The Mushroom Hunters 🍄

Some moons it would take Nita a week to move a kilometre, scouting the ground for evidence of mycellium and their fruiting bodies to push through the leaf litter. Her hands brushed over a quarter metre square, first the top layer of twigs and lichen, adding the freshest to her basket for the weavers and dyers, and then sifting through the layer of wet and blackened leaves. Some were still bright red, and at a distance, an inexperienced hunter might mistake them for waxcaps or witches caps, but Nita had trained herself to see colours as a distraction, especially the bright ones that shouted for attention. If she attended to all that shouted at her, she would be slower. Whether it was through scent or colour, the forest wanted more life, to create and recreate itself anew. If it had a way of seeing in human terms, it would see her as simply a means to an end, spreading spores and seeds through her interaction with it.

Her knees were wet and muddy, cold and sore - she had forgotten her hunting leathers, and she would pay for this later in life with arthritic knees like her Grandmother. Still, it was a pain she could bear. It was work she enjoyed. Sweep, pluck, shift, scrape. It was rhythmic, meditative - and after a while, she worked on forest time, slow and gently.

After the patch worked she could take any edibles, but they were suprisingly rare. In the pines, there were saffron milk caps, but the mushroom hunters had given up searching there. Today, Nita chewed on amanita jerky - tough and spiced with sea salt and fermented dryad sauce. The jerky was light to carry and full of the necessary protein to sustain her on the Tiers. She was welcome to eat anything else - small grasshoppers, roast on tiny fires in the evening, were popular, but she liked the smokiness of fresh mushroom meat roast on rocks or small fingerlings of trout or bream from the upper streams. The lower streams were notoriously dank and treachourous - one knew not to drink from them - but the upper waterways came fresh from the mountain ice and were clear and good. There were a few fish traps up in these parts for the hunters that came each year, and those that happened by knew them by the marks of charcoalled drawings of childlike amanita, a child’s mushroom drawn with characteristic spots. One always helped the Hunters, and protected what was theirs, wherever they saw their marks.

Nita’s own grandfather took eleven days once to move a metre of leaves and twigs and top soil, just as she was doing now but he was known to be a details man. Thoroughness was necessary, but obsessiveness could drive one mad on the Tiers. The elders had said as much when she turned thirteen and chose hunting as her primary skill set. Raised by mushroom hunters, it was not a surprise to anyone. Perhaps, they said, the hyphae that pushed through the forest also found their way into human brains and limbs, just as some ophiocordyceps infected the bodies of insects and coerced them to scarper up high and clamp tight onto the veins of grasses or leaves so that the fungi could draw nutritional value from them. Whilst the zombie insects might horrify some, she found it fascinating, and besides, the Tierpeople ate the end product as medicine, ignoring it’s origins. Her grandfather earned a lot of bartering power from such fungi, collected in a leather satchel strung diagonally across his chest. She used to rummage in there when he returned from his hunts, smelling the forest there, and finding all kinds of stones and bones, lichens and semi dried fungal matter swimming in sand, silt and soil.

She wished, sometimes, she had his single mindededness. Her mind moved in fits and starts, refusing to remain here, where her work counted, in the soil. As she moved her earth darkened hands over her patch, she thought of her family, long gone into the forest floor themselves, food for the mushroom gods. Consumed in the last sickness that swept the Tiers, they were ten of thousands of tierfolk who succumbed to violent coughing and fits of hysteria, and finally, the loss of the names of hearth and kin, of who they were, of their fungal hearth totems. Whether Bolete or Cep, Amanita or Hericium, all tierfolk succumbed, bar the few who were left to procreate. Two years ago, the last of one hearth disappeared entirely. She was to partner with a boy from that hearth, the Clitocybe, but instead she sprinkled spores of blewitts on his grave, which, if the mycellium took and pushed through the nutritional value of his flesh and bones, would grow purple in the Autumn, when temperature and rain and all magical fungal needs aligned.

Whilst the hunters objective was clear, sometimes it was easy to get depressed or indifferent, and move faster over the tiered ground to pass their hunt to the next team and take up some other duty in forest. Not Nita. Her memories of death were too sharp. Whilst she moved like hyphae through the forest, pushing in all directions in her hunt, her mind was brutally hooked to the memories of the dying and burying the dead not two winters past. She held her grandmother as she wailed and coughed, and finally could not remember her name, nor her granddaughters. She wiped sweat from her mother’s brow as she trembled and shook. She had watched her once erudite yet largely wordless father lose the words for ‘cup’ and ‘brew’ - two words integral to his existance, so fond he was of a strong infusion of turkeytail, honey and sheepmilk. She watched the lines of poison move under people’s skins like mycellial pathways or old roadways under the sediment of hundreds of years, til they became otherworldly and almost transparent, so that a cough would rattle through not just lungs but limbs too.

Her grandmother was the deepest loss. She had raised Nita when her mother could not, so busy with children was she. On the Tiers, large families were important for survival. They were no different to animals, here, in this time and place. The old woman had time for Nita, showing her how to make tinctures and other extractions from the mushrooms, make small balls of dusted fungi, spring greens and wild potatoes and toss them in roiling river water over the fire, and once risen to the surface, plucked out and fried in sheep butter and drizzled with haw sauce. She taught her to boil the toxic amanita to leach out the poisons, soak it in various spices and sauces and dry it in the sunshine. She had held her when her hearth friend, Cordy, had left for the outer Tiers and not returned. She had taught her the difference between the poisonous and the benign, both with people and the fruits of the forest, and had sung to her the old songs sung to her by her own grandmother and her own, back into the far reaches of time where such songs had begun.

It was not easy to watch a loved body die, even if one knew that this was simply the way of things, just as the padis rotted on the forest floor or the mosquitos lived out their short existance from larvae to biting enemies in the height of summer. But by then, there was not many to sit with the dying, and even if they could, Nita could not leave her grandmother’s side, even if she risked death herself.

In one fit of lucidity she held Nita’s hands tight and whispered: ‘the earth is yours, girl’, as if it meant something vital. Perhaps so - the old ones had more of an understanding of life than the youngers. A vital life might mean one energised with purpose, particularly finding what the Hunters were looking for: a cure for the plagues.