Nora took her to the tree. The scraped patch was obvious once they stood over it. Small feeder roots lay exposed beneath the disturbed leaf layer, and the separate locations were impossible to reconstruct. She could identify the general area, but not the position of each piece or its relation to the nearby roots.
Mira knelt and inspected the damage without speaking. Then she stood and brushed soil from her knees. "You may have gathered some useful material," she said, "but you've taken away much of what would have made it useful scientifically. We can't tell the condition of each specimen in the ground, and we can't reliably revisit those exact points. We should leave this area alone for the season."
Nora stared at the disturbed earth. "I found more," she said slowly. "I understood less."
Mira nodded. "That happens when collecting outruns observing. Underground fungi can be surprisingly variable, especially when they're immature, damaged, or mixed with other species. We need a repeatable method if you want to know what is here."
"Can you tell what the first one is?"
"I can tell you it warrants careful identification. I can't give you a safe commercial answer from an uncertain field collection and photographs. We'll need better specimens and better records."
There would be no tasting, no sale, and no quick call to Elena Torres. Nora accepted the boundary because there was nothing else honest to do. She covered the exposed root area as carefully as possible under Mira's guidance, then moved away from the tree. The six questionable specimens no longer looked like opportunity. They looked like proof that impatience could spoil information as thoroughly as neglect could spoil a harvest.
That afternoon, Nora dropped the hand rake into the truck bed with more force than necessary. Tess watched her from the passenger side and said nothing. For several miles they drove home in silence, past fields and fences and the small roadside businesses Nora had known all her life.
At the turn into their lane, Nora slowed. "I need to stop deciding that finding more is the same as finding out," she said.
Tess closed the ledger on her lap. "How?"
Nora thought about Rook standing over the damp ground, about the way she had hurried in with the rake, and about Mira asking for exact positions she could no longer identify. "I start by teaching the dog not to dig. Then I learn to stop trying to help him when he doesn't need me to."
Tess looked at her, surprised. "You think he can learn that?"
"I know he can learn it. I'm less certain about me."
The next morning, Nora called Jonah Pike, a scent-dog trainer who worked with farm dogs and sometimes helped owners teach them to search without disturbing what they found. Jonah listened to her description of the orchard and the repeated stops beneath certain trees. He asked about Rook's age, health, basic obedience, and whether the dog was naturally inclined to paw or simply followed her when she started digging.