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YEAR OF THE FUNGUS, PART TWO
Mary VanFleet
In that particularly damp summer a few years back, my foraging partner and I were out huckleberrying (if I told you where I’d have to kill you) and we noticed a proliferation of fungi and in particular, things we thought might be chanterelles. They are everywhere we went. It was a late berrying season, or an early fall mushroom bloom, but whatever it was, it was exciting. Never having seen them, we weren’t exactly sure. Some smelled like apricots, some didn’t and the nose got fatigued so quickly we didn’t smell anything after a while. But everywhere we looked, there they were, most likely mixed in with the not-so-edible look-alikes. So, we went on with the berrying, which was also prolific, and filled our buckets. We were so intrigued by the vast expanse of the orange beauties sprouting from the ground all over the place that we brought home some samples for further study. We looked at all the books, read all the references, stuck them under every nose we could find for a whiff, and spore sampling was a bust. In the end, it was fun, but much harder than people say. Supposedly foolproof. Fools we were, I guess. We threw them all out.
Within a few days, a dear friend was excited he was going chanterelle hunting the next day. “How do you tell them from the false ones?” I asked. “It’s easy” like he had done it before. The next day, he called to ask me if I knew what chanterelles looked like. I said no, I’d been there and done that. He said he picked a whole bag full, pretty sure they were the real McCoy, but wanted an expert. I didn’t qualify. He had already stopped at a visitor center on the way home to see if they were experts. No, just a visiting volunteer. So, he called another person, and another, and another, and I don’t think he found one. In the end, he decided he would take a chance, and sauté some up for a test. He called a few days later to profess he was still standing so he guessed that his guess was correct.
Within the week, a group of neighbors and friends went out to a local restaurant for dinner. The special of the night was grilled bison tenderloin with sautéed wild picked chanterelles on top. “ We just got these in fresh today!” the server said. We all knew the story and looked at each other. Finally, the guy at the head of our table asked the waitress “You didn’t get them from a guy named Frank, did you?” Laughter followed, and a toast to fall at Henrys Lake. Happy mushrooming.
Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Are they or aren’t they? You tell me. I’m not an expert.
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