Les Champignons Sauvages

As I write this, we are well into autumn, my favourite season. Where I lived in Franche-Comté, there are plenty of forests and I used to go there almost on a daily basis when I was growing up – I particularly loved the autumn when the trees changed colour. My father hunted and often took me with him, although not necessarily to shoot. In fact, we would chat or go on a long walk with our dogs while he told me about the deer. He knew all their habits and could spot them from a few hundred yards – well before I could. He was such a good observer of nature. He had a lot of patience, sometimes waiting for hours at a time just to see the deer. I wasn’t surprised when, in his early fifties, my father stopped hunting, but he still took the dogs into the forest for hours. Now, however, he collected mushrooms – and our forest was full of them.