Like Migratory Beasts

This year’s huckleberry yield is an embarrassment of riches—a season better than any I have ever seen.  The high mountain plants are tall and polka-dotted with berries that taste like the finest red wine.  I return from each day of picking with my hands purple and my back sore from constant picking.

Last year was horrible.  I found only a few sparse berries.   Even had the berries been plentiful I would have had a miserable time.

I did have a miserable time.

I lost Uyen only a couple of months before the season.  She loved going out after berries.   Given her fifteen year struggle with physical disabilities, Uyen could not enter the deadfall or deep woods, but we found ways to settle her into berry patches we found just off the mountain roads.  I would drop her into those and then wander the more rugged landscape around her.  Uyen did not like when I left her sight.  She called out my name on a regular basis and insisted that I respond.

Last year, without Uyen, I foraged deep into a cross-light forest, climbing over downed timber and stony jumbles.  I found few berries.  So I sat in a shaded place watching dust motes and flies ascending shafts of light.

Uyen did not call out my name and I sat there until tears began dropping into the shadows at my feet.

A bad year.

The huckleberries are amazing this year.  The mountains are filled with beautiful red patches of fireweed and light glowing along the deadfall on the forest floor and the call of birds.  Yesterday, I went gathering berries with two dear old friends.  We stuck together for the most part, penetrating far down into a wooded valley frequented by grizzly bears.  We teased one another, and filled our buckets as we pushed through the berry bushes like migratory beasts.

It is okay for me to go into the forest now.  And up the roughest mountain, too.

--Mitchell Hegman