The golden eagle

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

A man found an eagle’s egg and placed it under a brooding hen. The eaglet hatched with the chickens and grew to be like them. He clucked and cackled, scratched the earth for worms, flapped his wings and managed to fly a few feet in the air.

Years passed. One day, the eagle, now grown old, saw a magnificent bird above him in the sky. It glided in graceful majesty against the powerful wind, with scarcely a movement of its golden wings.

Spellbound, the eagle asked, “Who’s that?”

“That’s the king of the birds, the eagle,” said his neighbour. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to earth since we’re chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken for that’s what he thought he was.