10 NATURE’S BOUNTY

10

NATURE'S BOUNTY

Tuesday morning, Vida rises in a bright spirit of expectation and preparation. This is a fine day for preliminary gem evaluation and for seeking the bounty of field and forest. In summer, there will be blackberries and wild strawberries and many varieties of mushrooms. Here in the spring, she is limited to a mushroom hunt.

After breakfast, she spends an hour in her workshop, using a loupe to examine the gemstones found the previous day. Of eighteen sapphires, fifteen are in shades of green or yellow, so small that they allow minimal or no cutting. They are best used to enhance decorative items or for inexpensive multistring necklaces called rivières; she has a client who buys them by the pound. The remaining three are blue and promising, in need of study prior to being cut.

After she puts all the sapphires in the tumbler-polisher, the pleasant silence of the room gives way to the equally comforting hum and slosh and muffled rattling from the small machine.

In addition to the sizable butterscotch-yellow stone, there are three smaller chrysoberyls that might be called canary yellow. In rough form, they give her no reason to expect they contain either the oriented inclusions that will produce a cat's-eye effect or the angled fibers of an asterism that will result in a highly desirable star cabochon. She puts them aside for further consideration.

When she sets out on the mushroom hunt, she takes the can of bear spray in her belt holster, though not in expectation of a bear.

She never carries a gun of any kind, for there is nothing in this world that she can imagine shooting. Her uncle owned a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. He insisted that she learn to use all those weapons, and out of respect for him, she took instruction. Since his death, they have been in their latched cases, stored on a high shelf above the food supply, in the cellar. She takes the guns down only rarely and always because of the good memories of Ogden that they evoke.

She makes no effort to survey the eastern woods in which the watcher has thus far remained. Until he reveals himself, her interest in him is for the most part exhausted.

She crosses the meadow to the northern flank of the forest and enters the trees. The low bruu-ooo of rock doves gives way to the humming whistle of their wings as flocks take off at her approach, effortlessly threading their way through the maze of boughs and branches, through layered shadows and intrusions of sunlight.

The grassy clearing she seeks is half a mile from her house and smaller than her meadow, but the treasure here can't be found nearer home. Morchella conica are common in spring and among the tastiest of mushrooms. She visits here every few days during the season to harvest the best specimens, which mature with surprising quickness. They're best when not yet fully grown.

These mushrooms have tall light-brown caps with intersecting vertical and lateral ridges. She cuts them at the base of the stem and puts them in brown paper bags that she buys by the boxful for this purpose; there are edible mushrooms of other varieties to be gathered in the summer and early fall.

In 1953, a year after Ogden came home from the Korean War, he was, among other things, taught about mushrooms by a Native American friend, a Cheyenne, who gathered fungi with gratitude to Nature. Personally rather than because of any tribal custom, the same friend declined to violate the earth to rob it of its jewelry, but guided Ogden to the placer mine and thus gave him his future.

As Vida works, a hawk glides in its gyre. Abruptly it plunges to the meadow, ten yards from her. The prey—perhaps a field mouse—lives long enough to issue a miserable squeal as it is torn from the land and perishes in the ascent. Like Vida, the hawk is on the hunt, and though she pities the mouse, she makes no case against the bird.

At home once more, with three bags full, she cleans the morels and sets aside a portion to have with dinner. The remainder she submerges in a special vinegar flavored with a subtle herb bouquet; she seals them in three mason jars to be stored in the cellar.

After a light lunch of salad and chicken breast, as she puts away the washed dishes and utensils, she hears an approaching vehicle. Visitors are rare; these days, she never invites anyone.

Whatever is about to unfold, it won't involve sudden violence. If that were the watcher's intention, she wouldn't have been subjected to three days of observation before this moment.