Page 5 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

"From now on?" she repeats.

I hear it after I've said it. I don't take it back. "We can forage again tomorrow," I say. "Seven."

three

Lena

Daniel is talking to the ground and not me. "There you are."

He's on his knees in a bed of needles under a stand of pine. What comes out is white and firm and dense as a fist, nothing like the delicate gold I've spent four days learning.

He holds the mushroom under my nose.

It hits the back of my throat before it hits my brain. Cinnamon, hot and red. Then, underneath, something that has no business being in the same room as cinnamon — feet, laundry left in the machine, a locker room in August.

"Oh," I say. "Oh, that's filthy."

"That's four hundred dollars a kilo in Vancouver if I grade them right."

"For that smell?"

"For that smell." He turns it in his hand, checking the veil. "This one's a number three. Cap's already broken. The buyers want them closed, the size of your thumb, before they know they're mushrooms."

"That's insane. This one has actual flavour. The baby ones are all texture."

He looks up at me from the ground with an expression I'm starting to be able to read, which is a thing I couldn't do on Saturday.

"Say that again," he says.

"The closed ones are texture. The open ones are flavour. If I were cooking these I'd want the ugly ones."

"Twenty years I've been shipping the good ones away and eating the ugly ones," he says. "And in twenty years nobody has said that to me out loud."

I have been in professional kitchens since I was twenty. Six years of them. Two at Marchand, on Hamilton Street, where Yves put me on sauté at twenty-three and sous at twenty-five and where a service ran on the understanding that whoever wanted it least got to leave first. I was very good there. In fact, I was excellent, and I was proud of being excellent, and I stayed on the line with a burn on my forearm the size of a business card because leaving to run it under water would have been a thing people remembered about me.

And then in April I stood at my station during a Saturday second seating and looked at a plate of scallops I'd cooked perfectly and felt exactly nothing. Not pride, not relief. The dial was gone. I put the plate up. I put up two hundred more plates.

In May the guy I'd been with for two years, who worked as a manger four feet away from me and had never once asked me a question about my day that wasn't about the walk-in, told me I'd become impossible to be around, and he wasn't entirely wrong.

In June I asked for a leave and Yves gave it to me without a second thought. Six weeks unpaid, starting the eighth of September, once the summer menu was through. Sous chef, same station, same kitchen, waiting for me on the twentieth of this month.

I have not once, in five days on this mountain, thought about a plate of scallops.

I've thought about a man with mud to his elbows saying there you are to a mushroom.

"Why do you do that?" I ask.

He's brushing needles off the matsutake, unhurried. "Do what?"

"Talk to them. You name everything out loud. All day. You said good morning to a raven on Tuesday."

"That raven's been on this bench longer than I have."

"Daniel."

He sits back on his heels. The rain isn't in yet but the light's gone thin and grey and the whole draw smells like wet bark.

"My abuela taught me to pick," he says. "Rosaria. Down in the Okanagan, when I was six, seven. She walked slow. She had bad hips by then and she used to make me go ahead and come back and report." He turns the mushroom over. "She named everything she saw. Out loud, the whole walk. Trees, birds, weeds, the ones we weren't picking. I thought it was for me. Teaching."