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Striding forward, his sturdy right hand clutches a knobby wooden walking stick, cut from a tree branch and stripped.

On a recent drive north of Sacramento, I spotted a row of knobby peaks that looked more like a children’s book illustration than real-life mountains.

The boy is tall and lanky, with knobby knees poking out of his shorts and messy dark brown hair.

The tree has the look of an ancient thing — knobby and gnarled and thick, so thick and tall it appeared at times like several oaks stacked on top of one another.

The mushrooms bowed their knobby heads in her direction.