The Last Three Huckleberry Bushes

Huckleberries are quite finicky by nature.  The bushes are particular about where they will grow.  In short form, they only grow in beautiful places.  For the last month or so, I have been taking whole days to drive up into the mountains and harvest berries.

Huckleberry production in my normal haunts was surprisingly spotty this year.  I have found berries only in patches here and there.  I have done a lot of clawing up and down timbered slopes to find them.

Yesterday, however, I landed in a pretty decent patch of berries.  At the very end of my pick, I stumbled across three bushes that were loaded with hundreds upon hundreds of big, black berries.

We are talking about the proverbial motherlode here.

I try to be a “gentle” picker.  I often tell people I tickle the bushes until they release berries.  Not so, those last three bushes.

If those last three plants had been people, I might be jailed for how I tore into them.  I didn’t hurt the plants, but as one of my buddies often said, I went about my business “like a one-armed man killing snakes.” 

--Mitchell Hegman