The tangled northern forest opens up and I am hunting wild food again. This is a good day, with clouds all low and no deep shadows to distract me, but I see no berries: a wrong place, a wrong time, or both. If there are any large hemlock trees nearby I may find some pine mushrooms, the golden fruit of the Western Canada's old growth, but this is unlikely. These ancient groves, decimated by chainsaws growling all over British Columbia year after year, have been already reduced to a miserable one or two percent of their former range. How about boletes? They are more likely: these are deep-moss woods, moist but not boggy, with plenty of conifers, pillows of fallen needles and sufficient light and shade.
A surprise: my looking for mushrooms in this forest brings a flashback from the still distant tundra. It was 1976, and we were stuck for 13 rainy and mind-chilling days in a leaky pup tent in the Canadian Arctic with not a scrap of food left, trying to consider our next move. Our options were terribly limited. Much earlier, after John and I first met, we read "Alive!" -- a harrowing account of a plane crash high in the snowy Andes. There were the dead and the wounded, and the long weeks of sharing food remnants by a bunch of freezing survivors, and finally their last effort to keep alive that must have made many readers recoil in horror. Not us: we were young, in love and ready to take death by its spiky horns by any means necessary, including our mutual promise not to hesitate should one of us die in similarly dire circumstances. It seemed so simple: if you are starving and it is going to give you a chance to survive, eat my flesh. And enjoy it while you are at it.
But we were not starving yet, just very hungry, wet, cold and feeling trapped. Yet we also noticed we were still good to each other and not snappy or resentful. We even joked and teased our husky Mis, who smelled like hell of some rancid seal blubber he just rolled in but insisted on sleeping in our tent: "Hey, how about if we cook some Mis Tail Soup?" But he paid no attention to our stupid jokes. So when one hopelessly dark and drizzly morning John wondered if we should get married, I agreed. If we could carry these long days of stress reasonably well, maybe tackling a life together made quite a bit of sense?
So committed, we went to check on our neighbors, an Inuit family living in a canvass tent on the other side of a large boulder. We had been working on our first National Geographic story during the last five months, living with the last semi-nomadic Umingmaktormiut hunters whose existence few people in North America could even imagine. But now all we could do was wait the way they did. For the Inuit, such dearth of food was not some unusually hairy incident they may dwell on for years -- the way extreme adventurers do for other people -- but something that happened and could not be changed. They were calm and never complained: bitching would mean wasting energy on just flapping your tongue and achieving nothing at all.
Some time ago the family -- Peter Avalak and his wife Mary -- got hired by mine operators as caretakers after the miners flew South before the long Arctic winter. The operators assured Peter and Mary that all they had to do was camp near the mine and not budge to prevent airborne entrepreneurs scouring the Arctic for easy profits from stealing mining equipment and everything they could put their thieving hands on. Which, considering the promised salary which would buy the family a lot of store food in Cambridge Bay's store 100 miles away, sounded like a plum job. The money never arrived but the Avalaks have stayed put: they promised to guard the mine.
And they were still here. Even though their provisions -- and ours, since we shared all food-- were all gone by now. Even though they could not follow the annual caribou migration which would require leaving the mine. Even though the autumn storms tangled and tore their fishing nets out in the bay and they could no longer fish. And even though they had seven children, including the baby they adopted, and they were hungry. And so were their sled dogs, howling at the end of their chains or dozing until -- who knew how long? If things did not improve, they could be shot.
Still, we all tried to find anything we could eat. The older kids tried to kill seagulls with rocks and had no luck. Peter, his face grim and closed, scouted the tundra looking for sik-sik -- ground squirrels -- but the furry buggers seemed to have vanished. John and I walked the hills, hoping to collect enough berries to calm the growling hole in our bellies. And suddenly we saw mushrooms. Scores, no, hundreds of them, standing tall on their thick pale stems in the carpet of silvery caribou moss and topped with their smooth brown caps. I am from Poland, the country where wild mushroom gathering used to be a skill people learned in their childhood, and I knew them right away. King boletes, the very best kind.
We gathered all the 'shrooms we could find. Hollered for the Avalak kids to come and help. Filled caribou skin bags with the smooth brown caps and fat pale stems. Carried the loot back and cooked it in the largest camp pot, with some wild berries and the rest of the seal fat Mary discovered somewhere. We feasted. We slept. We lived.
Many week later we delivered our Inuit article to the editors and a scrupulous National Geographic researcher contacted the mine's officials in California to verify our account. "I hate to admit it, and hate even more to see it in print," the mine's administrator wrote back. "But I see we did not pay these people. We will, I promise." And much much later, during our visit to the newly created Nunavut Territory, we learned from Peter's and Mary's daughter Palvik the mine people never did pay her parents.
This all happened a very long time ago, but looking for the boletes hauled our survival mushroom feast right back to me. Still, looking does not mean finding anything: after much poking around and using my mushroom nose I come up empty. Then I spot a huge brown and undulating cap with an array of raised dark spots, so dramatic in its shape and size I sit down to consider what I found. Being Polish does not help me one bit, for I do not know this kind at all. I later have a chance to ID this specimen -- it is most likely Sarcodon imbricatus, with no common name that I could find -- and it is "reported to be edible," a lovely euphemism for not being entirely sure yet guardedly optimistic.
But had I found this giant during our memorable stint of shared hunger, growing in the windy hills above the Northwest Passage where the border between surviving and dying could be gossamer thin, would I just cook it, bite hungrily into its great dense flesh, and pass it around as well? Or would I eat just one tiny bit, wait a few hours, and only if I felt no poison roiling my body offer it to John and the Avalaks?
I cannot answer it today because I am no longer hungry. And this changes a hell of a lot of other things as well.
©Yva Momatiuk
