Barbie said, 'I think…' He really didn't want to hear himself say this. 'I think it's where the plane hit.'

'Say what?' Sea Dogs asked, but before Barbie could reply, a good-sized grackle swooped fifty feet overhead. It struck nothing — nothing they could see, at any rate — and dropped not far from the gull.

Sea Dogs said, 'Did you see that?'

Barbie nodded, then pointed to the patch of burning hay to his left. It and the two or three patches on the right side of the road were sending up thick columns of black smoke to join the smoke rising from the pieces of the dismembered Seneca, but the fire wasn't going far; there had been heavy rain the day before, and the hay was still damp. Lucky thing, or there would have been grassfires racing away in both directions.

'Do you see that?' Barbie asked Sea Dogs.

'I'll be dipped in shit,' Sea Dogs said after taking a good long look. The fire had burned a patch of ground about sixty feet square, moving forward until it was almost opposite the place where Barbie and Sea Dogs were facing one another. And there it spread — west to the edge of the highway, east into some small dairy farmer's four acres of grazeland — not raggedly, not the way grassfires normally advance, with the fire a bit ahead in one place and falling a little behind somewhere else — but as if on a straightedge.

Another gull came flying toward them, this one bound for Motton rather than The Mill.

'Look out,' Sea Dogs said. 'Ware that bird.'

'Maybe it'll be okay,' Barbie said, looking up and shading his eyes. 'Maybe whatever it is only stops them if they're coming from the south.'

'Judging by yonder busted plane, I doubt that,' Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the musing tones of a man who is deeply perplexed.