Setting: The Great Red Canyon
High atop the jagged peaks of the Great Red Canyon lived an Eagle named Aquila. Aquila was the master of the sky. His wingspan was as wide as a rowboat, and his golden eyes could spot a lizard moving in the shadows from a mile away. Because he lived so high up, Aquila looked down on everyone else—literally.
“I am the closest to the sun!” he would shriek, his voice echoing off the canyon walls. “The wind is my servant, and the clouds are my carpet. Why should I care about the creatures who crawl in the dust?”
One sweltering afternoon, Aquila landed on a flat, red rock to rest. He noticed a long, shimmering line of Weaver Ants. They were carrying bits of leaves, seeds, and tiny pebbles. They were building a massive, vaulted fortress in the shade of a desert shrub.
“Out of my way, you specks of dirt!” Aquila barked, snapping his sharp beak. “I wish to spread my wings here, and your little sand-castle is in my way.”
The Leader of the Ants, a tiny soldier named Aura, stood her ground. “Great King of the Air, we have been building this city for three moons. It protects us from the heat and the desert foxes. There is plenty of room on the next rock for you to rest.”
Aquila laughed, a harsh, scratching sound. “You spent three moons building a pile of dirt? I could destroy it with one flap of my wings! I am a creature of the Great Heights. You are just… floor-dwellers.”
To prove his point, Aquila didn’t just fly away. He hopped onto their fortress and began to scratch at it with his massive, curved talons. He tore through the delicate tunnels and scattered the seeds the ants had worked so hard to collect. “See?” Aquila jeered. “Your ‘city’ is nothing to me.”
Aura the Ant didn’t run away. She waved her antennae, signaling to the thousands of ants hidden inside the broken tunnels. “If you love the ‘Great Heights’ so much, Aquila, perhaps you should stay there.”
Suddenly, before the Eagle could take flight, thousands of ants swarmed. They didn’t bite his skin; instead, they climbed into his thick, heavy feathers. They crawled under his wings and deep into the soft down near his skin.
Aquila let out a cry of surprise. He tried to shake them off, but the ants held on tight with their tiny mandibles. He flapped his wings to take off, but as he rose into the air, the ants began to work. They didn’t just bite—they began to clip. They used their sharp jaws like tiny scissors to snip at the shafts of his most important flight feathers.
“What are you doing?!” Aquila screamed, wobbling in the air.
“We are showing you that even a ‘King’ needs a solid floor,” Aura called out from a feather near his neck.
Aquila tried to soar, but his wings felt heavy and uneven. He couldn’t catch the wind properly. He began to tumble, spinning lower and lower into the canyon. He wasn’t falling to his death, but he was losing his grace. He crashed landed—not on his high, lonely peak—but right in the middle of a thorny cactus patch at the bottom of the canyon.
He spent the next two days plucking thorns out of his legs and waiting for the ants to leave. He was stuck on the “dusty floor” he had mocked so much. He watched the ants march back to their rock and begin to rebuild, stone by stone, leaf by leaf.
By the time Aquila’s feathers grew back and he could fly again, he never mocked the small creatures again. He realized that while he owned the sky, the small creatures owned the earth—and without the earth to land on, even an Eagle is just a bird with nowhere to go.
The Moral: Do not look down on those below you; the higher you fly, the more you depend on the ground for a safe landing.
Review The Eagle and the Architecture of the Ant.