Feeling sick, I turned away and stared at the Cutthroat. I tried to read his face, the way I might try to read an opponent’s in a boxing match. I’d been told that you could tell what another fighter was about to do, and sometimes even what he was only thinking about doing, just from the expression on his face.
The Cutthroat gave me a scowl.
“Don’t look at me, kid,” he said. “I would’ve done a better job than that.”
Pop opened the dead man’s coat, exposing a blue Navy work shirt. I could see his hands shaking slightly as he did it. “I believe you,” he said. “Whatever happened here was sloppy. It may even have been an accident.” He opened the coat far enough to expose the right shoulder. “No insignia. He was just a seaman.” He opened the shirt collar. “No dog tags, either.”
Then he reached into the large, deep coat pockets, first the left, then the right. He came up from the right pocket clutching something.
Pop held it up in a shaft of gray light from one of the ceiling holes.
It was a huge, dark-brown feather, maybe fourteen inches long. It was bent in the middle.
“That bird,” Pop said, “is turning out to be nothing but trouble.”
VII
We left the body where it was and went back into the larger room. The wind was still furious overhead, so we were stuck there for the time being. Pop and I sat back down against the wall at the far end, and the Cutthroat lounged on the earthen shelf along the long wall to our right.
Pop didn’t look so good. He was pale, and he coughed now and then. I think he was trying to pretend that the dead man hadn’t bothered him. He had probably seen death before, but not the way the Cutthroat and I had.
Still, this was different. In battle, death is expected. Back at camp, when the battlefields have moved elsewhere, it’s something else. So I was a little shook up myself.
The Cutthroat didn’t seem bothered at all. His mind was already on other things.
“This goddamn williwaw might take that eagle away,” he said. “If it does, I won’t get my feathers. I should have come in the other way, like you guys did. I saw you there with it, but then I felt the wind coming. I didn’t think you two were gonna make it here.”
“Neither did we,” Pop said. “But if you want an eagle feather, you can have the one I took from that young man.” He reached for his jacket pocket.
The Cutthroat made a dismissive gesture. “That one’s bent in the middle. It’s no good to me. The power’s bent now, too.”
“What sort of power do you get from feathers?” I asked. I immediately regretted it.
The Cutthroat gave me a look too dark to even rise to the level of contempt. “None of your fucking business. In fact, I’m wondering what you and your damn lieutenant colonel wanted with the eagle in the first place.”
Pop coughed. “The private and I wanted nothing to do with it at all. But the lieutenant colonel seems to be curious about who killed it, gutted it, and staked it out like that. He incorrectly assumed I could help him discover that information.”
The Cutthroat sat up straight. “Somebody killed it on purpose?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Pop said. “Couldn’t you see it from over here?”
The Cutthroat’s brow furrowed. “I just saw you two, and the eagle’s wings, and then the wind hit me before I could come any closer. You say somebody pulled out its guts?”
“Yes.” Pop’s color was getting better. “And staked it to the earth with nails. Does that mean anything to you?”
The Cutthroat scowled. “Yeah, it means that somebody’s a fucking son of a bitch. I ain’t heard of nothing like that before.” He scratched his sparse beard. “Unless maybe a shaman from a mainland tribe was here, trying to do some kind of magic.”
Pop leaned toward the Cutthroat. His eyes were bright. “Why would killing an eagle be magic?”
The Cutthroat’s hand came down to rest on the hilt of his knife. It made me nervous.
“The people along the Yukon tell a story about eagles,” the Cutthroat said. “It’s the kind of story you white people like to hear us savages tell. I even told it to some officers one night on Attu. Took their minds off the fact that they were getting a lot of kids killed. Got a promise of six beers for it. They paid up, too.” He gave Pop a pointed look.
Pop gave a thin smile. “I don’t have any beer at hand. Will you take an IOU?”
The Cutthroat answered Pop’s smile with a humorless grin. “Don’t be surprised when I collect.” He leaned forward. “Okay. Long ago, a pair of giant eagles made their nest at the summit of a volcano. I’m talking about eagles nine, ten times the size of the ones we got now. They’d catch full-grown whales and bring them back to feed their young. And sometimes, if they couldn’t find whales, they’d swoop down on a village and take away a few human beings. This went on for many years, with the giant eagles raising a new brood of young every year. These young would go off to make nests on other volcanoes and attack other villages.”
Pop took a Zippo and a pack of Camels from a jacket pocket. “So they were spreading out like the Germans and Japanese.”
The Cutthroat nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, one day, one of the original eagles, the father eagle, was out hunting and couldn’t find any reindeer or whales or nothing. So the father eagle said, fuck it, the babies are hungry. And he swooped down and took a woman who was outside her house. Carried her back to the volcano, tore her limb from limb, ripped out her guts, and fed her to his giant eaglets.”
The pitch of the wind outside dropped, and the Cutthroat paused and listened. Pop lit a cigarette and then offered the pack to me and the Cutthroat. The Cutthroat accepted, but I declined. I’d promised my mother I wouldn’t smoke.
The wind shrieked higher again as Pop lit the Cutthroat’s cigarette, and then the Cutthroat went on.
“But this poor woman happened to be the wife of the greatest hunter of the village,” he said, exhaling smoke. “And when the hunter returned and was told what had happened, he went into a rage. He took his bow and his arrows, and even though everyone told him he was a fool, he climbed the volcano.”
“Most truly brave men are fools,” Pop said. He gestured toward me with his cigarette. I didn’t know why.
“I wouldn’t know,” the Cutthroat said. “In the Scouts, we try to be sneaky instead of brave. Works out better. Anyway, when the hunter got to the eagles’ nest, he found six baby eagles, each one three times the size of a full-grown eagle today. They were surrounded by broken kayaks, whale ribs, and human bones. The hunter knew that some of those bones belonged to his wife, and that these eaglets had eaten her. So he shot an arrow into each of them, through their eyes, and they fell over dead. Then he heard a loud cry in the sky, which was the giant mother eagle returning. He shot her under the wing just as she was about to grab him, and then he shot her through the eyes. She tumbled off the mountain, and that was it for her. Then there was another loud cry, which was the father eagle—”
“And of course the hunter killed the father eagle as well,” Pop said.
The Cutthroat glared. “Who’s telling this fucking legend, old man? No, the hunter didn’t kill the goddamn father eagle. The eagle dived at him again and again, and each time the hunter put an arrow into a different part of its body. But he never hit the father eagle in the eye. So, finally, pierced with arrows all over, and his whole family dead, the giant eagle flew away into the northern sky, and neither he nor any of his kind were ever seen again. But the eagles of today are said to be the descendants of those who had flown away in earlier times.” The Cutthroat gave a loud belch. “At least, that’s the story.”