Amanita

Published in Sad Girls Club Lit, 2023.

Thriving from a pile of dried dead leaves, the white-capped mushroom looked like a tasty find. Travis glanced back and forth between the living specimen to the photo in the dog-eared pages of Aunt Cathy’s Field Guide to Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest. He was ninety-five percent sure about the discovery, that is to say he had scientific certainty. “Hey Aunt Cathy! It looks like a pine mushroom but I think it’s a Smith’s amanita!”

“No way!” Aunt Cathy crouched to lower her dirt-streaked face nearly to the earth to peep the underside of the little fungus without uprooting it. “I’ve only ever found one of those and I misidentified it at the time.”

“Huh?” Travis frowned. “You’ve never found a Smith’s amanita before...” This mushroom was right up with the death cap as one of the most deadly a human could ever make the mistake of eating. He certainly hadn’t seen one on their foraging trips. But she had been showing him mushrooms in the backyard ever since he was little, so maybe she had a long time ago? Naw, unlikely.

“Of course I did. You were with me. You just don’t remember.” Aunt Cathy ruffled his hair. “We’ll need to take it home for a spore print.”

He’d outgrown having his hair ruffled by Aunt Cathy. He was no longer small and she didn’t have the venerable entitlement of an older relative to be able to do it. His mother’s youngest sibling, Aunt Cathy was only nine years older than himself. This time, however, he smiled; it felt it had been a long time since she’d last done that.

Travis traded his aunt’s guidebook for a field knife and specimen container from their single hiker’s backpack for the day. It was critical that unknown varieties were tested before sale or consumption - poisonous mushrooms often looked exactly like edible ones. They’d found fishy-smelling burn-red mushrooms that hopefully would be lobster mushrooms. Lobsters sold for a premium. A couple days ago the British Columbia Wildfires government website had listed a small fire in the area from a lightning strike. Shiitake mushrooms liked to come up after strikes due to a nitrogen influx to the soil. These were a standard staple among distributors and wholesalers and could be dried and packaged for the rest of the year. They had already gathered thirty pounds of shittake, most of it already in the car. Next year the burned spots in the forest would have black morels.

Noon brought a robin’s egg sky full of the easeful silence of the forest, punctuated by peaks of cedar and, even taller, the rusty point of the old radio tower on top of the abandoned copper mine.

“Do you think there are more shiitake here because of the radio tower? Since it’s more likely to draw a lightning strike?” Travis asked Aunt Cathy as they scoured the tree trunks above for summer oysters and turkey tails. You couldn’t eat rocklike turkey tails but they could be boiled with other ingredients to make soup stock or tea with medicinal properties.

She didn’t respond.She wasn’t beside him.

“Aunt Cathy?” He lurched around, the wind brushing the back of his neck. She was cutting off a clump of rubbery oyster mushrooms from a tree behind him. Even though she stood calmly Travis felt the same mild panic he’d felt once when he got separated from his mother at a grocery store.

“Hey! Earth to Cathy!” Travis held his hand on her shoulder and held on. Startled, she looked at him and seemed to remember where she was.

“Good question! I don’t see why not,” she answered as if no interruption had occurred.

Travis glared at her. “Why did you ignore me?”

She looked confused. “I never ignore you.”

“You just did!” Her denial made Travis angry for some reason he couldn’t explain. It was like she had left him for a second.

“I was just mentally somewhere else but I’m back now.”

“Uh...ok.” He shrugged but was not fully at ease. He turned his thoughts back to mushrooms, the point of the trip. “We should come back to this spot.”

“We should, but I don’t know if I want to again.”

Travis nudged her in a friendly bodycheck. Partly to be playful and partly to physically make sure she was still with him. “Why not?”

“There are other places to go.”

“But you don’t need to go to other places if this one is already good,” Travis insisted, a bit resentfully. “Why not come back here?”

“Because there could be something even better in a new place,” was her enigmatic non-answer.

The turkey tails and oysters weren’t plentiful here. She bushwhacked her way through some raspberry bushes in a quest downhill. Travis followed to have a view of her leading the way. “You know they built the tower because of the tragedy in the mines, right?” Cathy said.

“No. What happened?” Travis asked, curious.

“Like a hundred years ago there was a cave-in in the copper mine. A bunch of miners underground died. That’s why they closed it.” Aunt Cathy pointed out a bright orange glob of witch’s butter growing beside a lichen-covered trunk. “Later they built a radio tower here because there were already the mine entrance foundations that could be used for something else. And it gave them a monument to put a plaque on to commemorate the tragedy.”

