were plenty of people at work on the major museums, using publicity and lawyers to regain lost artifacts and remains; she would concentrate on getting the things back in the hands of private individuals. Grandfather had approved, and that was all she had needed.
It took time, but she had time-and what else was she doing with her life, anyway? Certainly there were no men in; it. She might as well do something useful with her free time Now I'm getting depressed-no, I'm depressing myself on purpose, she decided. This is ridiculous. What I need right now is a good night's sleep.
She turned off the water and wrapped her dripping hair in a towel, bundling herself back up in a robe. A big glass of orange juice, then bed.
The living room was dark, the house locked up; Grandfather had gone off to bed himself already. She shook her head at the time; she hadn't realized it was that late.
But as she slipped in between the cool cotton sheets, she felt a familiar tingling that told her that her Seeking hadn't ended in the sweatlodge. She barely had time to settle herself before she found herself out in the Worlds again.
But this was no World she knew; the place was grim and frightening, calling up a feeling of disturbance inside her that made her feel a little sick.
Beneath a gray overcast sky, a dead, chemical-laden wind stirred the branches of withered trees planted in little sterile circles of hard-baked earth. Except for those tiny circles of dead ground, the rest was concrete as far as the eye could see. She turned, slowly, and saw nothing else; nothing but leafless trees and lifeless earth-a parking lot for the damned.
Then, beneath one of the trees, she saw, with an internal shock, the desiccated corpse of a bird.
Hesitantly, with her stomach churning, she approached it. In a moment she saw that it had been a bald eagle; it lay sprawled ungracefully on the bare gray concrete, lying in a way that suggested it had dropped dead- perhaps from poison-rather than being shot or knocked out of the sky. The harsh breeze stirred its feathers as she stared down at it.
Something about the eagle jarred a memory-hadn't there been something about that mall-project on the Arkansas River near the eagles' nesting site?
She looked up, suddenly, and realized what this World symbolized.
I've been concentrating so much of my attention internally that I've been ignoring my connections to my own World and what's going on around me. Maybe that's what's been holding me back. . . .
As if she had somehow satisfied something-or someone-with that thought, she found herself moving out of that World and back into her own. She started to relax-
Then something dark, shapeless, and completely evil loomed up, interposing itself between her and the way back.
It looked at her for a moment, while she tried to shrink into something so small she could evade its gaze. The ploy didn't work; it reached for her, with eager, greedy interest.
Fear overcame her. She turned and fled.
_CHAPTER TWO
'I dunno,' larry Bushyhead said, staring meditatively at the raw red earth of the site of the new Riverside Mall. About half the site had been rough-cleared of brush, a quarter of the whole site leveled out flat and even, so the yuppies wouldn't have to park their cars on an incline. The scrub oak and cottonwood, weeds and tallgrass might not look like anything worth saving to a town-dweller, used to manicured lawns and landscaped shrubbery, but Larry was a hunter. They saw weeds; he saw habitat for rabbit, quail, squirrel and meadowlark, and hunting territory for hawks and even bald eagles. Habitat going under the bulldozer blade. His baloney sandwich dangled from his fingers, momentarily forgotten. 'I dunno, Johnny. I took the job, a guy's gotta work, but I'm still not sure I like this.' Larry leaned against his bulldozer, which served as an impromptu perch for half a dozen of his fellow workers.
'I know what you mean.' Rich Blackfox, one of the other dozer operators, nodded agreement as he swirled the Coke around in the bottom of his can. 'It's not just another damn yuppie mall going up, it's this site. The elders of most of the tribes around here didn't like it-Sutton didn't like it either.'
'Sutton who?' asked someone else on the other side of the dozer, a white guy none of the three knew very well, in the usual hot-weather 'uniform' of sweat-soaked T-shirt and work jeans. His hard hat had 'Cliff' stenciled on it. 'Who's Sutton? What's not to like about a mall?' He lit up a cigarette. 'My wife can't wait for this one to go up, so she can go run up the charge cards.'
'Sutton Avian Research Center, over to Bartlesville,' Rich told him. 'You know, the eagle people, the ones that run the tours up by the dam in February.'
'Oh, yeah!' The man brightened, and he grinned. 'Yeah, I went up there this spring, watchin' the birds fish, saw that little gal from Sutton with the tame one. Boy, she's got guts, I wouldn't let anything with a beak like that anywhere near my face!' He took another drag on his cigarette, then discarded it. 'So what is it they don't like?'
Rich stared upriver, squinting against the sunlight. The Arkansas was at a low point after three weeks without rain. In fact, it looked as if you could walk across it, with sandbars rising out of the water all across the basin. 'Sutton says we're too close to the places those eagles are nesting. They say we're gonna drive 'em away, and there just aren't enough good places for 'em to go, especially where people won't take pot-shots at 'em. My tribal elders say the same thing.'
'Huh!' The other man followed Rich's stare, as if he expected to see one of the birds right then and there. 'How many of them are there?'
'Eight pairs, at last count,' Larry put in. 'That's the most nests in fifty years.' He sighed. 'Here they got a pretty good chance-someplace else, they got odds of ending up in some scumbag's trunk.'
Even Cliff nodded at that; eagle-poaching had made the headlines again; a poacher had been caught during a routine traffic-stop, with his trunk full of dead birds. There hadn't been a man or woman on the crew that hadn't been outraged by the discovery.
Larry shrugged. 'But Fish and Game says they'll stay, says they're used to us now, and we won't scare them off. I dunno.' He looked around the site again. 'If you ask me, whoever decided to plant a mall here is dumber than dirt. What happens the next time we get one of those 'hundred-year storms' and the Army Corps of Engineers has to open the floodgates upriver?'
'We get bigtime flood sales down here,' laughed the other man. 'Seems like we've been getting those 'hundred-year storms' of yours about every three or six months lately!'
Larry nodded. 'You got it. Dumb as dirt, man.'
The placid Arkansas River, with sandbars rising out of the yellow-brown water like the backs of a pod of beached dolphins, and lower than it had been all year, hardly looked like a candidate for flooding. But before the Army Corps of Engineers had put in their flood-control program, parts of Tulsa had suffered more than one disaster. And it could happen again; if there was too much rain, floodgates would have to be opened, and the Arkansas could turn into the raging devil some old stories painted it. When it did-not 'if', but when-this mall could well be underwater.
So why put it here? That was what Larry didn't understand. There had to be a dozen sites that were better candidates, especially given the proximity of this one to the eagles. That particular fight had cost the developers plenty in extra studies and court costs.
He'd had a bad feeling about this place ever since he'd set foot on it-but he knew better than to say anything about that. He got enough ribbing from the guys on the crew about being a superstitious Indian, just because he had a medicine wheel his daughter had made him dangling from the rearview mirror in place of the fuzzy dice from his street-rodder days. He didn't need to give them any more ammo.
Still, there was something creepy about this place-and the boss. Rod Calligan didn't fit the profile, somehow. Larry had seen a lot of developers in his time; some were slimy scum, some were just guys, but Rod was a different breed of cat, all right. Or maybe snake. The man was cold, he had a way of looking at you that made you think he was totaling up your entire net worth right there on the spot. But he was smart, real smart; he could gauge the amount of time a crew would have to spend clearing a particular site right down to the hour, and he had a penalty clause built into the contract that kicked in unless the cause for delay was weather that he said was too bad to
