Guardian of the Cinnabar Chanterelles
It’s nearly dusk and I am bushwhacking up a steep hillside of mixed conifers, punctuated by ancient oaks. The oaks that stabilize these craggy slopes are survivors - spared widespread logging not due to conservation but to convenience, the prohibitive price of hauling hardwood out a ravine.
One elder oak invites me to sit down and rest my spine against its sturdy trunk as I gaze down at the sloping forest floor and catch my breath. Sometimes the hunter sees more by slowing down. A sliver of sunlight catches the rich, rosy hue of a collection of brightly colored mushrooms, so I leave my pack by the oak and stumble downhill to investigate.
Soon I have harvested a handful of fragrant cinnabar red chanterelles, more elusive and exotic than their celebrated golden relatives. Cinnabars tend to be small and can be good hiders despite their brilliant red coloring, and I wonder if I am just scraping the surface of a bigger flush. In the dimming daylight I carefully massage the duff, pulling back a clump of decaying pine needles and oak leaves to find several new cinnabars stretching up from the ground. More and more cinnabars begin popping into view - most too young to harvest - but my hunter instincts keep me surveying the scope of the patch and planning a return later in the week.
Crawling around under a darkening sky, well aware that it’s time to head back uphill to reclaim the pack I’d left by the oak, I notice an odd buzzing sound. I look at the soil, just inches from my face, and see a few massive earthworms wriggling around nervously. I wonder if the wriggling of these behemoths is creating the buzzing sound, but I’ve never known earthworms to be very vociferous creatures.
I clumsily uproot a small cinnabar I did not intend to harvest, and as I lament my overzealous twilight hunting I hear the buzzing noise escalate.I look down and notice it is originating from my hand. A bee! I feel a sharp pain as the stinger sinks into the pad of my forefinger and, recalling the time my father was swarmed after sitting on a rotting log, I take off sprinting. I could hear more buzzing and envisioned a fiery swarm on my tail, and I bolted back up to my backpack and out of the woods, now dark. When I ran out of breath and looked back, I found not one bee had followed me. And why would they have? The bees were quite content to return to their duties protecting the cinnabar patch.
