It is the ultimate forager’s dilemma. After miles of hunting, you spot your first morel of the season, a pristine yellow. You yelp gleefully, smile uncontrollably, reach down to feel its cool flesh in your palm.  You reach for your pocketknife as you prepare to harvest it from the sandy spring soil.

With only a sliver of sunlight left in the sky, I head for the hills in search of spring’s most coveted wild delicacy. Soon I find myself on hand and knee, scouring the soil beneath a giant ash as my setter howls madly into the twilight. I see a morel menagerie - plump and pickable blacks, yellows, and half-frees - in my mind’s eye, but my fingers find only leaf litter and hollowed acorns on the forest floor. I am hunting with my hands as much as my eyes, as the day grows dim and a silver crescent rises in the mid-May sky.

A fresh coat of snow has fallen upon last fall’s forgotten reishi (Ganoderma tsugae). Clinging to the thick trunks of hemlock trees, these eye-catching, medicinal polypores are the rotting reminders of a prodigious crop. Reishi mushrooms become unusable with the first hard frost, sometimes going rancid as early as June when the slugs and beetles have their way.

After a rainy day at the office, I head straight for the woods to catch the last rays of daylight. It is already too dark to hunt, unless you know exactly where to look.  Maitake is on my mind, and I am jumping from oak to oak in search of a hefty hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa).

Despite a prolonged dry spell, the woods are brimming with boletes. September mornings have found the forest heavy with river valley fog, and host trees are generously sharing groundwater with my favorite mycorrhizal fungi.

After a dry August, punctuated by the occasional downpour, the foraging is hit-or-miss. Now is the time to head for the deep, dank belly of the forest and discover explosions of yellowfoot chanterelles and hedgehogs in mossy glens and bogs. Follow a streambed, or visit a vernal pool. Pursue pockets of moisture beneath the shelter of cliffs, gorges and waterfalls.

Sauntering through a deep hemlock forest in the foothills of Camel’s Hump, I am scrambling to beat the slugs to June’s bumper crop of reishi. Chanterelle buttons glow on the soaking wet forest floor, the beginning of what should be a memorable July fruiting. Still, it will be at least a week before these golden beauties fatten up and find their way into an omelet.

Wheezing uncontrollably in the pollen-laden air, I make a sunset run to the nearest nettle patch at the city’s edge. I park my car on the side of the dusty dirt road and enter the woods beneath cottonwood and box elder. I walk past sprawling patches of denuded ostrich ferns, crudely cut stumps deprived of the chance to unfurl. Located just beyond the urban fray, this patch of ferns falls victim to the tragedy of the commons each spring as commercial foragers make their rounds and leave no fiddlehead behind.

As I walked the woods today with family and friends, spring was everywhere. Northern Vermont’s soils, frozen five feet deep in March, are bursting with new growth. Thousands of trout lilies poked out of the saturated soil. Trilliums, already bearing white buds, brushed up against blue cohosh and tangy wood sorrel.

Wandering through chaga country with five-month old Eliana in the snuggly, we came across a group of older women hunting. But it was not mushrooms they were after – they were searching for a member of their hiking party. They said she was the oldest in their group, a very slow hiker, sporting a backpack covered in Green Mountain Club patches. ”She’s been all over the world,” her friends told us, “and she always carries plenty of warm clothes.”

Every October as the wild mushroom season nears its inevitable end, a feeling of desperation sets in as I scramble to get out and collect the last of the harvest. My approach to foraging, usually patient and calculated, becomes decidedly more frantic as I find myself sprinting from oak to oak, fueled by visions of a well-stocked larder. As I check each and every oak for a roosting hen, I envision Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with maitake and lion’s mane – the grandeur of the harvest illuminating the darkest days.

With crispy autumn leaves underfoot and newly naked branches overhead, we took the little one to climb her first mountain. Winter is the longest season in Vermont, a sprawling and frigid affair, and autumn the most ephemeral. But when the leaves are peaking, and the harvest heavy, we are overwhelmed by abundance and undaunted by the coming cold.

I’m eating black raspberries for breakfast, watching them turn from ruby red to a luscious purple as they ripen under the summer sun. Nothing summons memories of summers past like the blackcap – my favorite bramble. My tongue tingles as their zingy burst of flavor finishes with dark, mysterious cloves.

This proud forager has a confession to make – the closest I’ve come to a morel this spring was inadvertently stepping on a lone Gyromitra esculenta. It was a gruesome site, too – the convoluted, wrinkly flesh squished like a false morel pancake on the ground.

The Vermont landscape is raw and rugged, the backcountry blanketed in deep, wet snow and the city streets sullied by slush. Though my calendar tells me today is the first day of spring, outside it is undeniably winter. Yet life is springing from within, kicking and twirling with the lengthening days. She is the first sign of spring, and the sweetest. When the morels begin to fruit, I’ll know our baby girl will be here soon.

Frostbitten reishi and morsels of maitake still sit in paper bags in my refrigerator – the last vestiges of an abundant foraging season.

I hike my red setter underneath the towering hemlocks on our land, the air heavy with the musty spice of red-hot candies as he smashes into frozen white matsutake. These regal fungi lose value as soon as they break free of their silky partial veils, but specimens that elude the forager’s knife blade can reach epic proportions before they meet their frosty fate.