Page 6 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

"It wasn't?"

"She did it alone too. I caught her at it once from the porch, out in the yard, no one within a mile of her." He shrugs, one shoulder. "She'd say — if you know what it's called, you can't walk past it. That's the whole trick. You look at a hillside, you see a hillside. You know eleven things on it by name, you can't see a hillside anymore. You see all eleven, every time. She thought that was the best thing that could happen to a person."

"She sounds like she was right."

"She died when I was nineteen. There's no house left, no land, my mother sold the lot in ninety-nine." He says it plainly, no weight added. "What I've got left is the habit. It's the only part of her that's still doing anything."

I don't say anything. This is a skill I've acquired from him.

"So I say the names," he says. "Out loud. In an empty forest. It's the least strange thing I do."

"What's the strangest?"

"Bringing a stranger up here."

I feel that deep in my heart.

We work the draw until the light starts to fade.

Daniel's got the tailgate down, sorting into flats by grade, headlamp on. I've been given the number twos. I sort them because I like the sorting and because it means standing eight inches from him in the dark, and I have entirely stopped pretending otherwise.

"You're cooking these?”

"The lodge lets me in the kitchen after nine. I've been doing chanterelles in butter every night since Saturday and eating them standing at the counter like a raccoon. Last night I did the ugly ones sliced raw and thin with lemon and salt and a scrape of the good butter and I nearly cried."

"Raw."

"Raw. You should try it before you ship the rest of your life away in a cooler."

He turns his head, and the headlamp beam goes across my face and off, and he reaches up and shuts it off so we're standing in the blue of the last light.

"Sorry," he says. "That was in your eyes."

I didn’t mind.

I can hear the creek from here, and I am close enough to see the grain of the stubble along his jaw and the wet at his collar, and neither of us is sorting anything anymore.

He lifts his hand to the strap of my jacket, where it's twisted at my shoulder, and he straightens it with two fingers, slowly, like the strap is a thing that has been bothering him for hours.

His knuckles touch the side of my neck. The warmth makes my breath catch.

"It’s supposed to rain Sunday night," he says, and his voice has dropped to somewhere it hasn't been all week. "Sunday and Monday both. Monday's the bad one."

"You said."

"I've got a cabin up the road. Ten minutes past the second switchback." He takes his hand back. It takes him a while to do it. "There's a stove in it. If you come out Monday, you'll want somewhere to put your clothes."

I suppose that’s Daniel’s way of inviting me back to his place. Wet socks. Pretty romantic for a mushroom forgager, I think.

four

Daniel

There's a way water gets under a collar and runs the length of your spine that no jacket ever built has solved. Lena has been living with it since eleven this morning without one word of complaint.

I’m right about the rain and relieved when she decides to come back to my place instead of hauling her muddy self back to the lodge.

I get the door open and she comes into the mudroom behind me, streaming, and stands there while I peel out of my shell and hang it on the hook.