In the first part of this post, which you can read
here, Howie Brokenbow, one of the
Ariana's engineers, explained the history and nature of the Aboriginal American Enclave (AAE) as an introduction to his part of the bird myth narrative. At last I'm presenting his part of the tale.
This probably could have been divided into two posts because it's pretty lengthy and ends with some general bird tales that don't fit in other categories. However, I wanted to finish up this series.
This will be the last of the Bird Myth posts. You can see why I'm having to cut this material from the final version of The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars. It's fun but irrelevant in an already humongous story. At least I've been able to present it here, and I do hope everybody has enjoyed the series!
Here is Howie's narrative:
“There were many tribes of aboriginal
Ammerikens and their mythology varies greatly, but they all include many
stories about birds of all kinds. The
one I’m going to tell today concerns the magical, or maybe divine, bird known
as the Thunderbird – a giant avian who made lightning and thunder with his
wing-beats and eye-blinks.
“The Thunderbird
could also be a shape-shifter like Garuda and some tribes believed Thunderbirds
came in flocks. They could change themselves
into men by tilting up their beaks as if they were masks and by removing their
feathers as if they were a blanket wrapped around their bodies. It’s said that Thunderbirds sometimes mated
with human women and so the lineage entered the human gene pool. My own family’s lore says my mother descended
from the Quileute people and that tribe had very special thunderbird tales. I used to tease her about being part
Thunderbird because she was so interested in the heritage. And then when I decided to enlist in the ESC,
my family teased me back about inheriting a desire to fly!
“The Thunderbird was a mighty, eagle-like creature
with a wingspan the length of two canoes and feathers as long as a canoe paddle. Its eyes flashed fire and its cry is
described as like the crack of lightning or the whistling of the wind. Sometimes it’s said to have beautiful
multicolored plumage. It controlled both
storm and rain and its enemies were the Water Spirits, which it fought with its
lightning. In all legends, it’s an
awesome creature not to be toyed with, but it was usually regarded as benevolent,
protecting the people against evil. It
was sometimes said to be the messenger of the Great Spirit, which is how the
name for God in the various AbAm languages is usually translated.
“A lot of variant tales exist of what the
Thunderbird could do, but I’m going to tell the most famous, the one from the
Quileute people. They lived on the
seacoast of what used to be called the State of Washinten, right at the border
of Old Kaneda. They took much of their
living from the sea. In those days the
salmon ran in that part of the world and also there were whales along the
coast, including the orca. Today, the
pollution of the coastal waters has killed off the orca or driven them to other
parts of the world, but in those days they were plentiful. And the Thunderbird was said to live in a
cave in nearby mountains on the edge of an ice field. If hunters approached its cave, it would roll
big chunks of ice down upon them, so no one dared come too near. Good explanation for the existence of
avalanches!
“The food of the Thunderbird was whales,
especially the orca. It would catch them
out in the open sea exactly as the bald eagle catches salmon and it would take
them back to its cave. The killer whales
didn’t submit quietly, though. The orca
and the Thunderbird fought many battles, some so fierce that whole swathes of
trees would be uprooted. To this day there
are open stretches of prairie mixed in with the forests in that part of the
world, all caused by the battles between whales and the Thunderbird. To top even that, some of the battles were so
fierce that the ground was torn up and huge rocks flung around, and that is how
the AbAms accounted for the roughness of the terrain. The factual scientific cause is terminal
moraines from the glaciers that receded at the end of the last ice age.
“Once upon a time disaster struck the
Quileute. There was a stretch of bad
weather the likes of which had never been seen.
There were many days of torrential rain and a barrage of huge hailstones,
some of which turned to boulders when they hit the ground and can be seen to
this day near the village in question. All
that was followed by sleet and snow. Nobody
could fish, all the edible plants died, and the people were starving. So the Chief of the Tribe called a counsel and
there he invoked the Great Spirit for help, saying afterward, ‘Now we
wait. If the Great Spirit sends no aid,
we will know he wants our lives to end now.
