How to Cook a Moose (28 page)

With Dingo trotting just ahead of us, sniffing and peeing and eating grass and trundling along, looking nothing like the big bad wolf, we found a patch of trumpetlike mushrooms by the old graveyard. From then on, we were on the scent, occasionally heading off the road into the woods, on the trail of something neon-yellow or otherwise intriguingly colored or shaped, scrambling over rocks and roots, distracted, then heading back to the road and resuming our walk until something else caught our eye. We weren't after edible mushrooms; we were just collecting for the fun of it.

“There's another beer can,” I said. “There's another one. Another one. There are as many cans as there are mushrooms. Oh my God, another one. Next time we should collect Bud Light cans. Who the hell are these people?”

I had a clear, uncharitable image of a bunch of backwoods yahoos driving their old pickup trucks along the road, throwing empties out their windows and hooting into the quiet air.

“Hey,” said Brendan, heading for a clump of mushrooms. “Look at those.”

We tried to take only one example of everything we found, but couldn't restrain ourselves if something looked particularly worthy. Walking takes on an entirely new dimension when you're focused on picking things up from the ground.

Back at home, I unpacked the basket and arranged our haul on the granite steps just outside the kitchen door, and then we stood and admired them for a while. We'd found orange horns that looked like tiny Victrola speakers with gills underneath, dead-white, penislike, obviously toxic deaths' caps, bright yellow and soft brown clumps of waving fronds that could have come from a coral reef, a bouquet of conjoined, delicate little oyster-colored coins, long slender stems with big flat caps of pale green, pale beige, muted red, gentle yellow, and
dirty white, a hobbitlike shaggy “old man of the woods,” and other wonders and curiosities.

We couldn't eat any of them, because we had no real idea what the hell any of them were, but we did feel a certain proprietary satisfaction.

Then, a year later, right after I passed my driver's test and got excited again about foraging when we went to Foss for blueberries, we ran into our neighbor, Dorcas, a lively and smart seventy-four-year-old, semiretired estate lawyer, well-read dynamo, and amateur mycologist. She lives down the dirt road from us with her husband of over fifty years, and we often see them out with their sweet old golden retriever in all seasons, walking on the road by the lake, or snowshoeing or cross-country skiing through the meadows. Often, in the coldest months, the four of us are the only people along the road. We always stop and say hello and exchange news like a bunch of happy hermits, comparing notes.

This day, however, I was on a mission: I was hell-bent on convincing her to take me mushrooming. Luckily, she didn't put up much of a fight, and a few days later, she picked Dingo and me up in her Prius after breakfast and whisked us off to her secret spot, a spot I swore never to reveal to anyone, especially not in print. Mushroomers are jealous and possessive, and with very good reason.

It was a hot, muggy, early-September day. The three of us set off through the woods on a well-kept path strewn with pine needles, soft and springy underfoot. It was cooler in the trees. A breeze lifted the hemlock and pine branches with soft whooshing sounds.

“Be careful where you walk,” she said. “It's very hard to see them, and easy to step on them by accident.”

I immediately slowed down and paid attention to the ground.

“Shoot,” she said after we'd walked for a while without finding anything, “maybe we're too late; maybe they're already all gone.”

Black trumpets are also known as black chanterelles, trumpets of death, and horns of plenty. They're funnel-shaped, and when they dry, they're inky black. Apparently, they're one of the hardest mushrooms to find, and also one of the most delicious, which explains why Dorcas is so careful about revealing her source.

We walked along slowly, intently scanning the ground and chattering away. She told me about her experiences on the board of directors of the Nature Conservancy, where scientists frequently give talks about various aspects of conservation and nature, of course; it's one of three local boards she sits on. She walked along as easily as I did, nimble and athletic, while she told me about the foremost mycologist in our area, who taught her to hunt black trumpets and chanterelles and got her started in mushrooming. I noticed that she never stopped scanning the ground right at our feet.

“Hey,” I called out helpfully every time I saw a mushroom or other fungus, no matter what kind, scalloped dun-colored fungi covering a fallen log, a dead-white toadstool with a neon-orange underbelly. “There's a mushroom. It looks fresh. Maybe we're not too late.”

“The brighter the color, the more poisonous the mushroom,” Dorcas said. “They're easier to find, but they're no good to eat.”

We continued on, slowly, searching every inch of pine needles, fallen branches, dried leaves, and earth.

“There, a whole patch!” she said. “More dried ones; shoot, we might be too late. The season may be over already. We got two big bags of them in August.”

I didn't see them at first, and then I did: small black shriveled things against the dark ground, almost invisible, spreading for several feet along the path. They looked not even remotely edible, like bits of crumpled tarpaper or lumps of volcanic rock.

“They grow along the path,” she said. “I think they like a bit of sunlight.”

And then, at last, we found a patch of edible, fresh black trumpet mushrooms in a boggy depression in the path, beautiful little horns on slender stalks with a chalky gloss to the dark color. We picked a couple of handfuls excitedly; it had been a treasure hunt, and now we had been rewarded for our patience.

“I can see why people love mushrooming,” I said. “You kind of get hooked. Now I just want to find more. How do you cook them?”

