On the Korean/Osage/white side—his mother’s branch of the family—there had been a general turn toward extremely fervent Christianity and the production of a lot of cousins Rufus didn’t know very well, since their incessant Jesus talk was so tiresome. By process of elimination, then, when he returned to this part of the country, the people he was seeing were his ninety-year-old grandmother, Mary, and the offspring of his two aunts on that side, who were enmeshed by many family and social ties in the KCA or Kiowa/Comanche/Apache network around Lawton.
An impromptu barbecue was fomented in the L-shaped compound as word got out that Rufus had slid into town. Various shirttail relations and friends began to pull up. Accustomed to solitude, Rufus had to suppress a fight-or-flight reaction as one person after another came up to interact with him socially. Most of these exchanges were either (1) rote friendly joshing about Rufus’s unusual looks, stature, and way of life, frequently softened by the exclamation “kee!” meaning “not!” or “just kidding!” or (2) congratulating him in a more serious way about his destruction of Snout. This feat—minus the part of the story where a business jet did most of the work for him—had somehow made its way into the oral tradition. Everyone, of course, knew the first part of that story: what had happened to Adele. Word seemed to have got around that Snout was no more and that Rufus had something to do with that. People had filled in the missing details with a conjectural story line that made Rufus out to be pretty heroic. Explaining what had actually happened was, of course, completely out of the question, and so all Rufus could do was nod and accept their warm admiration.
It all delayed the real conversation that Rufus wanted to have, which was with Mary. Which meant also having it with his aunt Beth, who had become the chief Mary caretaker and living repository of Mary lore. But eventually when the barbecue broke up, everyone went home, and the younger kids were in bed, he found himself sitting around the remains of a campfire with Mary and Beth in the cool of the evening. And then he laid the whole thing out, as much as he could without violating his NDA.
“I don’t want to burn any bridges with y’all or get mixed up in anything y’all would consider sacrilegious,” Rufus said, where “y’all” here basically meant that portion of his surviving family who lived around Lawton and identified as Comanche. “But it looks like I’m getting involved in this project that involves eagles.”
“Like the fighter planes?” Beth asked.
“No, ma’am. Birds. Some falconers—eagle tamers, basically—from different parts of the world, all come together to work on this thing I can’t talk about in West Texas. But these eagles have been brought up around humans and trained to use their eagle superpowers in certain ways—”
“Bald eagles?” Mary demanded to know.
“No. Golden.”
Mary nodded decisively. “Good.”
Beth was nodding too. “Because fuck those things.”
What was being referred to here was a long history of ambivalent feelings toward U.S. patriotic imagery, with bald eagles and the Stars and Stripes at the top of the list. Lots of Indians in this part of the country had served in the military and spent their careers saluting that flag, but they were all perfectly aware of the fact that effigies of bald eagles, and the red, white, and blue, were the last things that many of their ancestors had ever seen.
“That’s my understanding,” Rufus said hastily. “That when Comanches related to eagles it was always goldens. Balds were not part of the picture for us.”
Mary nodded. Beth exchanged a few muttered words with her, including pia huutsu, which Rufus was pretty sure was the word for bald eagle, and kwihnai, which he knew for sure was the word for goldens. Then they looked at him expectantly.
“But that don’t clear the picture up for me, ma’am,” Rufus continued. “I get that y’all got no time for pia huutsu and that y’all have reverence for kwihnai. But that might just make the situation worse, if you see what I’m saying, if I am mixed up in a project where the kwihnai are being, for lack of a better term, used.”
Beth totally got the picture and nodded. She discussed it with Mary for a minute or two in a rapid-fire mix of drawling Oklahoma English and Comanche.
“Our ancestors never did what these falconers do. Training them that way. We just captured them and held them captive,” Mary said. “For eagle medicine—because, you know, for some people, their personal medicine was eagle medicine—and for feathers.”
“Right! So do you think it’s okay to—”
“You said these falconers came from all over the world,” Beth said. “None of these people are Comanches, right?”
“Of course not.”
“So we don’t really have an opinion as to whether they should train golden eagles. It’s a different group of people, different religion, none of our dang business.”
“Yeah, but I’m involved and I don’t want y’all to think I’m being disrespectful.”
“What are these kwihnai being used for?” Mary asked. “What are they doing?”
“Catching rabbits?” Beth asked. “Isn’t that what falconers usually do?”
“Fighting,” Rufus said. “Fighting off invaders, I guess you could say.”
“Oh, that’s no problem then!” said his grandmother.
There had been some concern that spinning rotors might injure the birds’ talons. Piet, like Tsolmon, wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but it was easy to draw him out on this topic. He encouraged Rufus to reach out and grab Skippy’s perch and compare the size of his hand to the eagle’s foot. If you included the long curving talons, the bird’s digits were as long as Rufus’s fingers.
Not that Rufus would have relished shoving his hand into the rotors of a drone in flight. The blades of those things were extremely lightweight, but they spun quickly. They didn’t pack enough of a punch to break a finger, but they could draw blood, and the impact hurt.
He now perceived an opportunity to be of service. Actually wrangling eagles was not a thing that he was ever going to learn. It was a whole world of fussy veterinary procedures, weird social man/bird interaction, and messing around with small dead raw animals that did not appeal to him and that he never would have become good at. Even if he were to somehow master all those skills, the fact was that the eagles they actually had at the Marble Mine had all bonded with specific human beings who were not Rufus.
But if the goal of this Special Project was to reboot the canceled Schiphol Airport Eagle vs. Drone project, then there were ways he could be of service. First of all by building practice drones, the sole purpose of which was to be ripped out of the air by eagles, using rotors with pivoting blades that would be less likely to damage the feet of an attacking eagle. These would make it possible for the falconers to train their eagles safely.
In actual practice, though, it wouldn’t make sense to assume that the bad guys—whoever they might be—would be so considerate as to build eagle-friendly equipment. So the second part of Rufus’s work was to construct eagle gauntlets: lightweight, hard-shelled gloves, like those on a suit of medieval armor, that could be slipped over the birds’ feet and lower legs to take the impact from spinning drone rotors. Once those had brought the lightweight blades to a dead stop, the eagles’ talons could close in around the body of the drone, the three front toes raking it back so that the hallux—the huge talon on the bird’s “heel”—could close in, crushing and piercing the drone’s hull just like the rib cage of a hapless bunny.