Chapter 2, Part 6: First Flight

He continued walking me through the village, observing everything. He marveled at how alike our ways were compared to his own ancestors, even though the Sauk bore wings and his own people didn’t. Still, we lived off the land and wasted very little. What we did leave behind became one with the forest when we moved on.
This is when he noticed the second factor. The Sauk carried very little metal. Only the big, battered pot we kept over the main cooking fire and a handful of antique daggers bore any metal at all, everything else was made of wood or simple pottery. Even my own dagger, he noted, was made of the black, glass-like obsidian, chipped from a large stone long before even I was born.
We took to the air. Rather than hunting for game or racing with my sisters, I carefully guided the flight through one of my times at herding our flock of birds. He wondered at the raptors, so like the hawks and eagles of this world, yet carrying four wings and a mere rope of a tail compared to the broad, feathered tails of Earth’s birds. The flock itself, large meat birds he compared to something called a pheasant, also bore four wings, though their coloring seemed to blend more into the forest where the pheasant blended only too well into the golden grasslands of the plains. Like the pheasant, the cocks’ tail was longer and more colorful than the hens, but unlike them their overall color more matched the ocher of the nest tree compared to the greyish hue of the whip trees.
Our own herding wands were made from the wood of the whip tree sapling, the rattles from their seeds and the cord tying the rattle to the wand from the whip-ends of the long, tapered branches. Some of our hunters even used the long, flexible whip branches as weapon and beater, snapping it in a manner similar to the long bull whips once used for controlling draft beasts on Earth. I’d learned how to use them myself, but not as well as my mother, so much taller than I.
He watched as we herded the flock from one clearing to another, his muscles twitching as he mimicked my own motions. We flew slowly through the air, focussed on the birds rather than the ground below, with no sign of discomfort from him. One of the flock tried to break away and we followed, streaking beside the bird and whipping the gourds just ahead and to the near side in order to make it flinch away and back into the flock.
He grinned at the sudden burst of speed, so I shifted the view to one of my early flying lessons where I was taught how to control my flight around widely spaced obstacles. My own eyes focused on the doll held by one of mother’s sisters. I followed her up and down through the nest tree branches, protected by mother’s own up or down pressure of telekinesis if it looked like I might strike a branch I was trying to avoid. I gradually increased the pace of my flights as I led him through my growth, increasing speed and agility with my increased skill.
Just as he started getting uncomfortable with my flights, I soared with him as high as I could fly, showing him the land far below. Massive forests lay directly beneath and for as far as the eye could see off to the west and south, while white-capped mountains curved in a sweeping arc from due north off to the southeast. Even as I flew to my highest, some of the peaks soared higher still, comparable to the mountain called McKinley in his own lands or Everest in a far-off land. It wasn’t until I looked downward and showed him one of my sisters flying just above the treetops, barely perceivable as a Sauk in the distance, did he realize that I flew higher even than his own metal bird when he dropped out of its belly.
Diving back to treetop level, I crossed the border of the forest, slowing to glide over one of the clearings and study the grazing creatures below. Humps of thick, curly wool rose over the grasses that would hide the massive body otherwise. A broad, short head seemed to bob with the motion of the grass before it, the teeth cutting the stalks low to the ground and masticating them two and three stalks at a time before taking another bite and stepping forward. From those high shoulders the body tapered down towards its rump, revealing a short, tufted tail between thick hind legs. Most notable, however, were the two appendages growing to either side of that thick hump, laying almost flat against its sides until they rise, aiming spear-sharp tips towards me as my shadow crosses its path. Each of these limbs seem as long as the beast’s body, capable of dealing a deadly thrust should I venture within reach.
This close, the head becomes more visible, crowned by fan-shaped ears that follow the whistle of the air in my wings and a pair of forward-thrust horns as long as the head itself. The air vibrated as it bugled a warning to its companions, hardly seeming to raise its head long enough to emit that call before returning to its feeding. A swaying of the grasses announced the gathering of the rest of the herd, clumping into a circle of waving spears and horns alternating with smaller, paler forms of their young. It became quickly clear that these creatures were used to airborne predators, the young guarded not only by an outer ring of defenders, but also by the thrusting appendages above. No predator could hope to strike at a youngling without coming within reach of at least two different adults.
Even so, this defense wasn’t perfect, as revealed moments later when I glided past a hand of raptors ripping at the corpse of a youngling downed maybe an hour previously. Already scavengers surrounded the feeding raptors, the lunges of one or another of the great birds reminding them to keep their distance. Even I dared not let my shadow cross them as they fed. This is when Rain realized that he hadn’t seen a single creature with less than six limbs.
He broke out of my sending and looked at me again, appraising me as he hadn’t done before. “Alien,” he observed, his mind shifting into a warrior’s pattern. “You look like a fox, but you are no more a fox than you are human.”
        I sent acknowledgement and agreement, not yet trying to piece out the words but rather the mental images that backed them. “Ay-lee-an.”