That Time I Went Mushroom Picking With a Bear

The bear is standing twenty feet to the left of me. She is at the bottom of the foothill, where the mossy ground meets a sharp incline. The truck is conveniently parked on the road behind her.

Fuck.

Clayton is at the top of the hill, almost far enough to be out of earshot, and I don’t want to scream right now anyway. My heart is trying to remove itself from my chest cavity. It knows that if there were ever a time to get the hell out of dodge, that moment would be now.

I lower the tin bucket of water-logged chanterelles to the ground beside me. If I have to run, I don’t want that thing weighing me down. But where the hell am I going to run? I don’t have the keys to the truck. I’m in the middle of the forest. I don’t even know what kind of bear that is. I am not a woodsman, or more accurately, I am not a woodswoman.

Moments ago, I was at the creek, soaking mushrooms in hopes of a better payday at the buyers. They pay you in weight, and it didn’t take us long to decide that soaking them would mean more ‘shroom cash in our pockets.

I always thought I was a country girl. Growing up, I lived on a small acreage and did my fair share of farm work. Hauling logs for our wood-burning stove, hours of gruelling weed-work in the massive garden Mom kept. I thought I was tough.

That was before Clayton brought me to his hometown of Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island. How could life be so different, only a province away? He’s twenty-one, I’m seventeen, and now we have to make a living somehow. He works at the sawmill during the week with his brother. I’m half-heartedly working on finishing my grade twelve at the outreach school that’s located precisely in the middle of nowhere. On the weekends, we head to the woods to pick mushrooms.

Usually, we find our bootee in the forest surrounding the little town of Cowichan, walking distance from our apartment. However, this time, he tells me he’s heard of a great spot that provides enormous yields. I’m quick to agree because I don’t like living in Lake Cowichan, and I need to make some fast cash to afford a ferry and bus ticket back home to Alberta.

Maybe if I was a bit older, or more nature-loving, this place might be paradise.

But at seventeen, it feels more like one of the dystopian novels I love to read. Call me crazy, but scavenging for edible berries and mushrooms to sell in underground markets isn’t exactly what I call a good time.

We start out on Youbou and then Northshore and eventually veer off on a rough back road — the shocks on the Jimmy are shit. The road signs have been replaced with broad streams and fallen mossy trees. I fall asleep, head cold from the window I am leaning against.

“We’re here, Lindsay,” Clay says, jolting me awake.

I look around to find nothing but trees and hills. And mushrooms. There are so many mushrooms here: Chanterelles, lobsters, porcini, and morels, all in seeing distance from the truck.

“Oh my God, why haven’t we been out here before? This is the jackpot,” I say, excitedly pulling on my hiking boots from the floor of the truck.

“Well, we’ve been driving for hours. It’s not like it’s easy to get out this way,” He replies. I note the irritation in his voice. I guess I can see how my sleeping while he traverses the deep back roads of Vancouver Island may be irksome. I grab my bucket from the back of the truck and flip open the knife that’s attached to my belt loop.

“Oh no, we’re not just picking these ones. We’ll start over there, across the creek, and then pick these when we’re almost ready to leave.” He’s so matter-of-fact in this plan. My heart sinks a little. So it’s going to be an all-day trip, I guess. Though I don’t say this, it’s not worth getting in a fight.

Ten minutes into our hike, and I am trapped on a large boulder in the middle of the creek crying because I am too freighted to hop from rock to rock to cross the fast-moving water.

Clayton is on the other side, stretching his arms towards me, encouraging me to move because I can’t stay on this rock forever. Shows how much he knows. I’d be just fine with that prospect if it meant not having to risk my life for some measly mushrooms.

He is kind to me until I muster the will to heave myself to the next rock and then the next. Once I’m on solid ground, he says in a curt voice, “I should have just left you at home if you don’t even know how to cross a damn stream.”

The picking is easy, mainly because of the abundance. Crickets bounce up from under piles of dead leaves, and the rustling of the underbrush doesn’t scare me anymore as it did when we first began going out on our mushroom expeditions.

“We should bathe those mushrooms now because we don’t want the bucket leaking when we give them to Chandra. She gets pissed when she knows that people were soaking the product,” Clayton says, working on a large patch of chanterelles.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll run over to the creek and get started. Just meet me over there,” I say.

This is how I come to be standing twenty feet away from the bear.

What is one supposed to do when faced with such a situation? Did I read somewhere that you should try to poop yourself? Yes, shit yourself and play dead. I am ninety percent confident in this idea and begin to concentrate very hard to initiate such a sequence of events when I hear the plop of keys landing beside me.

It occurs to me as I slowly reach down to grab the truck keys that Clayton just threw to me that his action could have very well attracted the bear’s attention. Thankfully the bear doesn’t seem to care about me or the keys as I start my excruciatingly gradual getaway.

I begin to move backward in the slowest moonwalk known to man. The bear is still a pretty good distance away from me, but I’m no dummy. I know that despite their morbidly obese appearance, bears got moves and can be on top of you in seconds.

It is at this instant that all of the “bear facts” I have ever learned in my life begin dementedly dancing through my brain.

• Baloo from the Jungle Book was a Sloth Bear.
• Bears can remember the faces of other bears.
• Koala bears are not bears at all.
• Bears don’t pee when they’re in hibernation.

None of this information is useful, however, so I go back to quietly fearing for my life.

The bear starts walking up the hill but in Clay’s opposite direction. As I reach the truck and try to locate my boyfriend, I realize he is nowhere to be found.

I unlock the door and feel much better once I am in the relative safety of the cab. The bear is gone now, but I’m not feeling brave enough to venture outside again. So I stick my feet up on the dashboard and daydream of my life back in Alberta, where I am not burdened with having to commit near bear-mauling escapes.

Half an hour later, Clayton joins me in the truck.

I realize that I should have been more worried about him; he is my ride out of these woodlands after all.

“Wasn’t that amazing?” He says, his breath is hitching in his throat, and his big dopey browns eyes are sparkling.

“What, the bear?” I ask incredulously.

“Yeah, the bear, we were so close!” He gazes out the back window of the truck, maybe to try to spot his bear friend one more time, “I could tell you were scared, though, so that’s why I threw you the keys. What an amazing animal.” Are those tears in his eyes? Jeezum crow, get over it, buddy.

“You’re insane, man,” is all I can think to reply.

As we drive out of the woods with the pink and blue horizon at our backs, I think about Clayton and the unabashed zeal he feels for this countryside. He tells me, as we make our way out of the woods, that we should appreciate the beauty this land so effortlessly lays at our feet. We are guests in its labyrinth of hidden animals and towering pines and rushing creeks.

I recognize as we traverse over rutted terrain that this wilderness life isn’t for me. However, having witnessed this feat of God or Mother Nature or the universe, or whatever you want to call the series of events that brought us here, is something I’ll never forget.

As for Clayton and me, things didn’t work out. Sometimes opposites attract. And sometimes, you have to cut your losses and say, “Well, we’ll always have that one time we went mushroom picking with a bear.”

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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