Cicadas stop singing about thirty paces short of a violet fungus, and the silence is cut clean, as though the hollow ahead had been lifted out of the forest. Dogs sit down and will not be pulled further. People at Cathuvar read that gap before anything else. The other signs follow: no beetles ticking in the leaf litter, a ring of ferns gone the gray of ash, a pale slick on the stones where something lay down and stayed.
The fungus itself is a squat barrel, hip high, with a cap the color of a plum left in the sun and a stem thick as a man's waist. Four limbs hang from the cap rim, ropy and wet, tapering to hooked tips. They hang slack until warmth crosses them. Then the rim splits along a seam to show rows of dark pores, and the limbs snap out and wrap, and whatever they hold goes gray and soft within a day. The fungus does not chew. It waits for the rot to finish and draws it in through the stem. What it leaves behind is a sunken patch of black loam where nothing grows for years, and that is how hunters at Ozmelka map one. Bettrin Haske, who burns charcoal on the Cathuvar side, says a violet fungus is a mushroom with opinions, and she keeps ten feet clear of every one.
When the rains start, Cathuvar families leave a gutted fish on a flat rock at the edge of each known fungus. