Then she places a steaming bowl of succotash in front of me. It is flavored with bacon and not bear fat—since there are no longer any bears left for us to hunt. They have all been killed or driven away by the Aniyonega, the white men. Those bears that survived, the old people say, have all taken refuge within their stone lodge in the heart of the tallest mountain.

That is such a sad thing. The bears and the humans have always been meant to be together. One of our oldest stories tells that long ago the people were hungry and had nothing to hunt. So one whole clan of humans, the Anitsaguhi, got together and decided to sacrifice themselves. They turned themselves into the first bears and gave the humans permission to hunt them.

Of course, like all beings that are hunted, they only gave away their flesh. As everyone knows, when a game animal is killed, its spirit survives and it can come back to life again in another body. Still, it can be a painful thing to die. And that was a great sacrifice for the Anitsaguhi to make. So it can truly be said that bear meat and the bear’s sweet fat is one of the greatest gifts that was ever given.

But I only think of that story for a brief moment. That is because when my nose takes in the scent of my mother’s incredible succotash, that wonderful aroma drives everything else out of my mind.

I pick up the wooden spoon and taste it. Ah! My mother’s blend of corn and beans—cooked with fresh churned butter, seasoned with just the right amount of black pepper—is nothing less than perfect. She plops down another dish with several round, golden brown fritters in it. Corn pone! And then, as I am stuffing the first of those corn pones into my mouth, she fills a tall mug with sassafras tea and puts it next to my bowl.

When I finish that bowl of succotash, my mother fills it a second time. And a third. I eat so much that my stomach sticks out like a raccoon’s belly after it has finished robbing a goose nest. I almost eat too much—but not quite. There’s room for two pieces of cobbler made with some of the dried apples that were quartered last fall and hung in strings from the rafters over the stove.

I wish I could just keep eating. I wish I could just eat and eat and not think. But I can’t. And now that I’ve scraped the last of the cobbler from the wooden bowl, I realize, with a sigh, that none of my problems have gone away. Things are just as they were, if not worse.

I am still the son of Sequoyah, the man even my friends think is engaging in the worst sort of bad medicine.