“I sauté the black trumpets in butter and pour it all over steak, or I cut them up into a beef stew.”

“I'm suddenly starving.”

We went on, deeper into the woods.

“What's that blue barrel?” Dorcas said, pointing.

“I don't know,” I said.

We set off to investigate and found a plastic blue cylinder with a hole cut in its side and branches arranged around it and inside it.

“I know what this is,” said Dorcas. “It's a bear-baiting trap. Look, the hunter loads it up with donuts and sits up there and waits for the bear to come and then he shoots it. There's even a rest for his rifle.”

Beyond the bear-baiting trap was a blind in a tree, a lookout made of lightweight steel with a ladder driven into the trunk and a wooden permit dangling from the underside of the perch.

Dorcas made an impatient huffing sound and closed up the trap with the circle of blue plastic; for whatever good it would do, we agreed, it was better than nothing.

I had just heard of bear-baiting for the first time, because there was a referendum to ban it on the ballot for the upcoming election, and I'd been getting a lot of phone calls from activists, hoping to convince me to vote to support the ban. Being an animal lover, albeit a carnivorous one, I had decided without thinking too much about it
that bear-baiting must be bad if so many people in my part of the world were fighting so hard to outlaw it. The trap looked unsportsmanlike and unfair to me, too. “Shooting fish in a barrel” came to mind. I felt sorry for any poor bear that came wandering along innocently, looking for his lunch, thinking he was just enjoying a free donut, and then,
boom
.

On our way back to the car, Dorcas mentioned that her husband was at home that morning, picking the ripe tomatoes from their garden, and when she got back, they would put them up in sterilized jars.

“How much of your own vegetables do you grow?” I asked.

“All we need in the summer, of course. It's so nice to go out to the garden and see what's ready, and that's how we decide what to have for dinner. Our favorite thing to make is fresh tomatoes sautéed with whatever's ripe and served over pasta—eggplant, zucchini, peppers, and garlic, of course. We love garlic.”

“How much of your own produce do you freeze and can and put up for the wintertime?”

“Oh, I make lots of pesto from our basil and freeze that, along with peas, green beans. Our grandchildren love to help shell peas. And we grow our own onions, and they keep nicely. We have a huge freezer. We also have a yearly share in half a cow, a lamb, and a pig, from three different local farms who butcher them for us, and of course we share the meat with our family because it's so much, and we get our chickens at Sherman Farm Stand, because they come from a farm in Maine that lets them run around, pecking in the sunlight.”

“God,” I said enviously, admiringly. “How great. I have never had a garden, I've never grown anything, but I would love to try to start one next year.”

We came to the car and all hopped in, twelve-year-old Dingo leapt into the backseat as easily as Dorcas had walked over the forest
path. It made me glad for the thousandth time that I'd brought him here, away from the city's exhaust and grime, noise and stress.

“Well,” said Dorcas, “what do you want to plant?”

“I think I'd better start with things that are easy to grow so I feel rewarded and encouraged to keep doing it.”

By the time we got back to our dirt road, Dorcas had advised me to start with a ten-by-ten-foot plot, measure it out before winter and cover it with nonporous black plastic to minimize weeds next year, and to start with cucumber, zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, basil, lettuce, and tomatoes. We talked about compost and seasonal plantings. The more we talked about my future garden, the more excited I became. If I could learn to hunt mushrooms, I could learn to garden. Everyone else in this part of the world seemed to know how to do these things already, but to me, it was all still arcane, mysterious, and magical. Learning these things, even imagining learning these things, felt to me like a triumph, a challenge. It made me feel like a slightly different person: a better one.

When Dorcas pulled into the barn driveway, two hours after we'd set out, she handed me the bag of mushrooms.

“I'm not taking your mushrooms!” I said. “No way!”

But she insisted. I knew how kind this was; such generosity does not come along very often. I accepted with thanks and took my treasures inside.

I cleaned the mushrooms by tearing them gently in half and shaking out the pine needles and bits of earth from their crevices. They are very thin-skinned and delicate and velvety, and they come apart in long strips. Also known as the “poor man's truffle,” they have an earthy perfume. Brendan and I admired them all afternoon there on the cutting board as we went about our day.

After we came back from a cooling swim in the lake, when the shadows got long over the meadows and the day began to wane, we
opened some white wine and I embarked on dinner, excited to cook these beautiful things.

Black Trumpet Mushrooms with Chicken Thighs and Mustard Sauce

In a large, shallow skillet, sauté 2 minced shallots and several minced garlic cloves in lots of butter and olive oil. When they are soft, push them to the side and brown four skinless, boneless chicken thighs well; while they brown, dust them with sea salt, black pepper, paprika, and Old Bay seasoning. Remove them from the pan and add the cleaned strips of mushrooms and cook them for a minute or two, then put the thighs back in and pour in a whisked-together sauce of 1/3 cup each half-and-half and chicken broth, plus 1 tsp of Dijon mustard. Cover the skillet and let simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve over wild rice with a side of steamed, garlicky baby spinach. The mushrooms taste clean, faintly smoky, and very rich, and their texture is delicate and meaty. They are the best I've ever eaten. Serves 2.