Week 11 Story: Why The Bat's Wings Have No Feathers

Long ago, there was a giant Elk that lived upon the earth, and also a giant Eagle. These giant creatures kept eating men, women, and children. The people prayed to the gods to send them a hero. The name of the god-sent hero was Jonayaiyin.

First Jonayaiyin went to fight the Elk. The Elk had gone away to the desert. Jonayaiyin was not sure how to approach the Elk because there were no trees where he could hide.

As he pondered what to do, the Lizard came up and offered to help. "Take my skin," said the Lizard. "That way the Elk will not recognize you."

Next, the Gopher came up and offered to help. "I will dig a tunnel," said the Gopher. "After I am done, it will be easy to attack the Elk."

The Gopher dug deep through the earth. When he could hear the Elk's heart beating directly above him, the Gopher climbed out and started to nibble at the fur around the Elk's heart.

"Gopher, is that you?" asked the Elk.

"Yes, it's me. I am taking some of your fur so that I can make a bed for my babies. That way they won't have to sleep on the bare ground."

The Elk nodded his agreement, and the Gopher disappeared back into the hole. He then raced back to Jonayaiyin. "Everything is ready," he said.

Jonayaiyin then crawled through the tunnel and when he reached the hole, he shot an arrow straight into the heart of the Elk, and then another, and another, and another. But the Elk did not die. Instead, the Elk plunged his antlers into the earth and began chasing Jonayaiyin back through the tunnel. The antlers raised up great heaps of earth, and you can still those mountains today. Finally the Elk collapsed from exhaustion and died from his wounds.

Jonayaiyin stripped off the elk-hide which he made into a coat, and he also took the antlers, plus a sack filled with elk-blood. He would need all this to fight the giant Eagle.

The Eagle had a nest up high on a rock where he lived with his wife and two children. Jonayaiyin stood in the plain and lifted up his arms, knowing that the Eagle would snatch him up as food for his eaglets. And so the Eagle snatched him up, but his talons did not harm Jonayaiyin because the elk-skin protected him. "Here you go, children," said the Eagle. "I have brought food for you to eat."

But when the eaglets went to devour Jonayaiyin, he hissed at them, and the eaglets shouted, "The food is still alive!"

"You are wrong, children," said the Eagle. "He is just breathing his last breath." And without waiting to see what happened, the Eagle flew away to search for more food.

Jonayaiyin then threw elk-blood on the eaglets. "Tell me when your mother is coming back, or I will drown you in elk-blood."

The eaglets were afraid and said, "She returns to the nest during the afternoon rains."

When the rains began in the afternoon, Jonayaiyin was ready, waiting with the antler in his hands. As the mother flew up, he hit her with the antler and killed her, and then he pushed her body out of the nest.

Jonayaiyin then said to the eaglets, "Tell me when your father is coming back, or I will drown you in elk-blood."

The eaglets answered, "He comes with the rains at sunset."

Jonayaiyin waited for the giant Eagle to return to the nest with the sunset rains. As the giant Eagle flew up, Jonayaiyin hit him with the antler and killed him, and then he pushed the Eagle's body out of the nest.

Then Jonayaiyin hit the eaglets on the head and said, "You will grow no larger than you are now, and you will no longer hunt the humans as your prey." He then pushed the eaglets out of the nest, and away they flew.

But now Jonayaiyin had a new problem: he needed a way to get down from the nest. He called out for help, and an old Bat came flying up from the plain below. "What are you doing in the Eagles' nest?" she asked.

"I have killed the giant Eagles," Jonayaiyin said, "but I need help to get down from the nest. I will give you all the eagle feathers if you will help me get down. There, look: you can see the bodies of the Eagles where I threw them down below."

The Bat agreed, and she told Jonayaiyin to get into her basket.

"That basket does not look very strong," he said.

The Bat laughed and said, "Oh, don't you worry: my basket is made of very strong skin. Get inside, and we'll go."

The Bat carried Jonayaiyin down to the ground, and then Jonayaiyin filled the Bat's basket with the eagle feathers.

"Be careful, Bat," he said. "I warn you not to go among the small birds out there on the plains. They will steal these feathers from you."

The Bat nodded, but she did not listen to Jonayaiyin's warning. She went among the small birds and they stole all her feathers. The Bat went back to Jonayaiyin and asked him to fill her basket again. Jonayaiyin filled her basket and warned her again about the small birds of the plains, but the same thing happened again. And a third time. And a fourth time.

When the Bat came back the fifth time to ask Jonayaiyin to fill her basket of feathers, he refused. "Bat, you do not know how to keep your feathers. Take the skin of your basket and use that to cover your wings."

"I will do that," said the Bat. "I do not know how to take care of my feathers, so I will use the strong skin of my basket instead."

And that is why the Bat's wings have no feathers to this day.

Author's Notes. So far, I've been writing chain tale stories, but reading the Native American Hero Stories reminded me how much I love aetiological stories, so I decided to tell one of those stories... and I think I will start collecting those too; an anthology of aetiology stories would be so much fun. Working on aetiological stories will allow me to find story material from probably every culture on the planet. This one about the bat really jumped out at me because I've been seeing so many bat-related tweets at Twitter leading up to Halloween.

There are all kinds of great details from the original Apache story that I did not include, like when the Elk is chasing Jonayaiyin through the tunnel and different kinds of spiders weave webs to try to block the Elk's path. Jonayaiyin's mother also has a magic cedar bark that alerts her to his fortunes and misfortunes remotely. I also left out the gruesome detail of how when the mother and father eagles are coming back they are carrying people in their talons, and those people fall to the ground and are killed when Jonayaiyin kills the eagles. When Jonayaiyin hits the eagles so they don't grow up, they curse the human race with rheumatism! When the small birds steal the feathers, there is one bird mentioned in particular: "This accounts for the plumage of the small bird klokin, which somewhat resembles the color of the tail and wing feathers of the bald eagle." I have not been able to find out what name we use for the klokin bird, so I left that part out. Maybe I will be able to find that out later!

Bibliography. From "The Attack on the Giant Elk and the Great Eagle," a Jicarilla Apache story in Tales of the North American Indians by Stith Thompson (1929), originally published in the Journal of American Folk-Lore (1898).

Image credits. 
Elk by Andrew Russell at Flickr.
Eagle at MaxPixel.
Bat at Wikimedia.