eagle

the new lands line answered the sea; the mountains are the other frontier, and this is its first bird. a golden eagle over the peaks and the windswept hills below them — it finds a thermal over sun-warmed ground and rides it up in lazy circles, thirty blocks of height for nothing, then sets its wings and glides off cross-country on what it banked, and finds the next. at dark, and in a storm, it sits its eyrie: the highest rock it knows, kept in the save.

it takes the hill's rabbits in a stoop from the sun. the rabbit sees the shadow inside eight blocks and runs, the eagle wins six in ten, and a take is carried off to the eyrie and eaten there — gone from the hill, never a drop, because a raptor is not a hide farm. every rabbit in the world learns the shadow at once, warren's included. never a rabbit with a name, never one on a lead, never one within twelve blocks of a player.

and the reason it is the only raptor the shelf will carry: the crows mob it. the eagle lets itself be seen through crow's own door, the flock does the rest, and enough of them pressing close drive it off the sky for a minute. a flock around your base is what keeps the eagle off — which is what the eagle is for. the crows' opinions mean more the moment something in the sky is bigger than they are.