He didn't like what they were doing. Shapes from long-ago nightmares were hovering over his mind, unclear but no less unpleasant for that. He'd never heard of Indians using stone in their mounds, and that bothered him too. Still, why not? The Mississippi Basin was rich in soft yellow limestone, already layered by its floodings and strandings in the shallow seas of its deposition. So it wasn't the stone or anything else rational which was eating at Deehalter; it was just that something felt cold and very wrong inside him.

"That enough, Dee?" Kernes asked, panting. His sleeveless undershirt was gray with sweat.

Deehalter leaned forward."It'll do," he acknowledged. Kernes was shrinking back from the explosive in Deehalter's hand."Run the jeep over the crest of the ridge and get the hood open. There's enough wire to reach to there."

While his brother-in-law scrambled to obey, Deehalter knelt in the trench and made his own preparations. First he set the blasting cap in the hole in the end of the dynamite. Then he carefully kneaded the explosive into the slot Kernes had cut in the rock. The heavy waxed paper and its fillings of sawdust, ammonium nitrate, and nitroglycerin were hot and deformed easily. A lot of people didn't know how to use dynamite; they wasted the force of the blast. Deehalter didn't want to blow the mound open, but he'd be damned if he wouldn't do it right if he did it at all.

When the dynamite had been molded into the rock, the big man shoveled dirt down on top of it and used his boots to firmly tamp the pile. The thin wire looped out of the earth like the shadow of a grass blade. Deehalter hung the coil on the pick handle, using it as a loose spindle from which to unwind the wire as he walked to the jeep.

"This far enough away?" Kernes asked, eying the mound apprehensively.