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.”