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it—Bantella—it pressed every part of your tongue, and that they called me just Bant suited me fine. I liked the longer name a secret kept. Jimmy Make’s real name was James Makepeace Turrell, but him and Lace didn’t get married until I was almost four years old, and when they did, Lace still wouldn’t change my name. She couldn’t keep her own name after she got married, so she kept mine, Ricker See. My grandma had been a Ricker, my pap was a See, but now I was the only one in the family
who carried either name. That was the other part of the secret, something else I held inside. And while See was better than Turrell, I also knew it was the Ricker meant the most because Rickers had been on this piece of ground at the foot of Cherryboy, west of Yellowroot, for more than two hundred years.
    The flood had busted the footbridge all to pieces, so I jumped the creek and crawled up the other bank, the new loose dirt of it scaling down. Then I was on the old Ricker Run road and already I was reaching for the good I usually got in the woods, make the other go away. But I couldn’t yet bring it to me, and I started worrying even though part of me knew it was too early for that. The road was soft for walking, the ruts nearly grassed over, and the sun was falling heavy and thick the way it does after passing through all those green leaves. Before long I was passing where Grandma’s trailer had sat, and then I was moving on up the draw towards the Ricker Place where I’d lived the first four years of my life and Grandma’d lived all of hers until those last few years in the trailer. A couple hundred feet short of the old house, I reached the turnoff to the trail that would take me over the ridge to Uncle Mogey’s house, so I cut through a patch of mayapple and angled up the first part of it.
    It was narrow, not much more than a game path, hard to see if you weren’t used to taking it, especially now, with all the green stuff trying to cover, but I’d been running this path since before I was born. I’d started running this mountain when I was still inside Lace— Oh, that was a hard year, Grandma’d say . Hard times then. And your pap just a-smothering to death all along, you know —and they carried me back up just weeks after I came out. If I said it out loud, Lace would say I couldn’t remember, but I could, the ground moving below me, dead-leaf-colored, how many colors of brown. The smell of November rain on beginning to rot leaves. I helped my grandma from the time I could walk. Good little helper, Bant. Such a good helper, creasies,
Shawnee, poke, ramps, molly moochers in spring, blackberries in summer, mayapple and cohosh, then ginseng and nuts—hickory, black walnut, butternut, chinquapin, beech—in the fall.Yellowroot after the sap went down. Sumac and sassafras in November, come Christmas, holly and greenery. I knew these things before I could read. You can live off these mountains, Grandma’d say. And in bad times, she’d say, meaning layoffs, strikes, but also, I knew, the year I was born, we did .
    Now that I’d got past the steepest part of the path to Uncle Mogey’s, I was moving fast, watching always for the copperheads. The humid riding me like a damp shirt. This was full woods now, and I reached out one hand, touched the tree trunks that I passed, lichens, bark, moss. Up in here, you couldn’t hear the machinery working.You couldn’t see any sign of the flood.
    After we came back to West Virginia from North Carolina two years ago, it was all different. It was different. But I still spent a lot of time up here. I didn’t hunt stuff much anymore—some of it was gone, and even the plants that were left the dealers wouldn’t buy like they used to—so I mostly just sat in my places. Those places where if you sat quiet, the space dropped away between you and the land. Some of them were places I’d discovered on my own, but others were ones where me and Grandma used to stop. She’d make me sit