If he does send aid, we will know our deaths will not come until later.’
“And so they waited, and as dusk was falling …
lo and behold! … there came flashes of lightning and a great whirring sound as
of wings beating, and out of the setting sun a huge bird-creature plunged
toward them, with a great curving beak and glowing eyes! It held a big whale in its talons. It deposited the whale on the ground in front
of the awestruck people and then it flew away, back to its usual hunting
grounds in the lands of the Great Spirit.
“And so the people were saved, nourished by the
meat and fat of the Great Spirit’s gift until the food of the Earth became
plentiful again. To this day, they never
forget to be thankful for what the Thunderbird did for them."
[I had a picture of the Piasa Bird, but I can't get the darned post to take it, so if you want to see what it looks like, go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piasa]
“Now I want to tell one more story and it’s from
a Midammeriken tribe called the Illinoi, like the region that’s now part of
Mitchican-Indipol Prefecture. It’s about
a creature a little different from a Thunderbird. They called it the Piasaw Bird, which means ‘the
bird that devours men’ or ‘the bird of the evil spirit.’ When Uropian explorers first came to that
part of Midammerik, they found a giant petroglyph on a cliffside depicting a truly
fantastic creature. It resembled Prf.
Katsopolos’s griffon more than it did a true bird. It had wings, but it also had four clawed
feet, antlers, a beard and huge fangs.
Its head was turned to face the viewer and it looked more like a monster
mammal than a bird. I wish I had some of
the pictures I have at home. Like Prf.
Katsopolos, I didn’t know to bring anything with me.”
“Oh, you know what?” cried Lea Register
suddenly. “I’ve seen that thing! When I was first piloting cargo flyers, I was
assigned to fly out of Sinsinatty to points along the Misipp River and one time
the flyer needed some repairs and I had a little spare time, so I took a tour around
the region and I saw that cliff painting!
They said it was a reconstruction and not the original, but that it had
been there for centuries. The local
people had always kept it touched up because it was so amazing!”
“That’s it!” said Howie. “I’ve never seen it myself – I wish I
had! Anyway, here’s the tale connected
to it. Once upon a time, the Illinoi people
were being ravaged by a monster – a flying creature with a man’s beard, a deer’s
antlers, and a bird’s talons. It kept
seizing and carrying away children and women and even big men, and not even the
stoutest warriors were able to stand against it.
“So when a new Chief came to power, he went
aside from the people to seek divine guidance.
After he had fasted and prayed for a month, the Great Spirit told him
what to do. He went back to the tribe
and assembled twenty of the stoutest warriors and gave them poisoned
arrows. Then they went out and sheltered
under a cliff while the Chief, singing the song sacred to dying warriors, exposed
himself in the open as bait for the monster.
It was not long before the Piasaw Bird appeared, swooping down and seizing
hold of the Chief. But the other
Warriors rushed out and shot all their arrows at the creature and it fell
dead. The Chief was wounded but he
recovered, and so the tribe of the Illinoi rejoiced, being freed at last from
the demon-monster that had harassed them for so long. In thanksgiving to the Great Spirit for
showing them the way, they carved the image of the Piasaw into the cliff-face
and it remained there until a quarrying operation destroyed it. But a restored form of it has been preserved
to this day, just as Lea said.
“One last note and then I’ll be done. Throughout history in the Ammeriken part of
the world, there have been sightings – almost never supported by any
demonstrable scientific evidence – of all kinds of crypto-creatures. Reports of giant flying animals have been
quite common and there was a lot of speculation that they were pterosaurs – reptiles
that were the biggest creatures ever to achieve flight – that had somehow
survived in a remnant population for millions of years. They had wingspans of over 10 meters and
would have been capable of picking up and carrying away quite large
animals. The sightings stopped around
the end of the 21st century; if pterosaurs did exist and were responsible for
legends like the Thunderbird and the Piasaw, then environmental pollution and
habitat destruction and climate change did them in the way it did a lot of
other creatures. Personally, I have my
doubts they could have survived to such a late date, though.”
