07 11 07

The wind’s blowing up from the west again & from the point above the ants that looks out over Eilean Dubh I can see ocean spume. Although the ants are in full hibernation, beside their small dwelling I find a pair of Scarlet Hoods. These mushrooms are blood red with a waxy feel & shine among dead bracken & deepsea green moss. They’re also edible, so into my hat they go for safe passage home. Then, with the easy optimism of an early find, the hound & I set off mushrooming in the woods.
The woods, like me, are not sure if autumn is coming or going. The oaks are browning & crisping their leaves, one tree at a time. It’s not age, nor yet exposure that causes this patchwork undressing, but perhaps an expression of health or of individuality, with here a mature tree in green leaf, there a partially clad elder & here a stripped fifty year old youngster. The taller hollies are vibrant with berries, a signifier of a bad winter, it’s said. Other hollies here seem close cropped, perhaps by deer; certainly they’re very low & appear to be layering into small groves, but no taller than mid calf. They have no berries, so maybe they are too young , or simply all male trees. The willows are still leaved. The Scots pines are direct from a Chinese mountains & waters landscape scroll, with their backdrop of soft-toothed hills. A signature is the final spindly foxglove, with its single purple bell.
It’s a joy to walk in these damp, duff-smelling moss clad woods; I think of Sweeny, exiled, mad, & his naked wanderings in the woods of Ireland & Britain: “Dense wood is my security, / the ivy has no edge.” in Trevor Joyce’s perfect translation. & “I occupy in alien woods / an old retreat; / in my familiar square of trees / shrewd centre of such intimate quincunx am I”. Quincunx, where he counts himself a tree. Indeed, it’s so silent here, that the slight sibilance of our exhalation is equal to the fall of sap in these oaks.
Of mushrooms, though, not a smell; save for a single psilocybe. I stravaig north & west; past the trunk where once was frosted chicken-of-the-woods, a dim memory in the skillet now, past the small stand of beech & deeper into the oaks, where, still serving my stomach, I take the consolation of a bite of wood sorrel (Sweeny: “Though you relish salted hams / and the fresh meat of ale-houses, / I would rather taste a spray of cress / in some zone exempt from grief.”) But the truth is, the sorrel’s tough & at the uttermost end of its season.
Once, I would have been pleased by the psilocybe, but with deep woods & scarlet hoods singing bloodred in my brain, now they stay unplucked. Hinds & stags have no such scruples, browsing through the woods. Nor the slugs. What does a slug experience, nibbling on Russula emetica: the Sickener? Hard to imagine a slug with vertigo, or seeing flashing lights, or even vomiting. These are the toxic effects on humans of this little cherry coloured mushroom. Fly agaric seems to be eaten with impunity by deer. It has, of course been taken for its psychotropic qualities over the ages in northern woods. I’ve eaten it raw and any psychotropic experience – the flashing lights, organic curlicues of Green-Mannishness & an overwhelming certitude (of what, is never asked) - is second only to uncontrollable shivering & prodigious, endless vomiting. Americans also assert, helpfully, “it fries the liver”. It has also been taken when passed through another’s liver. Some stories have it the liver of a deer, others the livers of the rich, (poor people being unable to afford the mushroom: but this doesn’t stand scrutiny, much; poor people need only go to the woods. But again, parenthetically, we might ask what else have the rich ever done for the piss-poor). Mrs Beeton might say: first catch your deer. & what would the rooted & branched stags experience in the way of apparition & delusion from psychotropic agarics? Safely through a liver, then, the urine may be drunk: result – intoxication without toxicity. I’ve met men who’ve drunk turps & even brasso & achieved a kind of Sweeny-state; they’d maybe drink urine too, if they were half the believers that our current ranks of neo-shamans & Latter Day Druids are. Sweeny was never half so deluded.
The hound looks at me – I’ve sat still long enough. All day, we’ve seen nothing moving but a wren; heard nothing but the running water of burns among boulders thick with moss, & now the lowing of cattle over the hill towards Polloch. It’s just two Scarlet Hoods then, with my supper eggs & potato. At the kitchen table, I’m eating & leafing through Dogen’s “Instructions to the Cook”: (“When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions.”) & out flutters a small clipping. It’s dated by me in pencil 12 11 05, almost precisely two years old. It’s from the Guardian, & in entirety reads: “Swedish papers reported the tale of the rampaging, drunken elks that threatened to attack an old people’s home. The old people were saved, but the elks were following well-documented behaviour that included attacks on joggers and cyclists after feasting on fermented apples.”