Soaring Eagle: marypeacefinley.com

Soaring Eagle


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Soaring Eagle

  • Top Hand Award, Colorado Authors League, 1994.
  • Finalist, 1994 Colorado Book Award, YA category.
  • Nominated by the 1994 ALA/ALSA Recommended Books for the Reluctant Reader.
  • Nominated, Colorado Blue Spruce Award, 1998-1999.
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Teachers' Guide
Soaring Eagle is the survival adventure story of blond, green-eyed Julio Montoya on the Santa Fe Trail in 1845, a journey fraught with grief, loneliness, disease, snowblindness, and death. Julios's search for identity leads him away from his Mexican family in Taos deeply into another life in another culture —the Cheyenne—which he embraces, then abandons to continue the search for clues to his past at Bent's Fort.

From Kirkus Reviews, 10/15/93: "Blond, green-eyed Julio knows he's not Mexican like the rest of his family. In 1845, he accompanies Papa  to Bent's Fort, Colorado, after hearing that someone there may answer the tormenting questions about his origins. After Papa  is killed by Apaches, Julio--injured, snow-blind, starving--is rescued by Cheyennes. Their generosity and kindness overcome his initial wariness, and he resolves the conflict between his Catholic heritage and participation in their ceremonies to become Cheyenne, follow their customs, earn the name "Soaring Eagle,'' and eventually learn from his friend Dancing Feather the sorrowful lesson that ``Nothing lives long, only the earth and the mountains,'' while a vision quest helps him recall his early life. Though deeply affected by his new ideas, Julio is bereft when Dancing Feather dies in battle. Alone, isolated in anger and grief and unable to accept "the Cheyenne way,'' he seeks answers and his future at Bent's Fort. Finley's ...old-fashioned descriptions of the sweat-lodge ceremony, eagle trapping, and other particulars of Cheyenne life are well-crafted and richly detailed. A frequently exciting, thought-provoking story; a good candidate for social studies lists. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist: "This historical coming-of-age story will certainly appeal to young readers."

Also reviewed by The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, School Library Journal, VOYA, and Horn Book Guide.


Paperback edition available from Eakin Press, $7.95; Published by Eakin Press; Fall 1998
ISBN:1-57168-281-3. To Order Call 1-800-880-8642
(Discounts available for Classroom sets.)

Original hardcover edition published by Simon & Schuster in1993
ISBN: 0671755986. Used copies available from amazon.com

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Soaring Eagle

Chapter One

The night was too silent. No sheep bleated, no nighthawk swooped, no cricket chirped.

Julio slipped his reed flute into his bag and scanned the faint outlines of the blue mountains, eyes straining to see through the darkness. He picked up a torch from his small fire and began to circle the flock with Chivita, his sheep dog, at his side.

"Santa Maria," he prayed aloud, asking for protection from what he felt lurking outside the meadow--wolves, bears, Jicarilla Apaches, spirits…

The sheep grunted and shuffled, averting their eyes from the torch, and tightened into a circle of dusty wool. A newborn lamb bleated. Julio stiffened, listening, senses alert, sliding a tiny silver coin back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. The smells of rich, oily fleece and trampled grass rose to his nostrils. Cool air brushed against his skin. A hoof clicked. Chivita began to growl softly.

Slipping the coin into his bag, Julio dropped the torch. He put a rounded rock in his sling and stood tensed, straining to hear. Still nothing moved in the blackness. Chivita broke into a bark. She raced around the sheep, her black coat swallowed by the night, the white patches flashing like ghosts.

The screams of a terrified lamb and a triumphant yelp---"Yah-hee! Yah!" ---shattered the tension.

Julio's sling sliced through the air, spinning the rock toward the voices, but it was too late. The Jicarillas' cries and the bleating of the lamb faded up the hillside, swallowed by the night.

"Chivita! Come back," Julio called. "Chivita!"

Panting, Chivita returned, her small muscular body quivering.

"I hate them!" Clenching his teeth, Julio knelt and stroked Chivita's short wiry hair, letting his hand say the anger in his voice was not for her. "They're too lazy to work! They let us work, then they steal! We've lost another lamb."

Aching over the loss, Julio reached into the leather bag hanging at his side. His fingers felt the stones ready for the sling, his fire flints and mechas, the wicks his sisters had twisted for him from tree cotton to catch sparks, and found what he was searching for---his reed flute. Easing down onto the ground, he scratched behind Chivita's ear, then began to play.

     The soft music calmed the sheep--and him. The harm was done. The Jicarillas would not be back, not tonight. But he wished, as he had every night for three years, he were at Bent's Fort with Papa.