The Feather Keeper

Book excerpt: John Two-Feather and his two cousins, Samuel and Joseph King, are the grandsons of Navajo singer and medicine man John King. As boys growing up on the reservation in New Mexico, they listened to their grandfather’s heroic tales of the heroes of the Navajo or Diné. Their most favorite story of all was called “The Two Who Come to Their Father,” the story of the Navaho twin heroes known as the Feather Keepers. In the myth, the hero twins journeyed out to find their father, the Sun, so that he will give them the skills and weapons to protect their people. Overcoming many trials along the way, the twins find their father and convince him to give them the gifts to combat their enemies. Returning to their village as powerful warriors, the twins undertake the destruction of the monsters that plague their people. But what John and his cousins did not know as they listened to the childhood tales was that their grandfather, the existing Feather Keeper, was preparing them for their hero’s journey. Now, armed with the “gifts of ages,” the three work as part of a clandestine U.S. government program known as AGHIA. After a failed U.S. operation to capture terrorist Hussein Al Rahabi, the three Navajo cousins adventure into the war-torn wilds of Zabul, Afghanistan, to find Al Rahabi and stop his uncle’s powerful Taliban army from retaking the province and overrunning the tiny military outpost built there. In the process, the new Feather Keeper will be made.