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       1

       Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia September 4, 2007

      Head down, her eyes skimming the ground, Mariah Lockwood walked the woods. She was looking for ginseng, not to dig and sell its roots as so many Appalachians did, but to count the plants that sprang from the precious roots. At this altitude, the herb was especially easy to spot right now with its yellowing leaves and clusters of red berries. The buried treasure of the ginseng root was worth millions to its buyers, especially in the massive Chinese market. Wild wood American ginseng, locally called sang, was getting so rare it was threatened, and that’s where she came in.

      Seven years ago, her daughter, Jessica, had gotten her the nice-paying job of ginseng counter in these parts. The human-body-shaped ginseng root was on the U.S. government’s endangered species list. If Mariah’s yearly count went down too far, exports would cease and lots of Appalachians, as well as the Chinese and other deep-pocket buyers, would be spitting mad.

      Since the sun was sinking fast, this site would be Mariah’s last stop of the day. Yet, feeling the pinch of hunger, she stopped to pluck some pawpaws. Most places, the little, banana-shaped fruits ripened later, but where the setting sun streamed past the peaks, they were ready early. Their sweet flavor was an acquired taste, but she and Jessie loved them baked and served with cream.

      As she savored the soft pulp, Mariah wondered what her girl was eating in Hong Kong at that big conference on cultivating ginseng. Probably chop suey, rice and lots of tea. More than once, Jessie had wanted her mother to travel with her, but traveling to Lexington for her doctorate graduation was as far as Mariah wanted to stray from this area she knew and loved.

      “This is the forest primeval,” Jessie had quoted from some poem the last time the two of them had walked the woods. Ever since Mariah had agreed to let Dr. Elinor Gering take Jessie into her home near the Kentucky university campus in Lexington, she’d taken fast to book-learning, though the little town of Deep Down and its people still ran fierce in her blood. Although Jessie used to spend every August here, she’d been too busy this year, and Mariah couldn’t help but wonder if Drew Webb’s return had something to do with that.

      Before she checked her last sang spot—one of her secret ones, far back in the smallest hardwood cove huddled up to the stony skirts of Snow Knob—she got her a notion to walk the rocks of Bear Creek, just like in the old days. She and Nate had courted here beside its rushing waters, jumping from rock to rock and sitting out on the biggest one to share corn bread and kisses. When they were both nineteen, smack-dab in the middle of that rock—their island, they’d called it—he’d asked her to marry up with him, and Jessie had been born the very next year. The precious, nearby sang patch had provided roots that paid for her gold wedding band, their marriage license and some blankets and dishes to set up housekeeping.

      With her pack slung over her shoulder, she jumped to the first rock, then leapt from stone to stone, just as she and Nate had, holding hands. The year Jessie turned eight, she’d lost him in a freak accident when he was repairing a barn roof for extra cash. Though she was still young and could have used someone to support them, she’d never wanted to wed again. A one-woman man, that was her. And sometimes here, like right now, she felt her curly haired and sky-blue-eyed Nate was still with her, laughing, leaping. No way this place made her sad.

      Finally, reluctantly, much farther down the creek, she stepped back on firm ground again. In the spring or after a rain, the creek rose high and covered some of these stones as if they weren’t here at all—like folks you’d loved and lost but you knew were still there, just below the surface of your rushing thoughts.

      From the slant of sun, Mariah reckoned it was after seven. Evening shadows stretched long and dark, ‘specially here at the foot of Snow Knob. Hurrying now, she set off again. She was fixin’ to get this last site counted before she went home. The familiar forest trail snaked through the fern-carpeted floor ever deeper into the basswood and walnut trees, the kinds sang liked for company. A ragged canopy overhead that threw mottled shade and sun—that was sang country.

      Already she could hear Bear Falls, which fed the creek, crashing down its limestone stairs. She’d once joshed Seth Bearclaws, the only full-blooded Cherokee round here, by asking if the falls were named after him. But Seth didn’t have a sense of humor, ‘specially about someone counting or digging sang in the old sacred places of his people.

      As if the thought of diggers had summoned them, Mariah’s practiced eye picked up signs they’d been through here, or at least someone had used the sharp edge of a shovel or hoe as a kind of cane as he walked this path. A few small limbs were snapped off too, as if to mark a way back out. She prayed they hadn’t found her special spot, untouched all these twenty-eight years, maybe even longer. Folks not only poached sang off-season, but outright stole and even killed to get