“Huh.”

Aunt and nephew reached the bottom of the incline and sat on warm rocks above a bubbling creek with their packed lunches. They’d made mushroom soup with foragings from previous occasions: oyster, Pacific golden chanterelle, king bolete and chicken of the woods. Aunt Cathy used to insist that they sell all their finds but recently Travis had convinced her to set aside the freshest picks from the inventory. He didn’t want to miss the bounty of their harvest.

Aunt Cathy wasn’t touching her delicious lunch for some reason. She took one long look at it then kept looking around at the forest and creek surroundings. Travis was mildly annoyed, then he felt uneasy again. Why did he think her behaviours were so weird today? He didn’t care how other people ate their lunch.

“Hey, wait here,” Aunt Cathy said. Without explanation she abandoned lunch, bounced off her rock and skipped over the creek, disappearing into a clearing that lacked undergrowth.

Startled, Travis put down his soup and scrambled after her into the shade under the trees. What could she have seen to leave like that? When he drew nearer it was a partially-collapsed sunken hole in the soil two metres deep, choked with weeds.

He peered into the accidental burrow. Deep down he discerned from the best attempts of daylight to reach it, a cement tunnel interlaced with a criss-crossing scar laid on the floor like stitches in the earth.

Aunt Cathy rubbed her hands together. “It’s a sinkhole into the old mine. There’s likely to be some neat species just inside.” Aunt Cathy had taught him that dark, damp environments in wooded soil with some air circulation were the perfect habitat for some types of mushrooms.

The sinkhole was a twisting tunnel through rooty, damp soil into an abandoned mine. Travis laughed because she must have been joking. “Yeah, I’ll go get the shovel.”

“Oh, we could just slide right in.”

Travis stopped chuckling. “Into the hole in the ground?”

“Yeah. Easy.” Before he could question it she had sat on the ground and was easing her way feet first into the rabbit hole.

“Wait!” Holes were not a usual occurrence in soil so interlaced with the root systems of the cedar trees. Something was very off about it.

“I’ll only go inside a little, I just want to see if there are any atypical mycelium roots or even mushrooms down there.”

“Here, how about I go?” Travis dropped to the forest floor and kicked her feet out of the way into the hole. “I’m more nimble and you would know what to do if something happened.”

“But I can better identify unfamiliar species, so it should be me.”

“I can tell you if there’s anything down there I don’t recognize.”

“You might not recognize unfamiliar fungi anatomy,” Aunt Cathy argued.

“How else am I supposed to learn?” Travis countered. “If I’m leading my own foraging trip one day?”

Aunt Cathy was silent. “You’re right, Travis. I won’t always be there on a trip. You’ll have to learn how to consider things that might not seem important enough to consider.”

Travis gritted his teeth and rotated his torso to crack the bones in his back. He was going to go down this stupid sinkhole before she did because she was acting weird and he didn’t like it. Aunt Cathy had never been a downer and today she sounded like an aging grandparent. He didn’t understand why; they were born in the same decade.

“Do we have to see what’s down there?” Travis finally asked. “We already have so many mushrooms. There will be lots more up here. Morels, king boletes, we could even see who can find a puffball first! There’s nothing worth harvesting in there,” he almost pleaded. Plus, if she got stuck inside or the soil collapsed on her there would be no help within fifty kilometers. Even that might be inaccessible so deep in radio country.

“Travis,” Aunt Cathy patted him on the shoulder. “I’d rather you stay up here. We shouldn’t both go down there. I really just want to know.” And with that, Aunt Cathy clamored past his feet and disappeared into the yawning gape of the crumbling mouth.

“Wait!” Travis followed suit. Rotting wood chips and rich soil showered around his head and shoulders as he wriggled and then slipped through the earth. It was like the tightest covered slide he’d ever slid down, while dirt rained over his face and ears and hair. He lost his balance upon landing through the mine ceiling and fell on his butt onto the hard, raised metal stitches he’d observed. Wincing, he felt its cold, rusty surface. A yellow light pierced the darkness as Aunt Cathy secured a headlamp around her head, the kind they wore camping at night.

The hole in the ground had sunken into an old tunnel. In the headlight Travis saw that the metal bar he’d fallen on was a track. The air smelled...metallic. So far removed from the fresh, rainy, mossy smell of mushroom habitats. At the edge of the headlamp down one direction of the track was the ghostly outline of a cart.

