Island's End by Padma Venkatraman

curls and pulls out one of the four feathers tucked into his headband. “The sea eagle is my spirit animal, Uido. And I will ask that he let you fly with him one time so that someday, when you meet your spirit animal, you will have a sense of how to send your spirit into its body.”
    To fly with an eagle sounds more wonderful than anything I ever imagined. The thought of it sets my heart skipping like sunshine on water.
    Lah-ame faces east and raises his hands. The tips of his fingers seem to touch the clouds. “Kolo-ame,” he calls, “come to me.”
    I see an eagle appear in the east. The bird streaks toward us across the blue, carried by a sudden rush of wind from far across the sea. It hovers above us. Looking up, I see its soft white belly and the dark tips of its great wings.
    “Brother, this is Uido,” Lah-ame says to the eagle. “She has walked a long way with me and hopes to become an oko-jumu. Will you take her upon your shoulders?”
    The eagle screeches.
    Lah-ame leads me to the edge of the cliff. We stop barely a hand’s width from where the rock drops straight down into the water. Lah-ame spreads my arms out to my sides. “Close your eyes.”
    I stand on tiptoe. Lah-ame lets go of me and I feel a spurt of fear.
    “Allow your body to become as light as an eagle’s feather.” Lah-ame’s whisper is the voice of the wind tugging at my feet. “Let the eagle’s sight fill your eyes.”
    I feel an eagle’s feather stroke across the tip of my outstretched fingers. I feel the air entering my body, cool and fresh.
    I am on the eagle’s back, hearing the beat of its wings. Below us, my island shines, the jungle as green as a parrot’s feathers.
    We swoop low over the cliff, eastward along the island’s edge, until we are at the tall rock that marks the highest point on the island. Then we fly above the steep jungle path that leads down from the cliffs to the wide expanse of our beach along the eastern shore.
    We turn inward, dipping beneath the trees that separate the beach from our dry-season village. There, over the clearing, we hover for a few moments, watching the women at work below. I see Mimi and her youngest sister sitting close to our hut, weaving a basket from strips of cane. She looks up as we swoop down and I wonder if her spirit senses my presence close to her. At the edge of the village, between the circle of huts and the jungle, a few children are swinging on a vine. Tawai is with them, taller since I last saw him, but no fatter. I hear his happy shouts before we rise high up again, above the treetops.
    Away we soar toward the south of our island, passing over the huts where Lah-ame and I stayed in the rainy season and above the large communal hut where my tribe was living. Far to the west, I glimpse the mangrove swamp. We glide back, north and east, over the waves of our fishing beach where the strangers came ashore.
    The strangers’ island lies in a straight line from here .
    I gaze down at the white flecks dotting the blue sea. It is dusk as we fly further east, away from my island, until through the darkness I see a beach I recognize—where Lah-ame’s friend stood in my vision on the cliff long ago. All night, we fly among the stars. But at dawn, I hear the eagle screech four times as though to call me out of the Otherworld. I float down through the pink sky like an eagle feather. My feet grow heavy again and my toes feel the earth beneath them.
    I open my eyes and see the eagle perched on Lah-ame’s shoulder.
    “Well done, Uido.” His eyes twinkle.
    I reach out to the eagle but it turns away. I withdraw my hand, feeling a little hurt.
    Lah-ame says gently, “This is my brother, Uido.”
    “But he carried me. Is he not my spirit animal now too?”
    Lah-ame shakes his head. “He only did what I requested, Uido. Someday you will find your own spirit animal—one that you may touch and call and speak to at any time.”
    “What kind of animal is it, Lah-ame?”
    “I sense yours