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By Root 618 0

the flavors and scents—is not only comprehensible but answers to your desires. Indeed, the plants have by now folded those desires into their genes, craftily exploiting them in order to expand their numbers and habitat. It is as much as anything else this mutualism that makes the garden the most hospitable of landscapes, for everything in it is, in some sense, an extension of ourselves, a kind of mirror. (And we are in some sense an extension of the garden’s plants, unwitting means to their ends.) The domestic species in a garden (or farm) are figures in our world, live under the same roof. You can forage in the garden, in the way Adam and Eve presumably did, but there isn’t much to it: no dilemmas, no hunting stories.

This forest proposes a completely different way of being in nature. The morels would just as soon I pass them by, and it will be a long time before the first berries return to this blasted landscape and declare their bright presence. It’s a little like being in a foreign country: No one knows me here! In the forest you’re encumbered by none of the agriculturist’s obligations of citizenship; you feel some of the traveler’s exquisite lightness of being in a place oblivious to his presence, as well as his hyperreal sense of first sight, first smell, first taste. That sense, too, of something for nothing, for all this is coming to you simply by dint of walking around and deploying your senses. Of course the rush of newness is usually shadowed by worry: Am I getting lost? Should I pick that mushroom, too?

And yet though the burned forest does not welcome us like the garden and exists completely outside the realm of our domestic arrangements, you nevertheless feel certain strands of affiliation with these wild species you’re looking for: the affinities of the hunt. When it’s working, the pop-out effect—this amazing perceptual tool we’ve developed to defeat the arts of camouflage—feels very much like the manifestation of such an affinity. Alone in the woods out of earshot of my fellow mushroom hunters, I found myself, idiotically, taunting the morels whenever a bunch of them suddenly popped out. “Gotcha!” I would cry, as if this were a game we were playing, the mushrooms and I, and I’d just won a round. This is not something I can ever imagine saying to an apple in the garden; there, it just wouldn’t be news.

I’d completely lost track of time and space when my walkie-talkie blurted, “Break for lunch—meet back at the car.” I had wandered nearly a mile from the car, mostly downhill, and by the time I worked my way back up to the road, clambering up ankle-twisting hills that slid out from under my feet, the others were standing around on the roadside munching trail mix and admiring their impressive hauls. “You couldn’t have picked a better day,” Ben gushed when I wandered over with my own bag full of morels. “The mushrooms are so on today, I’ve never seen it like this—we’re killing them!”

We sat on a charred log (by now we were well charred ourselves) and ate our lunch, talking about the mushrooms and the “mushroom trail” and this summer’s upcoming big mycological happening. Apparently thousands of mushroom hunters were expected to descend on a vast burn deep in the Yukon, some by helicopter, to await what was expected to be a world-historical flush of morels. Paulie Porcini was thinking of going. “You get twenty-two hours of hunting up there,” Paulie said, as if this were an unquestioned boon.

People have been gathering morels in burned forests forever; Ben mentioned that in Bavaria people would set forest fires for the express purpose of harvesting morels. I asked if mycologists had figured out what made the morels come up after forest fires. Were they saprophytes feeding on the roots of dead pines, suddenly plentiful, or mycorrhizal mushrooms that had suddenly lost their hosts? Nobody knew for sure, though one of Anthony’s theories holds that “a bad year for the organism is a good year for us.”

Mycologists I talked to later confirmed Anthony’s hunch. The current thinking is that the morels found in pine forests