A Taste of the Woods: Morel Hunting

Soda talks while studying the ground passing his truck window. Suddenly he jams on the brakes. An empty turtle shell skids across the dash.

"I thought I saw one," he says. He peers into the sullen woods, a mottle of bare brown limbs and scrub brush, brown silty soil, brown eroding leaves, and brown rotting twigs and limbs. It is brown upon brown, damp to cloak the spongy morel from discovery.

"Nah. We're a day or two early for this spot. Let's try another place." We stop farther along. The mulchy earth oozes with winter and smells of decay. Fallen, sodden twigs collapse underfoot rather than snap.