Page 3 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

"Are you out here tomorrow?" I ask.

He takes his time with it. Long enough that I've already started building the exit — no problem, thanks anyway, I'll find the road.

"Pullout at the second switchback," he says. "Seven. Bring better boots."

He's forty feet up the slope before I remember I don't know his name.

“Hey, wait! I’m Lena.”

"Daniel," he calls back, without turning around.

two

Daniel

I trim the base off a hedgehog mushroom and drop it in the basket, and my hands are doing the work without me, which is how I know I'm listening for a car.

It's ten to seven. The frost is still on the shaded half of the pullout and gone off the half the sun's found, a hard line straight across the gravel. I've been standing at my tailgate for twenty minutes with a thermos I haven't opened, cleaning yesterday's take that didn't need cleaning again.

I don't do this.

Foraging is solitary work. Two people in one patch is one person too many, and I like the quiet better than I like conversation. I've never run a crew out here. Never wanted one. Twenty years in this forest and the only voice in it has been mine.

Then last night I lay awake thinking about a woman in borrowed boots walking a north slope alone with no map worth the paper and a basket full of false chanterelles, and leaving her to it felt worse than breaking a rule I made up myself.

A small grey car comes up the switchback too slow, the way people drive when they're counting corners.

This time, she gets out in proper boots.

"Silver Ridge has exactly one place that sells these," she says, coming around the hood. "The man asked what I needed them for and then he asked if I knew Daniel, and I said sort of, and he said, and I'm quoting, 'well, you'll want the felt liners then.'"

"You'll want the felt liners,” I agree.

She's got her hair off her neck, a wool layer under a shell that still has the fold creases in it, and a paring knife in a leather sheath she's made herself out of what looks like an old belt. She sees me notice.

"Ten minutes with a punch and some waxed thread," she says. "I wasn't carrying a chef's knife up a mountain"

"That's a good knife."

I hand her a basket — the spare, flat-bottomed, mesh through the base so the spores drop back where they came from. She takes it like she's been handed a station.

We work the bench above Blackwater Creek and I try, for about the first six minutes, to talk less.

It doesn't hold.

"Aspect," I hear myself saying. "This slope faces north-east, so it stays cold and it stays wet, and the sun never sits on it long enough to dry the duff. That's what they want. Anything that catches the full afternoon, don't bother."

"So I'm not looking for mushrooms."

"You're looking for the conditions. The mushroom's the last thing that happens."

She stops. Turns that over. "That's mise en place."

"What?"

"Everything set up before service. If you've done it right the cooking is the smallest part of the night." She scans the ground and I can see her doing it differently already — not hunting orange, reading the whole surface. "The dish is the last thing that happens. You're describing prep."

"Then you'll be fine at this."