“Maybe we should go,” Travis said, mouth dry.

“Yeah...let’s go,” Aunt Cathy responded as she moved to the heavy metal cart, to Travis’s consternation. As she moved down the tunnel he saw in the dim periphery some long, jagged things dangling from the ceiling spaced every couple meters. Travis squinted dumbly at the things until his eyes adjusted. They were rusted chains.

“I mean we should leave!” He had to dry heave every word because the whole place left him dumbfounded.

“We haven’t looked for mushrooms yet,” she called back from the metal cart. Rather than echoing, the walls sucked and trapped her voice so she sounded much farther away. Travis watched with growing apprehension as his aunt placed her hand on the lip of the cart.

“There are no mushrooms here!” He ran to her. Up close the heavy metal cart was large enough to fit a handful of grown miners. Inside were piles of thick chains entombed below inches of dust.

Aunt Cathy looked him dead in the eyes. “I have to go, Travis.”

Travis wanted to drag her out of the ground back into the safety of the fresh air. “What do you mean?” he forced out in a measured voice.

“Don’t dwell on this place.” She sounded strangely blank. “You don’t belong here. I’ll see you again.” The briskness and finality of her words hardened the goosebumps on his neck that had formed ever since she seemed to have left in the forest earlier.

Travis almost saw it coming, the mad dash for something invisible and insane that he couldn’t understand. She climbed into the cart with the same startling enthusiasm jumping into the hole. Without any further prompting the cart began to move on the even ground.

“Aunt Cathy!” Travis ran and caught the cart before it slipped away and he threw himself inside. A cloud of dust stung his eyes and scratched his lungs and he coughed deep from the chest. Then he felt a pinching and the rush of wind as the chains below him moved. They shot out from below him and wrapped over his body, pinning him to the floor of the cursed cart. They were as heavy as the dead weight of metal pythons. Immobilized and disoriented from the spore-like dust, all he saw were darting shadows on the ceiling.

“Travis!” Aunt Cathy’s voice carried a surprised fear. The chains tugged while he sputtered and felt the motion of the cart downhill. “Go back!” She sounded like her normal self. With some effort she pulled the chains off him. The wind howled in the concrete tunnel. Travis wiped his face with his freed hand. The cart decelerated to a halt much too soon as if a switch had turned it off.

In the light from Aunt Cathy’s headlamp Travis made out that they were in a deeper chamber where the tunnel widened. The cart had stopped in the very centre of a domed cavern. He didn’t like that at all; it reminded him of an altar, or the bottom of a bowl where eyes above could see everything but those in the bottom could not. Travis noticed hollowed cubicles carved into the walls. He was too stunned to move. Cathy stepped out of the cart with the same care of exiting a rollercoaster after a dizzying run. She approached the cubicles in the wall.

There were three. Each contained an object that shouldn’t have been there.

The first cubicle contained Aunt Cathy’s worn, beloved copy of Field Guide to Mushrooms of The Pacific Northwest. He didn’t question how it got there even though they had left it behind aboveground by the creek. The second had Aunt Cathy’s thermos of mushroom soup. It was still steaming. And the final cubicle contained something Travis had only seen once. It was in a misplaced habitat so there was no scientific certainty. But somehowTravis knew with absolute certainty that this was a Smith’s amanita mushroom.

Travis climbed out of the cart in a daze. He stood beside his aunt. He didn’t know what to say.

Aunt Cathy gently rested her hands on his shoulders. “I think you already know what these things are, Travis.”

Travis had a horrible guess that he didn’t want to say out loud or else it would be true.

“I’m afraid it’s true.” She hung her head sadly.

“No,” Travis croaked. He couldn’t articulate a rising wave of something upsetting squirming inside making his stomach sick, his throat dry and jaw locked. It threatened to well from his dirt-smeared face over warming cheeks, in contrast with his clammy, tingling hands.

“But I haven’t fully gone. You haven’t let me go.”

“You’re not gone.” Travis said thickly. He remembered the last trip. They’d found a half-dozen white mushrooms clumped together. They’d taken a rushed spore print of one and the guidebook said it was a white matsutake, or pine mushroom. Used in Japanese high-end cuisine and fetching up to two hundred dollars a pound. They’d set up the backpacker stove over a propane canister. Grilled their finds. Aunt Cathy had added a single grilled mushroom to her soup to taste. Travis hadn’t, he didn’t want the renowned spiciness of the pine to overpower the meaty taste of their regular stock. She’d said hers was delicious.

