Page 2 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

I set the fake down on the log and wipe my fingers on my thigh and wait to feel stupid, and the feeling doesn't come, which surprises me too. Six years in professional kitchens teaches you exactly one useful reflex, and it isn't knife skills. It's this: when someone who knows more than you tells you you're wrong, you say thank you and you write it down.

"Show me a real one," I say.

He stands. Doesn't offer me a hand up, which I appreciate more than I'd have expected. "This way. Watch the ground, not me. You're looking for a different orange — colder. More apricot than pumpkin."

I follow him twenty metres across the slope, and we're not on a trail anymore, and he's talking the whole way in a low steady stream I don't think is entirely aimed at me.

"Bunchberry. Step over. Hemlock, hemlock, fir — good, that's what we want." His hand goes flat, palm down, like calming an animal. "Sword fern's a bad sign, it means the ground's too rich. Here. Look at the moss where it swells."

There's a hummock of moss with a crack in it, and inside the crack, a lobe of pale gold.

"That," he says.

I go down on both knees in the wet without thinking about it. The cap is wavy-edged, funnelled in the middle, and when I turn it the underside is exactly what he described — ridges like veins, blunt, splitting and rejoining, running down into the stem, the whole thing one continuous piece of gold.

"Smell it."

I break the flesh with my thumb and bring it to my face, and there it is. It smells a lot like apricot, warm and stone-fruit sweet, sitting on top of something raw and animal and cold.

I have been unable to want food for five months. Not eat it — want it. I've been standing in a rented room heating soup out of a can and feeling nothing at all, and now I'm on my knees in dirt with mud in the creases of my hands, and I want to cook this so badly my mouth stings.

"You okay?" he asks.

"Yeah." My voice comes out wrong. I clear my throat. "I didn’t expect it to really smell so good. It's real."

"It's real." He crouches on the other side of the hummock, and now he does smile, briefly, at the mushroom rather than at me. "There you are," he says to it, quiet, like he's found a coat he thought he'd lost.

I look at him for slightly too long.

He shows me how to cut it, leaving the base in the ground, and how to brush the needles off before it goes in the basket instead of after, because dirt in a basket travels. He shows me a second one under a fir six paces on. Then he stops me with two fingers held up and points at something white-stemmed and red-capped standing alone in the moss like a decoration.

"See the skirt on the stem?"

There's a ring of pale tissue around it, like a cuff pushed down.

"Anything wearing one of those, you leave alone until somebody's taught you otherwise. That's the whole rule. You don't have to learn the names of the bad ones today. You have to learn the shape of what you don't know yet."

"Is that a foraging thing or a general life policy?"

"Both, probably." He straightens and settles the basket strap. "You're a cook?"

How does he know? "Sous chef. Vancouver. Six years."

"Figured. You held the knife right, anyway." He looks at the two chanterelles in his basket, then at me, then somewhere over my shoulder at the treeline. "How long have you been picking?"

I check my watch. "Ninety minutes."

"On your own?"

"There was a woman at the market yesterday selling rosehip jelly and she said the chanterelles were coming in thick on the north slope, and I bought a trail map, and the lodge lent me boots." I hold up one enormous foot as evidence. "In fairness to me, I've never claimed to be an outdoorsman."

He looks at the boots for a long second.

"You saved me from a very bad dinner," I say.

"You saved yourself." He lifts one shoulder. "I talk a lot, is all."

There's a stillness to him when he stops speaking that most people fill up immediately. He doesn't. He stands there in the low gold light coming sideways through the hemlocks, and the cold is coming up off the ground through my knees, and I think: I am twenty-six years old and I have spent my entire adult life inside rooms with no windows.