“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.