Rock Eagle
Malatchee leads Tobias on an arduous trek to an eagle-shaped effigy mound in book three, The Witch of Lurago.
Thousands of thousands of rocks, chunks of quartz in rose pink and pale grey and every shade in between, formed a shape he’d dismissed as piles of rubble when he ran past on the ground. From his perch in the towering tree, the mound’s distinctive form was unmistakable, its edges crisp and clear.
“I see a hawk,” said Tobias.
“You would.” Malatchee laughed. “Hawk. Eagle. Who is to say, eh?”
The figure of an enormous bird stretched across the plateau, hundreds of yards from tip to tip of its outstretched wings. A sailing sloop could fit inside the fan of its tail, and its sharp, curved beak pointed towards the rising sun.
Tobias is right. It looks like a pile of rubble when you’re standing on the ground.
Built 1,000 to 3,000 years ago by the Eastern Woodland Indians in what is now middle Georgia, it is one of only two effigy mounds east of the Mississippi River. Long revered as a historic site, I remember the first time, at 10 years old, I climbed to the top of the stone observation tower and looked down on the mysterious Rock Eagle.
As always with places seeped in an aura of the past, the other-worldly feeling of the place stayed with me through the years.
What prompted the early inhabitants of Middle Georgia, who lived in a time long before the rise of the later Mississippian, Creek and Cherokee cultures, to build these massive effigy mounds is still something of a
Ancient History in Georgia Stone
mystery. They obviously hold ceremonial significance and the Rock Eagle seems to have been expanded from a large dome-shaped central mound.
A shiny new marker at the site says, “The mound is compose of white quartz rocks, forming the shape of a bird in flight with its head turned toward the east and wings outspread. It measures 102 feet from wingtip to wingtip, while the body rises about 10 feet above the surrounding surface.”
An older and far more poetic marker from 1940 cautions us:
Tread softly here white man for long ere you came strange races lived, fought, and loved.
