I went for a walk in the forest yesterday, expecting nothing mycological, but came home with a bucket full of chanterelles. I have never seen more than one or two of these mushrooms in our woods before, but yesterday I found two large clusters, brilliant yellow in the gloom, a miracle. Last fall, I brought home pail after pail of honey mushrooms. This fall, I have not laid eyes on a single one, though the forest is filled with mysterious fungi--brilliant pink toadstools, tiny delicate corals, a strange orange variety shaped like green beans, pale gray disks on logs, white stalks thrusting up through the leaf litter. And now these chanterelles.

Scavenging for wild food gives me enormous pleasure. I love picking dandelion greens and fiddleheads in the spring, hunting for blackberries in late summer . . . all that quiet circular wandering, my sharpened eyes, the animal sounds, the glow of the berry under a leaf. Last fall was my first serious foray into mushroom hunting, and of all my hunts I may enjoy it most, though I will change my mind about its supremacy once fiddlehead season returns. It is more difficult than, say, berry picking (because mushrooms don't reappear as predictably as plants do) but also easier (no yogic bending and balancing among the thorns). And mushrooms are such strange, otherworldly growths: so frankly erotic in their allure; so alarming, elegant, and hideous. And then there is the scent of the forest in autumn: breathing that air is like breathing a special, rarefied oxygen composed of cavern secrets and forgotten childhoods.

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov talks about his mother's penchant for mushroom hunting:

One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit' po gribi (looking for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream, her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest. . . .

Rainy weather would bring out these beautiful plants in profusion under the firs, birches, and aspens in our park, especially in its older part, east of the carriage road that divided the park in two. Its shady recesses would then harbor that special boletic reek, which makes a Russian's nostrils dilate--a dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, rotting leaves. But one had to poke and peer for a goodish while among the wet underwood before something really nice, such as a family of bonneted baby edulis or the marbled variety of scaber, could be discovered and carefully teased out of the soil.

On overcast afternoons, all alone in the drizzle, my mother, carrying a basket (stained blue on the inside by somebody's whortleberries), would set out on a long collecting tour. Toward dinnertime, she could be seen emerging from the nebulous depths of a park alley, her small figure cloaked and hooded in greenish-brown wool, on which countless droplets of moisture made a kind of mist all around her. As she came nearer from under the dripping trees and caught sight of me, her face would show an odd, cheerless expression, which might have spelled poor luck, but which I knew was the tense, jealously contained beatitude of the successful hunter. Just before reaching me, with an abrupt, drooping movement of the arm and shoulder and a "Pouf!" of magnified exhaustion, she would let her basket sag, in order to stress its weight, its fabulous fullness.

Near a white garden bench, on a round garden table of iron, she would lay out her boletes in concentric circles to count and sort them. . . . As often happened at the end of a rainy day, the sun might cast a lurid gleam just before setting, and there, on the damp round table, her mushrooms would lie, very colorful, some bearing traces of extraneous vegetation--a grass blade sticking to a viscid fawn cap, or moss still clothing the bulbous base of a dark-stippled stem. And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child's finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.