Mushroom Rush.(Short story)

Two hours east of Eugene, Oregon, in the rain shadow of the southern Cascades, the forests begin to thin out. The volcanic peaks that loom above them are among the most active on the continent, and every so often one of them blows. The Klamath Indians still talk about the eruption of Mt. Mazama, seven and a half thousand years ago. It left a hole in the ground which is now called Crater Lake and covered the area in pumice up to three hundred feet deep. The ash still lies so thick that logging trucks send great plumes of it trailing behind them, and even old-growth trees have the spindly half-starved look of battlefield survivors. It's the kind of land that only a mushroom could love.

When Kouy Loch first arrived, on a chilly September night in 1994, he was looking for matsutake. The mountains were filled with them, he'd heard. They grew beneath the pines in the national forest--some of the most valuable mushrooms in the world--and anyone with a ten-dollar day pass could pick them. Loch's cousin Saraong, a veteran picker from Washington, had agreed to show him a good spot. The two men drove down from Tacoma that night, in separate cars, and pulled up on a gravel road deep in the forest. "This is the place," Saraong said when Kouy walked up to his window. "Matsutake country. Just go in there and pick all day." Then he drove off with a wave, leaving Loch alone by the side of the road.

The air was sharp and sweet that high in the mountains, scented with pine resin and recent rain. Loch stood in the dark for a while and listened. In the distance, he could hear the crackle of gunfire. More than a thousand other pickers were crowded into a campsite a few miles away, on United States Forest Service land. They gathered matsutake by day and sold them in the evenings to mushroom buyers in the nearby town of Crescent Lake Junction. Many of the pickers, like Loch, were Cambodians, unfamiliar with the area. They carried pistols to protect their matsutake patches and to send signals to one another in the woods. (Every few years, one or two got lost and died of hypothermia.) That night, though, they were just celebrating, shooting at the stars: the matsutake were selling for a hundred and sixty dollars a pound.

Loch had first heard of the Great Matsutake Rush two years earlier, from other Cambodians in Stockton, California. They were migrant pickers, for the most part, who spent the winter in California and the rest of the year following the wild harvest down the Pacific Coast. The season began in the spring, with morels in the Yukon or British Columbia, swung south to Montana for summer huckleberries, then west to the mountains and coastal forests of Washington and Oregon. You could pick porcini, chanterelles, and matsutake through the late fall, moving steadily south, then switch to hedgehog, black trumpet, yellow foot, and the occasional Oregon black truffle, tasting of pineapples and musk.

North America has an astonishing variety of mushroom species, but only a fraction of Europe and Japan's demand for them. The mushrooms we eat are almost always cultivated: buttons, portobellos, oysters, and shiitakes, grown in damp, murky hangars, on beds of compost or sawdust laced with spores. Interest in morels and a few other wild species has risen in recent years, but matsutake are still barely known. They tend to grow in remote areas--the jack-pine forests of Ontario; the arid mountains of central Mexico--and the deer usually get them first: their potent smell and snowy-white caps give them away. Even field guides are less than encouraging. The matsutake's "tough, chewy texture does not appeal to everyone," David Arora wrote in his 1979 book "Mushrooms Demystified." Its odor, he added, is "a provocative compromise between Red Hots and smelly socks."

Despite its unsavory reputation overseas, the Japanese prize matsutake above all other mushrooms. They almost always eat them fresh, in the fall--a few shavings can elevate a soup to sublimity, they say--but never seem to have enough to go around. Many matsutake patches were once off limits to all but members of the imperial court, in the early harvest season. A single mushroom, so young that its hood still clung to its shaft, was considered a fine gift for an aristocrat--the more phallic the better. (Matsutake is slang for penis in Japan; in some courts, women were forbidden to speak its name.) These days, anyone can pick matsutake, but few can afford them. A mushroom that sells for fifty dollars a pound in Oregon could bring three times that in Tokyo.

Loch was late to the rush and a novice as well. He worked as a mechanic in Stockton and hadn't picked mushrooms since he was a boy in Cambodia. (He used to roast them in the woods with the hummingbirds he killed with his slingshot.) When he asked the other pickers if he could tag along, they said no. Their patches were their livelihood, and Loch looked like a liability. He was a tall, stiff-backed thirty-three-year-old, with fierce eyes and handsome, slab-sided features. But he'd lost a leg to a land mine as a young man, and wore a prosthesis. Picking mushrooms at six thousand feet was hard with two legs, they told him. "We don't want to have to carry you down the mountain."