He swung the dozer around to the place he’d quit, engaged the blade, and put her in motion. It sure was hot out here; he was more or less used to it, but he figured he must go through a couple of gallons of water a day. It kind of made him mad to be plowing up trees just so a bunch of yuppies from Tulsa had more places to spend their money.

Suddenly, the uneasy feeling he’d had built to a crescendo; there was something wrong with the way the earth felt under the blade—

He braked, and killed the motor—and looked down.

And froze, for the treads had stopped a mere inch away from a skull.

A human skull.

It must have been at least ninety-five out in the sun, but Larry still felt cold, chilled right down to his gut, which was in knots. He’d backed the dozer off, you bet, and damn fast when he’d turned up those bones. For one horrible moment, he’d been certain he’d uncovered some kind of dumping place for the victims of a serial killer or something, like the guy in Ok’ City. The other guys had come at his yell of surprise and—yes, fear. They clustered around the dozer, and the place where the blade had stopped. There were more bones there, more skulls.

Only a closer look showed that the bones were old, really old, and what was more, there were broken pots and things mixed in with them. It was Keith Pryor, another Osage, who said out loud what had been trying to break out of Larry’s own muddy thoughts.

“It’s a burial ground,” Keith said flatly. “We’ve been digging up sacred ground.”

That was when Larry realized that he had known, from the moment he’d seen them, what those artifacts were. They were Osage. He’d been digging up the graves of his own ancestors. Old tales flitted through his mind; there were terrible things that happened to those who desecrated graves.

“Oh, man,” he said, unhappily, wondering if old man Talldeer could be talked into an emergency ceremony. Not that he believed the Little People were going to take revenge for this, and it wasn’t as if he’d done it deliberately, but—

—but he didn’t care. He was Osage, and the Osage honored their ancestors. He needed someone like Shaman Talldeer to let the ancestors and the Little People know that he meant no disrespect, no sacrilege. And then, to kill the trail from this desecrated site back to him.