And it was her attitude that only those who had left written accounts of themselves-the white settlers-were I worthy of attention that gave Jennifer an idea.
"Well, the reason I asked about that particular case," she said, interrupting a plaint of how the Civil War relics were falling to pieces, "is that I collect Indian relics. I don't suppose you'd be able to sell me those, would you?"
The girl gaped at her, then stammered something about "county property." Jennifer nodded, and said, "So who's in charge of county property? The Assessor? Or the County Commissioner?"
It took several phone calls before it was established that the County Commissioner did have the authority to sell property deeded to the museum. Jennifer was not going to let this opportunity slip through her fingers, and the volunteer was not about to lose a chance at some funding for her pet project. So when Jennifer urged, "Let's go ask him," the girl led the march straight to the tiny office on the fourth floor.
She had the feeling that she could have bought half the museum if she'd wanted; the Commissioner was overjoyed to sell something the girl assured him was "worthless." He was probably very tired of her pleas for money; now she had some, and maybe she'd leave him alone for a while.
Jennifer was fairly certain that the sale was only quasi-legal at best, and she hadn't cared. It was doubtful that anyone would pursue her.
It had taken every ounce of determination to take the box of relics, smile, and thank them.
The place where the settler in question had discovered the massacre was now in the middle of a state park. That made things easier.
Whatever the tribe's rites had been, no one knew them now. Jennifer could only inter them near where they had died, trying to recreate a rite as best she could from her own intuition and Medicine knowledge, as well as from things she had learned about the Peoples who had once lived in the area, gleaned hastily from the county library. She found a place she thought would be undisturbed, one of the lesser, less interesting mounds near what had been the village, and spent most of the day digging into the side. At sunset, she had laid them to rest as best she could.
Then she covered her tracks, and went back to the job she was being paid to do.
But that had given her an idea. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts in profane hands, all over I the country. Not just museums, but in the hands of people like private collectors, and in the hands of the descendants of Indian agents. Some agents had been good, well-intentioned, if woefully Judeo-Christian-centered people, but some had been thieves who took anything they could get their hands on, and others had felt the only way to "pacify" the Indians was to destroy their culture. Most of those artifacts didn't matter; much-but some-
For some, it would be as if collectors had robbed the tomb of Abraham Lincoln for the sake of the bones, or stolen the relics of Catholic saints out of their shrines. As if some museum knowingly bought the Black Stone after it was stolen from the shrine at Mecca. The remains of Ancestors deserved a proper interment-and medicine objects deserved to go back to the hands that cherished them. That was when she had decided that she would do something about the situation; tracking these objects down and returning them to the appropriate hands. There were plenty of people at work on the major museums, using publicity and lawyers to regain lost artifacts and remains; she would concentrate on getting the things back in the hands of private individuals. Grandfather had approved, and that was all she had needed.
It took time, but she had time-and what else was she doing with her life, anyway? Certainly there were no men in; it. She might as well do something useful with her free time Now I'm getting depressed-no, I'm depressing myself on purpose, she decided. This is ridiculous. What I need right now is a good night's sleep.
She turned off the water and wrapped her dripping hair in a towel, bundling herself back up in a robe. A big glass of orange juice, then bed.
The living room was dark, the house locked up; Grandfather had gone off to bed himself already. She shook her head at the time; she hadn't realized it was that late.
But as she slipped in between the cool cotton sheets, she felt a familiar tingling that told her that her Seeking hadn't ended in the sweatlodge. She barely had time to settle herself before she found herself out in the Worlds again.
But this was no World she knew; the place was grim and frightening, calling up a feeling of disturbance inside her that made her feel a little sick.
Beneath a gray overcast sky, a dead, chemical-laden wind stirred the branches of withered trees planted in little sterile circles of hard-baked earth. Except for those tiny circles of dead ground, the rest was concrete as far as the eye could see. She turned, slowly, and saw nothing else; nothing but leafless trees and lifeless earth-a parking lot for the damned.
Then, beneath one of the trees, she saw, with an internal shock, the desiccated corpse of a bird.
Hesitantly, with her stomach churning, she approached it. In a moment she saw that it had been a bald eagle; it lay sprawled ungracefully on the bare gray concrete, lying in a way that suggested it had dropped dead-perhaps from poison-rather than being shot or knocked out of the sky. The harsh breeze stirred its feathers as she stared down at it.
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."