The Thunderbird, imagined as a great golden eagle, is the foremost of the Thunderers, the martial powers of the upper world whose wing-beats are thunder and whose glance is lightning. In the Menominee clan-origin the first Thunderbird descended at the summons of the ancestral bear to become his brother and the founding ancestor of the Thunder, or Eagle, phratry. As a class the Thunderers are the standing enemies of the horned underwater powers, whom they hunt with the lightning; this cosmic war between the beings of the sky and the beings beneath the water frames much of Menominee myth and ritual.