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term.
    All bush-hogging activity had ceased shortly after Faye arrived, and there had been little noise beyond the morning birdsong and the voices of her colleagues since, but it had been unreasonable for Faye to hope that the pastoral silence would never be broken. The narrow pavement running in front of Oka Hofobi’s house was classed as a farm-to-market road, which meant exactly what it sounded like. It was a critical artery for trucks rushing produce to market. Since larger farm operations were more likely than small ones to beat the law of averages and prove successful, most local farmers owned as many separate parcels of land as they could afford, and many of them were strung out along this roadway. Their equipment—tractors, bush-hogs, harrows, harvesters—was forever being driven from one plot to the next.
    Faye rose from her work and cocked an ear toward Calhoun’s property. She couldn’t see the mound any more—the Nails’ house was in the way—but he seemed to have started bush-hogging again. The motor was much louder than it had been that morning, murderously so, and it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere fast. Maybe he was trying to clear some land that was more heavily vegetated. She needed to stretch anyway, so she walked around the corner of the house, just to see what in the world was going on.
    It took her ten seconds to find her voice.
    “Oh, God—y’all come see, this man has lost his mind!” she hollered as she sprinted toward the road. Her co-workers, who may have thought she’d lost her own mind, came running.
    The tractor, a tremendous beast with an enclosed cabin, was powered by tracks big enough to crush an economy car. Fitted with a broad blade, its engine roared and screamed as it forced down a tree.
    Then it backed up and began an assault on the mound that Dr. Mailer had tried so hard to get a look at the night before. The blade bit into the mound’s sloping flank, and hundreds of pounds of earth were peeled away.
    She presumed Mr. Calhoun was locked inside the air-conditioned cabin. His words echoed in her ears: “If that mound wasn’t standing over there, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now, would we?” He might as well have paid Western Union to telegraph what he intended to do.
    “Call 911!” Faye cried as she ran across the road, with her colleagues trailing after her. “Call the National Guard, call anybody that can stop him. He can’t do this!” But she wasn’t actually sure what he could or couldn’t do. How did cultural protection laws apply to sites on private property? All she could do was try to stop the destruction until someone figured it out. Cell phones beeped out a chorus of cries for help.
    The engine whined as it forced the behemoth against a tree that didn’t want to go down. When it yielded—and it had no choice but to yield—its rootball surfaced, dragging any artifacts tangled in those roots up to the surface to be crushed.
    They reached the far boundary of Mr. Calhoun’s soybean field, then paused, uncertain of what to do. What could seven puny humans do to stop a man armed with a machine the size of dinosaur?
    Did Dr. Mailer realize that this was his fault? Farmers like Mr. Calhoun could be excused for feeling besieged by the government. They owed taxes every year on their land, whether it made them any money or not. Pesticides that they believed might make the difference between a good crop and a disaster were heavily controlled or outlawed. If the government decreed that a road needed building, a strip of fertile land could be condemned and taken, whether the farmer felt he could do without it or not. Mailer should have known that this man might not respond well to even a faint possibility that some arcane historical protection law might hamper his ability to use his own land.
    Calhoun’s tractor took another bite out of history, and Faye felt it in the pit of her stomach. Another wad of soil, still wet from the night’s