“I’m familiar with those reports,” said Robbie,
“and I have my doubts, too. I think the
human imagination simply exaggerated what were already sufficiently big birds,
like eagles and condors and maybe distant memories of creatures like the
elephant bird. One thing’s for sure – I’m
impressed by the size of all these mythical avians. Except for Capt. Kibwana’s swallows, not a
single one of your stories deals with little birds! Can’t the human imagination construct
something interesting that doesn’t require physical prowess?”
“Oh, you bet, sir!” volunteered Lt.
Brokenbow. “I mentioned there are AbAm
tales about all kinds of birds, but I thought we were supposed to do big
creatures like the Phenix. The raven is a
small bird that’s particularly important among tribes related to my mother’s people. He’s one of your trickster characters, Prf.
Katsopolos, and a creator as well! Just
an example … one day Raven was flying around with a stone in his beak and when
he dropped it in the ocean, it grew into the land where people now dwell. And then he happened to discover timid little
human beings living inside a clamshell and he coaxed them out to play with
them. He intended to stick them back
inside the shell when he got bored, but then he found some female humans inside
a different shell, so he decided to see what would happen if he put them
together with the males. You can well
imagine what the outcome of that was!
Ever since then, Raven has felt protective of the lineage he brought
into being. Later on he stole the sun
from the Eagle and gave humanity light and fire and fresh water. There are a thousand stories about Raven –
don’t get me started!”
Then Clancy Mortimer spoke up a bit shyly. “On the subject of little birds, I read somethin’ at school once – it was a West British
tale, I do believe, or maybe from Scottlend.
There was this contest, see, to determine who should be King of the
Birds, and it was decided that whoever could fly highest, he should be crowned
King. So naturally it was the eagle who
won out. But the wee wren had hid in the
eagle’s feathers and popped out at the highest point of the climb and flew up
even higher. So the wren became King of
the Birds and was forever after held in great esteem for his shrewdness and
cunning.”
Robbie had begun to laugh with great pleasure. “Ha!
There, you see? Now, I’m really
taken with those stories! I’ve always
revered eagles, but I have a fondness for wrens, too, and certainly for ravens!”
“The weakling
who outwits the powerful!” said Linna. “It’s
a universal theme!”
And Clancy added, “If ye don’t mind me sayin’ a
word more, ’cause I wasn’t scheduled to be on the program, there’s a couple of
add-ons to me tale. It involves why the
owl flies by night. One says, after the
wren became King of the Birds, the other birds were so angry they tried to
drown him in a bowl of tears. But the
clumsy owl overturned the bowl and the wren escaped, and then the other birds
took out their frustration on the owl and doomed him to fly only at night.
“And a better one yet … the clever wren volunteered
to venture down into hell and retrieve fire for the birds’ use. He made it home with a coal hugged to his
breast, but a spark leaped out and burned off all his tail feathers. The birds were so grateful that they each
gave the wren one of their own tail feathers to make up his lack – all except
the selfish owl, and that’s why the owl was exiled and fated to fly by night.”
“You know what? I think we’ve come full circle,” said Robbie. “We’ve gone from my own tale of a real eagle
through fantastic god-birds to pterosaurs and back to little wrens and ravens. We’ve gone from King Garuda to King
Wren! I just hope all of you have
enjoyed yourselves as much as I have, and learned as much as I have. But now I guess the time has come that this
meeting will have to adjourn. Those of
us who haven’t had a sleep shift during this pod interval need to get some rest.”
He looked up at the port screen, where
the red-orange Garuda with the huge head still squatted, brooding over the
assemblage. “I’ll wager anything I dream
about that big chap up there!”
Another look at the red-orange Garuda whom Robbie was talking about:
