, teacher, food, school, and hi.

  I lived in the dormitory with Norov and the two girls from Altansogts. But there were other girls in our room who were not so nice to me. One in particular was quite mean. She especially made fun of the way I wore my hair, in long braids, and said that was how old ladies wore their hair. She teased me about the way I spoke, too. And about my clothes. I tried to ignore her, but one day, I’d finally had enough. I told her to stop saying mean things, and she pretended to be upset. She even said, “But your hair is so beautiful. Let me help you style it!” I fell for her trick. I sat down in front of her, and she started combing my hair. I had been in the school for a few weeks and should have known better than to trust her.

  I felt the comb go through my long hair as she asked other girls in the dorm, “What should I do with this country girl’s hair?”

  I ignored the first comment, thinking she was actually trying to help me fit in, but the combing got more forceful.

  “Ow,” I said, pulling my hair away.

  “Oh, I am sorry, did I hurt you?” she said, pretending to be concerned.

  I glared at her. She continued to comb, but even more forcefully this next time, digging the comb into my scalp. I realized at that moment, as two other girls started giggling, that she was doing this on purpose.

  “Ouch!” I yelled at her again as she yanked the comb through my hair.

  The girl who was combing my hair then hissed in my ear, in Mongolian, “You are a country girl. You are nothing.”

  I jumped out of my chair, swung around, and hit her so hard that she fell on the ground.

  I then ran to the director’s office and explained what that girl had done.

  “This is not the first time,” I said, red in the face with anger. “She always says mean things. I’m done. I am going to leave this school.”

  The director was upset. He said, “Please don’t leave. Let me handle this.”

  And the next day, that girl apologized.

  School got much better after that.

  Every so often, Otto would call my dad with an update: “It’s coming together!” I could hear his British accent through my dad’s cell phone. “I can’t wait for you to see it!”

  But we soon forgot about the film, my problems adjusting to school, and everything else, when we suffered an unexpected loss in our family. One day in May 2015, as my grandfather was riding his horse, he fell over. It was a heart attack. He died instantly.

  We missed my grandfather so much. He was the patriarch. He lived in one of the five gers we erected in the spring and summer pastures. He was the one who taught me how to wrestle. He gave me his blessing to be an eagle hunter. I had just proved to myself that this was my path and had so many questions for him. There was so much more to learn. Without him, it felt lonely.

  That summer was such a sad one for my family.

  But we continued our life the best we could. I continued to bond with White Feathers and to help my parents with their animals—and to meet tourists, most of whom now wanted to meet the girl who had won the eagle contest. Word was traveling fast, and that summer we had more visitors than ever.

  October came quickly, and I entered the Golden Eagle Festival again. This time, I was not the only girl. Two others were competing.

  I felt so happy to see them there—and hoped my winning the contest the year before had inspired them each to compete. I was not surprised to see other girls as excited as I had been to be part of this tradition.

  That year, I was not as nervous as I had been the year before, even though I had not spent as much time training White Feathers. She was out of practice, and so was I. I was not concerned, though, as I had already proved myself. It just felt good to be part of the event, part of the tradition.

  Otto called that December to say that the film was finished. He wanted us to come to the United States in February 2016 to see it at a film festival called Sundance. That was the first of the many trips I would make to the United States. The second one was to Los Angeles for the Hollywood premiere in October, which meant I had to miss the Golden Eagle Festival that year, but it was worth it. I got to see the movie. I got to see my grandfather again, as he witnessed me winning the Golden Eagle Festival. To see him, so vibrant and alive, was like living in the dream I have had since he died. It was like seeing a ghost.

  I must have started trembling because I felt a hand on my shoulder, steadying me.

  “It’s okay, Aisholpan,” my father whispered in my ear.

  I turned and saw the blue, silvery light reflecting on his face, like the moonlight does in Mongolia. It lit him up. His big brown eyes were brimming with tears, too, as he said again, “It’s okay.”

  That made me cry even harder.

  “You were born to do this,” my grandfather told me shortly before he died. “You are Aisholpan, our brightest star. You will show us the way.”

  I realized, as I sat in that LA theater, that this film was doing more for eagle hunting than I had ever imagined. When the film ended, and I wiped the tears from my face, I felt the applause as much as I heard it. It rumbled up from the floor and throughout my whole body. The entire audience had leaped to their feet; some people were even crying. It reminded me of the crowd’s reaction when White Feathers had landed on my arm in five seconds.

  Something about my story moved these total strangers to feel all these things.

  I stood up and waved, as did my mother and father. And people kept clapping and cheering.

  While the film got positive reviews, some people commented that it was not 100 percent accurate. Namely, I learned that I was not the first eagle huntress ever in the world! Just in my family, and the first to have won the Golden Eagle Festival.

  My father thought that he was the first man to train his daughter to be an eagle huntress, and that before me there were no eagle huntresses. This was the story both Asher and Otto had believed as well. But we all realized that this wasn’t correct when people started writing stories to say, “Aisholpan is not the first!” That was how I learned that eagle huntresses date back as far as 700 BCE. That I was part of a long line of famous eagle huntresses, including Makpal Abdrazakova, an eagle huntress from Kazakhstan who competed in a festival there in 2009, several years before I had won the Golden Eagle Festival.

  I am so proud to be among them.

  Once the film was out in the world, my life changed even more radically. I became used to flying places and, in the months that followed, went to film festivals and premieres in London, Paris, Athens, Bangkok, Zurich, Beijing, and beyond.

  It was wonderful—people were learning about eagle hunting and about our culture. People were mesmerized by the beauty of our land and the purity of our relationship with animals—whether they were Australian, Japanese, or Greek. This story resonated. The film was bigger than me and my story. It was the story of the Kazakh people. It was the story of this remote northwestern corner of Mongolia, where people can still live a nomadic life and hunt with eagles.

  My father and I agreed to do the film with Otto because we wanted to share the ancient art of eagle hunting with the world. We had hoped to help revitalize a practice that was threatened with extinction.

  It was working.

  14

  The Aisholpan Effect

  I had spent the summer months traveling to so many film festivals and premieres that I did not have time to fly White Feathers or get her ready for the festival. I knew I would be in Ölgii to compete in October 2017, but I also knew that White Feathers was too fat.

  When you get your eagle ready to hunt, you have to start thinning her out, making her muscular. You have to train her to keep hunting, rather than feed her like a baby. We had so many tourists visiting us that summer, and they all wanted to meet “the eagle huntress” and her. So, with every fox drag we did for show, she got a piece of meat. Sometimes, if I was not home or available, Saigulikh would go because she looks enoug
h like me. No one complained!

  My father was also too busy—between accompanying me to every film premiere and hosting so many tourists, this became his full-time job. Thank goodness my brother had returned from the army. Samrakhan was now living at home with his wife, Alia, and their baby girl, Tansholpan. He took care of all the animals when my dad was away—including my father’s eagle and White Feathers.

  The Golden Eagle Festival was the first weekend in October, and my father suggested I use his eagle instead of White Feathers. The most important thing in a competition like that, with so many eyes on you, is that your eagle is ready. And we both knew that White Feathers wasn’t ready. His eagle was older and more mature. She could handle the crowds and was used to tourists. I would fly her instead.

  So much had changed in the two years since I had won the contest. I could tell from the morning I arrived at the festival grounds that it was going to be the biggest event yet. There was a different energy. And so many people! When I competed in 2014, there were six hundred attendees. In 2017, there were more than one thousand.

  And this year, there were seven girls competing. Seven!

  I saw Zamanbol there, one of the two girls who had competed two years before, and I learned more about her.

  “When I was young, my grandfather told me about eagle hunting,” she said. “That’s how I became one.”

  She told me that when she saw me compete in 2014, it inspired her to join the competition, too.