She told herself that one careful scrape would not matter. She was not excavating the tree. She was only following what the dog had already found. The rationalization sounded reasonable in the open air, where no one else could hear it.
The rake caught leaf litter first, then soft soil. Nora lifted the top layer, searching for the same brown surface she had seen beneath her fingers. She found one lump, then another. Encouraged, she scraped a wider patch and found several more. By the time she stopped, six additional pieces lay in a shallow box beside the first specimen.
For several minutes, the number alone felt convincing. Seven things from one root zone. Seven reasons the original find could not have been a fluke. Nora imagined a small specialty crop without having to cut down a tree or pay a crew to shake its branches. She drove home more excited than she had been after the first pecan harvest.
The excitement faded while she cleaned the pieces. Most were paler than the first. One crumbled at the edge when she brushed off dirt. Another had an interior texture that looked nothing like the firm surface of the original. Some smelled faintly of damp wood, and others carried almost no scent at all. Nora lined them up on the table and could no longer persuade herself they were all the same thing.
Tess arrived while Nora was studying them. "You dug again," she said.
"Rook found more."
"Mira said not to disturb the roots."
"I didn't go deep."
Tess examined the box, then the first specimen in its separate paper bag. She brought each piece near her nose in turn, without tasting or cutting it, and frowned. "These don't all smell alike. Are we sure they're the same kind of fungus?"
"No. Not yet."
"Then why were you talking about calling Elena?"
Nora looked toward the note on the table where she had written the name of a chef Wade knew. Elena Torres bought unusual local produce for a restaurant not far from town. Nora had been thinking of asking whether a specialty fungus had a market before knowing whether she had found one.
Tess reached for the cash flow book and erased the line where Nora had penciled a hypothetical sale. "Until we know what is ripe and what is merely found, we have nothing to sell," she said.
Nora felt the sting of the correction because her daughter was right. She had followed the discovery exactly as she had followed the first broad paddock, moving faster on an encouraging impression than the evidence justified. The goats had punished that mistake with damaged fencing and a cut hoof. The root zone might punish it in a way she could not see until much later.
When Mira arrived the following week, she brought sample bags, a field notebook, and a calm manner that left Nora little room to pretend she had misunderstood the warning. She examined the first specimen and the six newer pieces separately, recording appearance, condition, location, and the order in which they had been collected. Then she asked Nora to show her the exact places in the soil where each one had grown.