If you want fair weather after you kill a snake, you must bury it.

A bare foot nudged me, then rolled me over like a log. “What you mean yellin like that?” the trouble girl asked. “Folks must’ve heard you clear to town.”

I set up, held my hands against my heart to keep it from burstin through my skin, and brushed the leaves out of my hair. The branch laid on the ground a few inches from me. Stickin out from underneath it were the rusty brown body of a copperhead snake, its mouth wide open, fangs down, and its mean cat eyes starin right at me. I must’ve slept next to that snake all night.

The girl stuck out her hand to help me up. I stood, all wobbly and shakin, and we looked at each other eye to eye. I didn’t want to have to say it, but I did. “Thank you for savin me.”

“Now we don’t owe each other nothin,” she answered.

But I felt like now I did owe her somethin, and I wouldn’t never forget it. I stuck out my hand and took hers again. “Looks like we’re spost to be together,” I said. “Let’s eat a few bites, then get movin up the crick.”

We both set on a big limb that stretched like a bridge over the water. We opened our sacks, pulled out some apple slices and jerky, and chewed in silence. Soon we both be swingin our legs and talkin, almost forgettin for a few minutes where we was and why we was runnin.

“What your name?” the girl asked me.

“I don’t have no name. My mama died just when I were borned and nobody bothered to give me one, ceptin Grandpa, who always called me Sweet Girl when we were alone. But you can call me Girl like everyone else does.”

“Girl ain’t no name for you. I never knowed someone with no name. Even the Nkanga hens on the plantation has themselves names,” she said to me as she stood up and walked back acrost the limb and onto the bank.

“I give you one, but I needs to find a name that fits you good.” She bent to knot the end of the sack, then swung it over her shoulder.

I shuffled acrost the limb, climbed off, slipped my achin arm through the loop of the sling, then tied my bag closed.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, but she were on the other side of the clearin and hadn’t heard me.

“Hey, girl,” I shouted, “what you doin there?”

She kicked soil and leaves over the long, patterned body of the copperhead.

“Hopin for fair weather,” she said. “Cain’t leave this snake without a buryin or we have storms.”

The girl finished coverin the snake and stepped off the bank and into the crick. We both kicked and threw handfuls of water onto my sleepin spot and everywhere our feet had touched the ground.

I started to ask her name again, but the words never left my mouth. Loud barkin come from somewhere down to the bottoms. I could hear bayin and buglin, the song the hounds sing when they on a warm trail. Then more bayin, and this time too close. Was they pickin up our smells?

“We in trouble,” I said. “Let’s get movin. Stay in the crick.”

She looked at me and nodded afore she took off through the water. I follered close behind her, makin too much noise, splashin, slippin, and fallin over rocks and branches. I felt like I couldn’t raise my feet up another step.

This part of the crick twisted and turned, all crooked every which way. We’d go one way for a few minutes and near meet ourselves goin the other. It felt like we was makin no gains.

Then things started lookin like I’d seen them afore. We was in the Horseshoe Bends near to Bush Crick where Pa brought his wheat to be milled.

We come to a split. Wide waters one way, the other a narrow run I thought to be Bush Crick. We stood at the whirlin pool where the two met and looked up one and down the other. “Which way?” the trouble girl asked me, but I didn’t have no answer.

Bathsheba, my favorite of Pa’s dogs, howled out her familiar yodel-like call from somewhere close by, and we took off runnin down the shinbone of water that rushed ahead of us.