Before the sun cleared the peaks, he stepped through the mountain gate and passed the small wooden shrine. The air was still heavy with night, the dampness settling in his bones. Tsuyu — the rainy season — always made his joints ache. He looked out over the tanada — the stepped paddies that climbed the mountainside. Mist clung to the water, trembling with the steady drip of rain from cedar boughs above. A crow perched on the hokora tilted its head, watching him, before giving a low caw and lifting into the gray air.

“Don’t wander too far,” Grandfather said, reaching back with a gnarled hand until his fingers found her tiny ones. “Tsuyu brings the frogs — and the mountain’s hungriest yōkai,” His voice carried a laugh, warm but edged with mischief.

The little girl stamped at the dirt, sending a puff into the cool air. “I’m not scared,” she declared, half-skipping to keep up as they crossed into the shadow of the trees.

“Good. Then you can keep an old man like me safe.” He pushed a long branch aside as they came to one of the traps. “What do you think we caught today?”

“A rabbit. This way I can keep it and name it—”

“You always want to keep it,” he interrupted, “and then you get hungry. And what do we do with it?”

She huffed, plucked a leaf from a shrub, and tossed it aside. “We eat it…” she muttered. “But I won’t eat this one.”

“Grandpa, look.” She bent to pluck a small yellow wildflower; before he could protest she tucked it into his obi, as if it were blossoming from the cloth. “Now you’re a flower too.”

He laughed and released her hand, leaning down to move aside some brush and check the snare.

This one was empty.

“Fox clever,” he said, resetting the loop with careful fingers. “Come. If the traps are lazy, the hills will feed us anyway.”

They left the path, dew soaking their hems as sedge brushed their legs. Frogs clicked from the irrigation ditch by the paddies; a dragonfly skimmed the water’s skin and was gone. “Step on stones,” he said over his shoulder. “Leeches like warm toes.”

“I’m not scared of leeches either,” she announced, then hopped rock to rock, arms out like a tightrope walker.

At the first cut-bank he stopped and pointed. “Warabi. Bracken. Only take the young ones that still curl.” He pinched a fiddlehead and handed it to her. “Grandmother will bathe them in ash water so your tongue doesn’t go numb.”

She sniffed it, wrinkling her nose, then tucked it into his basket as if placing a treasure. “How many do we need?”

“Three good handfuls. And some yomogi.” He brushed his palm across a low patch and lifted his hand to her face. “Smell.”

She leaned close. “Like kusa-mochi!”

“If you help me pick, I’ll ask Grandmother to make some.” He glanced back at her. “And if you find the biggest warabi in the forest, I’ll carve you a flute from bamboo tonight.”

Her eyes lit. “I’ll find two biggest.”

They worked the edge of the trees: she plucked soft yomogi leaves with solemn care; he cut a few fat fuki stalks, peeling one and handing her the thread of pale bitterness to taste and spit. In the ditch he pinched wild seri for miso tomorrow. At a thorny sapling he paused. “Tara-no-me,” he said. “Shoots. We only take a few from one tree, and we leave some, or the mountain gets angry.”

“Does the mountain really get angry?”

“It remembers,” he said simply.

They found the second snare along a game track. A single pheasant feather snagged in the twine, bright as a tongue of flame in the dim light. He held it up, smiled, and tucked it behind her ear. “For luck.”

“Like the flower,” she said, pleased. “Grandma will say I look like festival.”

“If your grandmother sees you muddying her floor, she’ll say you look like trouble.” He lifted the trap, checked the knot, and reset it. “One more by the cedar stump. Then we turn back.”

“Can we pick mushrooms after?”

“Mushrooms are for autumn. Today is shoots.” He hefted the basket. “And you’ve already won your flute.”

They started back as the world brightened, the paddies beginning to mirror the pale sky. Ditch water lapped at stones. A snarl of vine caught at her ankle; he freed it gently, brushing mud from her heel with his sleeve. When they reached the small shrine again, she tugged his hand and broke away long enough to press another flower at the base of the weathered wood.

“For luck,” she said.

“For thanks,” he corrected, but his voice was soft.

The old man adjusted the basket on his back, the flower in his obi nodding with the motion.

“Come on,” he said. “before the sun climbs high and the frogs sing like your father after too much sake.”