Hunting foxes with eagles

Kazakh eagle trainers prepare for a hunting trip with their eagles.[Provided To China Daily]

The eagle explodes into the fox, talons first, harpooning the canine's back.

There's the punch of impact, wallops of wings, then the crackling of the fox's spine.

The predator-vs-predator death match is over.

The prey lost.

The raptor has delivered its payload - two sets of barbed deathtraps, jeering from its feet that clench into the fox's neck and its tail's base. The eagle then wrenches the canine's legs to scrunch its backbone backward into a U-shape.

Death from above is part of life on the ground in the Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture.

This is a commonplace event in the ethnically Kazakh swathes of the Xinjiang autonomous region, where nomads have hunted with golden eagles since time immemorial.

Techniques remain essentially unaltered.

Still, such scenes remind one of why many modern fighter jets and projectiles are named after eagles.

These real raptor rockets' launchpads are horseback nomads' forearms.

The bird-of-prey warheads blast off herders' leather gloves, whooshing over snowcaps, honing trajectories like homing missiles, zeroing in on one target.

Yet their precision is often less than surgical. Foxes lash frantic jaws at attackers.

It's hunter against hunter.

Then, the horseback herders gallop in to not only defend their "sons" (the eagles) but also to protect the precious pelts from being gashed in the tussles.

They tug the hysterical canines from the raptors' clutches to slaughter them as quickly and mercifully as possible.

Eagles eat the meat. Herders wear the hides.

Hasan Wormanbek's 4-year-old grandson's cap is fashioned from a fox his previous eagle caught.

Ili's Kazakh nomads don't eat or wear rabbits, since it's not halal, the 76-year-old explains. They feed them to the birds.

Rabbits are faster than foxes.

Or wolves.

Two eagles working together can slay a wolf, Wormanbek says.