Rod Calligan stood in the shade of his office, a frown on his face, arms crossed over his chest, watching work progressing on the mall site. And it was progressing; that was why he was frowning.

All of the Indians had come back to work yesterday, with no explanations. All of them. By law, since they’d been out sick, he had to take them back. And the “accidents” had stopped, at least yesterday and today. So it was business as usual; better than usual, since they seemed to be determined to make up for the “sick time” off by working twice as hard. If they kept working like this, he was going to have a difficult time finding a rationale for shutting work down unless he blew up another dozer. …

He was so busy watching his industrious crew that he didn’t notice the commotion in the air above the site until more than half of the workers stopped what they were doing and began pointing up at something in the sky. He squinted, shaded his eyes with one hand, the other hand going automatically to the fetish in his pocket, and looked in the direction they were pointing.

By the time he spotted what they were looking at, virtually everyone else on the crew was already intent on it—

“It” was an aerial battle, a kind of dogfight, with three scrawny black birds chasing something else, a swift little brown bird about the size of a blue jay or a robin.

What the hell? he thought, fuming, fingering the fetish in his pocket. Work had completely ground to a halt while the men watched, the Indians among them cheering the bird being chased as if it were their personal friend.

It swooped low enough to the ground, and near enough to him, that he saw it was a hawk or falcon, though smaller than he’d thought hawks were supposed to be, with brown and gray feathers, a speckled breast, and black markings around its eyes.

He should have been pleased; this was throwing delay into the work again, and that was what he wanted. But he wasn’t; the very sight of that bird escaping the black ones over and over sent him into an unthinking rage.

If the Indians seemed to think that the hawk was their friend, he felt the same about the other birds. Hawks were vermin; they took game that rightfully belonged to human hunters. The black birds were probably protecting their own nests from a bird that would kill their young! And just when it looked as if the black birds finally had the little hawk cornered—

A raven flew up out of nowhere, croaking alarm and flapping wildly, distracting the black birds enough that they missed their strike! The Indians cheered wildly as the hawk arrowed right between a couple of pieces of equipment, did a wingover, and climbed past her pursuers.