Interesting. So her unknown had a medicine-animal self. At least that meant he wasn’t one of the Little People; they didn’t have medicine-animals, spirit-totems, since they were spirits. And it meant he was indeed a “he”—it was a stag, after all, and not a doe—and that he probably wasn’t white. Although she had met white people who had medicine-creatures, there weren’t many of them in the Tulsa area. He didn’t fit the profile of someone who would be grave-robbing, either; a medicine-animal would have left him, if he’d done something as appalling as that. No one she knew had a stag for a medicine-animal. …

But he didn’t seem aware of his medicine-animal; at least, he paid no attention to it, staring instead very fixedly at something lying just inside the roped-off area.

That was really odd; how could he not know he had a spirit-guardian? And for one to appear, to try to force him to become aware of it, he had to be in some kind of danger.…

The stag was very agitated, frantic; surely he had to feel something! Even if he was only marginally in touch with his spiritual self, he had to feel it! The stag kept alternating between threatening gestures with its horns toward the man’s right, and pawing at the earth, threatening something there, where the man was looking.

She concentrated a little more, and narrowed her focus. Whatever this is, it’s very small—and I think it’s in that area where I spotted something earlier.

Finally, something clicked, and she saw it, or rather, saw the medicine-self that was the echo of its physical self.

It was a single artifact, a small one. A medicine-pouch, hardly bigger than the palm of her hand. She had missed seeing exactly what it was the first time because she had been “looking” for a mass of relics, not a single piece.

A real, physical light flashed on, startlingly bright in all the darkness. The other person had a penlight and was shining it on the object, and she cursed him mentally for a fool, showing any kind of light out here at night! Anybody driving by would see it; anybody keeping watch for saboteurs or troublemakers would see it! How could he be so stupid?

That’s the same kind of dumb trick David would pull—

Whoever the idiot was, he didn’t act as if he’d expected to find the pouch there, and she wondered how he had spotted it in the first place. Maybe he was marginally sensitive—

Maybe pigs sing arias. He probably saw something reflective.

He was studying it, carefully. Although it was too much to hope for that he’d leave it there. …