Wild Harvest Mountain Man (Autumn Harvest in Silver Ridge #4)

1. Lena

one

Lena

Two mushrooms, orange as egg yolk, pushing up through the needle litter at the foot of a rotting log, and I have the plate built in my head before my knife is out of my pocket.

Dry pan first, because water is the enemy of everything good.

Then butter, foaming, going nutty at the edges.

Thyme. A smashed clove of garlic I lift out before it colours.

If this town has crème fra?che I'll finish with a spoonful, and if it doesn't I'll use good salted butter and a squeeze of lemon and nothing else, because the kindest thing you can do for a chanterelle is get out of its way.

I reach for it.

"I wouldn't."

The voice comes from up the slope behind me, unhurried, like a man commenting on the weather. I don't fall over, which I'd like credit for, because I'm crouched on wet duff in boots two sizes too big with three pairs of borrowed socks bunched inside them.

I gasp and turn on my heels.

He's maybe ten feet above me on the pitch, standing on ground that should not hold anybody, a flat woven basket hanging off one shoulder and a short knife riding his belt.

Canvas jacket gone dark at the shoulders from wet branches.

Ball cap. Mid-thirties, a week of beard, dark eyes that have already looked at my hands and the log and the two orange caps and come to a conclusion.

He's a big man. Wide and tall and bearded. There's a low catch in my chest, specific as a pilot light taking flame, that has nothing to do with mushrooms and everything to do with how still he is while he waits for me to answer.

I have not felt anything catch in five months. I'd stopped expecting to.

"They're chanterelles?" I ask.

"They're not."

"They're orange."

"So's a traffic cone." He comes down the slope in three steps and crouches beside me without crowding me, close enough that I get woodsmoke off his jacket, and wet earth, and something faintly resinous underneath.

He doesn't reach for my mushroom. He points at it with one blunt finger. "Turn it over."

I do. The underside is a fan of thin blades, densely packed, orange going brownish where they meet the stem.

"Those are gills," he says. "Sharp. Thin.

Crowded. They come away if you push at them.

" He nudges one with his thumbnail and it lifts, delicate as a fish bone.

"A chanterelle doesn't have gills. It has ridges — blunt, forked, running down the stem, the same colour as the rest of it.

You can't peel them off because they're not stuck on. They're the mushroom."

"So what's this?"

"False chanterelle. It's a good liar." He turns the cap in my palm without touching my palm.

"Soft. Orange all the way through the flesh.

And it's growing on this." He taps the log.

"Wood. Rotten wood, duff, old stumps. Chanterelles don't do that.

They live off tree roots — Douglas fir, hemlock — so they come up out of soil, on their own or in a loose scatter, never sprouting off a log like a shelf. "

"What would it have done to me?"

"Nothing dramatic." A beat. "You'd have spent the night regretting the choices that brought you here."

"I've done that sober."

That gets me a look.

Clearly I do not know enough about wild mushrooms to be foraging. I thought I did.

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.

"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.