Once upon a time, high above the clouds, there lived a magnificent eagle named Aquila. Aquila was the undisputed king of the sky. His wings were as wide as a doorway, his talons were as sharp as steel, and his eyes could pick out a field mouse moving in the grass from miles and miles away.
Every afternoon, Aquila flew to the highest, sharpest cliff in the valley. He would settle upon his rocky throne, puff out his chest, and survey the wide and beautiful land below with keen and lordly eyes.
He could see everything from up there. He could see the river winding silver through the fields, and the smoke rising in a thin line from the chimney of a farmhouse, and the tiny dark shapes of sheep drifting slowly across a hillside. He could see the hawks circling far beneath him, so far down that they looked like scraps of brown paper caught on the wind.
Down on the ground, the world was full of noise and worry. Creatures ran and hid, and hunted and were hunted, and never rested for long. But up on his cliff, Aquila felt perfectly safe. He feared absolutely nothing at all.
“No creature can ever reach me up here,” he would whisper proudly to the wind. “I am too high. I am too strong.”
And the wind, which knew a great many things, said nothing at all in reply.
One sunny afternoon, as Aquila was watching the shadows stretch long and blue across the valley, the peaceful silence was broken.
SHHHH-THWIP!
It was a strange, whistling sound, and it cut through the air like a gust of cold winter wind.
Before Aquila could even turn his great head to look, a sharp and terrible pain burst through his chest.
An arrow, shot from a hunter’s bow far below, had found him.
The great eagle gasped. The sky seemed to tilt and spin around him. He felt the sting of it deep in his breast, and he knew at once, with a heavy heart, that the wound was a mortal one. He could no longer hold his head high. His majestic wings grew weak and would not answer him, and he sank slowly down onto the cold, hard rock of his perch.
The king of the sky was falling.
As the strength drained out of his body, Aquila turned his dying gaze downwards, towards the arrow that had struck him. He wanted, before the end, to see what sort of terrible weapon could bring down the king of the air.
He looked closely at the smooth wooden shaft standing out from his chest. He looked at the sharp head of it. And then he looked at the very end, where three neat flights had been fitted, perfectly trimmed, to help the arrow fly straight and true.
Feathers.
Aquila blinked, and his eyes widened in shock. A pang of sadness — far sharper and far deeper than the wound itself — went through his heart.
He knew those feathers.
They were not the feathers of a goose. They were not the feathers of a hawk, or a crow, or any other bird of the valley.
They were his own.
A few weeks before, he had sat on this very rock preening his wings in the sunshine, and he had let a few loose feathers drift lazily down into the valley below. He had not given them a second thought. Why should he? They were only feathers, and he had thousands more.
But the hunter had found them lying in the grass. The hunter had picked them up, and trimmed them, and fitted them carefully to a shaft — and so made his arrow fly perfectly, deadly straight.
With his final breath, the eagle looked up at the vast blue sky he loved so much.
“Alas,” he cried, and his voice echoed softly against the rocks, “how much sharper are the wounds we give ourselves! It is with my own plumage that I am slain.”
The wind carried his last words away down the valley as the great bird closed his eyes for the very last time.
The Moral of the Story: Sometimes, without ever meaning to, we hand our enemies the very tools they need to hurt us. We should always take care with what we leave behind, because the things we make can one day be turned against us.