The Kalevala's helpful eagle is a creditor squaring accounts. Wainamoinen, his horse shot from under him and eight days adrift in open sea, despairs; an eagle from Pohyola finds him — a bird at world-scale: "One wing touches on the waters", "While the other sweeps the heavens" [The Kalevala, Rune VII]. The help is offered as repayment, and the eagle does the bookkeeping aloud: "Well do I the day remember" — "Thou didst leave the birch-tree standing" in the great forest-clearing, "As a resting-place for eagles" [ibid.]. Then the rescue: "Place thyself between my shoulders"; "I will lift thee from the waters" [ibid.]. It carries the old singer over the sea to dismal Sariola, "Where the eagle leaves his burden" and "Flies away to join his fellows" — no lingering, no second favour [ibid.]. Thompson's apparatus for the helpful eagle runs from Aesop's fables to Vai tales in Africa, none of it wired; the one served witness happens to state the motif's economy exactly: kindness to birds is banked, the bird remembers the deposit, and repayment is precise — one spared tree, one saved life, account closed.