Skyborne

A twelve year-old New York City boy, Michael, bonds with Gregory, a boy the same age, and his little sister, Smokey. It is July and Michael is spending the summer holiday on a cattle ranch in West Virginia with an old family friend of his mother. At the ranch the grandfather is a natural raconteur and tells the children he befriended a golden eagle at Devil's Fork Mountain, and how the last two golden eagles in the Appalachian Mountains survived all odds. He reveals the flying secrets...
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A twelve year-old New York City boy, Michael, bonds with Gregory, a boy the same age, and his little sister, Smokey. It is July and Michael is spending the summer holiday on a cattle ranch in West Virginia with an old family friend of his mother. At the ranch the grandfather is a natural raconteur and tells the children he befriended a golden eagle at Devil's Fork Mountain, and how the last two golden eagles in the Appalachian Mountains survived all odds. He reveals the flying secrets of the golden eagles which carry an important message: the ecology and the preservation of the environment. The children search for Devil's Fork Mountain in vain.Michael returns to his home for the new school year with the anticipation of returning the next summer. At the beginning of the following year, he finds out the grandfather died, and his dream of spending the summer on the ranch is called off. Gregory and his family are moving to California after the school year.Two years later Michael rejoins his friend for the summer in California. The teenagers find the grandfather's mystery mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains. They come across a bald eagle nest with two dead eaglets fallen from the nest. The eaglets are deformed so badly they couldn't have survived had they lived. They realize what their grandfather meant by preservation of the environment: Devil's Fork Mountain is littered with rusting vehicle skeletons, metal barrels half full of toxins giving off odors they can hardly stand to breathe; tires litter the landscape around a polluted rainwater pond. Ponds of this nature usually thrive with insect life at this time of the summer, instead, it's festering with unnatural dark slicks of foreign liquid.The three children attend university in California and grow up to contribute to the suvival of animals on the edge of extinction, and the protection of the environment. Michael and Smokey work at the San Diego Safari Zoo while Gregory becomes a test pilot for the navy, and he eventually enters the new astronaut training program.