It had been fine.

“That didn’t happen.”

“Travis-”

“We just had our normal soup. Then we foraged some more.” They’d survived lunch, collected pounds of chanterelle and chicken of the woods. And then...and then...

“We followed the guidebook. We tested the mushroom. It was definitely a pine mushroom,” Travis pleaded. His tight jaw felt like he would never open it again.

“We did, Travis. They weren’t all, though.”

There had been no cell phone reception. He’d screamed into the radio. An hour later a pair of grim loggers arrived, the RCMP not far behind them…

Travis began to sob like a small boy. He rubbed his eyes. When he opened them Aunt Cathy wasn’t standing there. His wet eyes didn’t adjust to the darkness. He sniffed. Again the walls didn’t echo. The sound evaporated into silence as if the place were determined to remove any sensory evidence that he was there, just like it had removed any sign of Aunt Cathy.

No- there was a new light source. He faced the wall. The thermos of soup and the Smith’s amanita were glowing a beautiful, inviting warm light like a dappled sunrise on fresh berries. Neither the pine mushroom nor the amanita were naturally bioluminescent but he wasn’t even surprised anymore at the oddness.

He felt suddenly very tired and heavy and sat down. The darkness was like a blindfold no matter how widely he opened his eyes. He lay on the earthen ground and closed them.

Maybe if he lay there long enough the heaviness would drain into the planet and he’d be so light he’d float through the forest floor and above the trees and into the sky. There would be no forest there. No mushrooms to forage. He clenched his fingers into a fistful of earth and slowly sat up.

Travis eyed the glowing thermos and mushroom framed so perfectly in the tempting light. His aunt’s beloved book was dimly shadowed in the periphery of the glow. Aunt Cathy would want him to keep her book safe. He gently lifted the Field Guide to Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest and hugged it to his chest.

It was still too dark to see anything else. He hesitated, then pinched the edges of the thermos and the stem of the Smith’s amanita and lifted them off the wall cubicles so they dangled with minimal touch. With a glowing lantern in each hand we walked slowly back into the tunnel they’d slid down.

Travis didn’t fear the dark place anymore with the deadly lights by his side and the book pinched under his arm. He knew he didn’t belong there. And he had to return his aunt’s book home. She would have wanted that.

The second he had that thought he sensed a sort of camaraderie though he didn’t know why. Then a voice said, “I know it was hard to get there but you did eventually.”

He almost dropped the items. He turned his head to his side and Aunt Cathy was back walking beside him with a little smile on her face.

“Aunt Cathy!” Travis couldn’t help it. He threw his arms around her in a very solid, warm hug. “I know you’re not really there but you’re still here, if that makes sense.”

She returned the hug. “It doesn’t have to make sense. And I’m proud of you,” she said. Travis hung onto her every word. “I know it’s so hard. I’m sorry I won’t be there for the rest of it. I should have been more careful.”

“It’s not your fault,” Travis conceded. “I’ll always remember everything you taught me about the woods, and foraging. Thanks, Aunt Cathy.”

“We’ll meet again, Travis, just not now.” He nodded. Aunt Cathy walked him to the sinkhole they’d crawled through. “You won’t need those,” she pointed to the glowing thermos and the Smith’s amanita mushroom. He handed them to her and was about to hand her her book but he gently pushed it back and shook her head.

“It’s yours,” she said.“ I’ll ask you all about your finds and what you’ve learned. By then, you’ll have more experience and will probably be teaching me!”

They laughed. She tossed the glowing objects above her head and with a flicker like a flame popping out, they vanished. “Till we meet again, little guy,” she ruffled his hair.

“Bye for now, Aunt Cathy,” Travis said. And with that, she started to look a bit transparent, then her feet disappeared, then her legs, then her torso, until her waving hand and big smile were the last parts of her to softly fade away.

Travis scrambled up the hole like and crawled out of the earth into a warm afternoon, observing cedar boughs above rustling in the wind and the stream beyond bubbling over smooth rocks. He was alone.

He took in the enchantment of the forest around him in silence. Then, brushing a streak of wet dirt from below his eye, he brought himself and the field guide to mushrooms back to the stream, packed up his sole lunch. He picked up the single backpack for just one person, and made his way back to the path home.

—