After the Hunt, You Must Sing to Your Bird

Here at the foot of the mountain the summer night is warm. At first I don’t see Chala, but I don’t have far to look. Someone is singing. I follow the sound.

I find her nestled in a small nook behind a stone wall that separates the homestead from the mountain. From the look of things, she must come here routinely. The wall is old and crumbling; many of the stones jut straight out, like shelves. Chala uses these stones to store things like a hairbrush and a small wooden bowl. Out here there is also a perch for her bird to sit on, the perch simply a stick wedged in among the rocks so that it sticks out at a ninety-degree angle. Inside the house, the eagles rest on their upright perches, the top of each shaped like a Y. Here is no such formality. The eagle sits on its stick much the way it might out in the wild.

Chala rests against the stone wall and holds a small square-shaped piece of wood. A few strings, most likely hairs from a horse’s tail, stretch the length of it. The notes it produces are dull and uniform, but Chala plucks away on the little makeshift contraption, her voice unadorned. Though I cannot make out a proper melody, her song describes a Kazakh girl who can never be with the Russian boy she loves. As she sings, I picture the river keeping the girl and boy apart, the long-standing enmity of their countries.

When she’s finished, Chala takes a bowl from one of the ledges and fills it with water from a metal bucket. It should be vodka, she says. Skillfully she dips her ring finger in the water, then flicks her finger in each of the four cardinal directions before presenting the bowl to the eagle, who dips its beak in and throws its head back. After the hunt, you must sing to your bird, Chala explains. Then you should feed it some of the meat from the kill, she says.

Despite her father’s anger, she is tranquil. She is also seven years old, eleven months older than her brother Aibek, the candidate. Next month she turns eight. Both she and her brother are unusually large for their age. Their father towers over two meters.

There is such joy in this little being out here among the elements with just her eagle. After a long day in the Machine, I feel myself growing drowsy. The moon shines on us as if full.