(For Spirit, who loves raptors. Also, anyone who has read Courage, please skip to the middle for the paleontological stuff.)

In Ratha's Courage, a canyon fire kills many female hunters of the Song-hearing tribe. Because the Named feel some responsibility for causing the fire, they agree to help the Song-hearing hunters remove their smoke- and fire-killed dead from the canyon and take them to a mountain site where they can be “given to the air” (Ratha's Courage, pp. 178-183).

The Named clan cats don't know what this phrase means, but they obey Ratha in aiding the Song-hearing tribe in this terrible yet sanctifying task. When the Named do arrive at the site, and lay the dead out on a granite slab that resembles a table, they discover that giving the slain ones to the air means giving them to the birds of the air.

While Ratha's people sit with the victimized tribe and witness the mourning of the hunter dead, great birds of prey circle above, descend, and alight, to play their roles as scavengers. Here's a part of the scene:

...A large hawk, it's eyes fierce and beady, swooped over the table, landing on the outcrop. It stared down at the table, moving its feathered head around in a quick series of jerks. Another followed, also landing on the outcrop. Then a third.

More were gathering overhead, gliding down in an open spiral as Thakur and Cherfan returned from the table and took places near Ratha. The hawks on the outcrop bobbed their heads, cleaned their beaks against their talons, and mantled their wings at one another. One sailed down and landed.

Ratha felt herself grimacing in disgust. Then, as the hawk hopped and landed again on something higher so that Ratha could see its head and opening beak, the grimace turned into a snarl. Wretched carrion-birds, violating the stillness of the dead, she though, wanting someone else to chase them away, but neither True-of-voice nor any of his tribe made a move.

(end of quote)

Ratha, at first misunderstanding the purpose of this ritual, is outraged that the birds are interrupting the mourning ceremony. Again, the narrative:

Instinct made her want to lunge at the raptors, driving them away as she would drive them from a kill. It went against her grain to let them land and feed on a herdbeast kill. To allow or even encourage carrion-feeders to alight on the dead of one's own tribe was unthinkable...

Thakur stops her before she can leap onto the slab and drive the birds away:

In a softer whisper, Thakur replied, “Ratha, they are part of what he has planned. The dead are being given to the air. The birds of the air.”

So Ratha learns that the birds are an essential part of the ritual. She finds this difficult to accept, however.

Hawks, eagles, vultures, condors and others are part of today's world, but did they exist 20 million years ago, in the California Miocene world that is home to Ratha and her clan? Indeed they did, and in forms that were very close, if not the same, as the modern species.

Paleontologists agree that small fast-running bipedal dinosaurs called coelosaurs developed feathers, not only for thermal insulation, but also to aid the animals in pursuit of insect prey. (For more detailed information, please see the Wikipedia article on the origin of birds. ) Proto-feathers, possibly developing from scales, covered the body. They grew longer and stiffer on forelimbs and tail, helping to stabilize these little sprinters in quick turns and may have been deployed as a catch-net for flying insects. Aerodynamic feathers may have helped coelosaurs to increase jumping distance and height, and parachute them down from trees. Feathered arms, either by slow change or sudden accident, transformed into wings, lofting their possessors up into a new element. “Proto-Avis” became Archaeopteryx, “ancient wing”, progenitor of the creatures we call birds.

Archaeopteryx lacked the keel bone (the large multi-flanged bone you see while carving a turkey) that is needed to anchor flight muscles in the avian chest. It only had a very weak version of the powerful flight machine we now see in modern birds. But that fluttering Jurassic hop to the base of a tree began the avian ascent into the air.

Having begun in the Jurassic, birds had plenty of evolution time. They survived the end-of-Cretaceous extinction event about 65 million years ago, and radiated into many different forms, from the flightless loon-like Hesperornis, to the stilt-legged proto-duck that begat today's waterfowl, to giant soaring vultures, such Argentavis, the fossil found in the Argentine. One bird ancestor was so into wings that it had four – by converting its feathered legs into aerodynamic surfaces, it anticipated the human-built devices called biplanes.

Others lost their wings and forelimbs so completely that not even the shoulder socket remained, as in the recently-extinct moas of New Zealand and the living kiwi.

Had prey birds developed into their essentially modern forms by Ratha's time? Were they present in North America? Fossil discoveries say yes, and with plenty of time to spare. A paper from The Auk, April 1969, records the discovery of two fossil accipitrids (hawks and eagles). One, from the Early Eocene of Colorado in North America (about 60 million years ago) represents the Falconiformes, or falcon- and kite-like birds. The other comes from the Oligocene (about 40 million years ago) of South Dakota, and shows a close resemblance to the genus Buteo, (a group of large hawks).

The same paper mentions two fossils from a Pliocene (about 5 million years ago), Kern River deposit in California. One is a vulture very similar to the present day King Vulture (Vultur papa) although larger, and called Vultur kernensis.

Paleontologists also found a Buteo hawk resembling a modern Harris Hawk (Parabuteo uncinatis). Prey bird evolution into present-day forms was well-established, showing a high probability of similar birds being present earlier in the Miocene.

So the scene as depicted in Ratha's Courage could (with the possible exception of the fictional intelligent cat characters!) well have happened.

CB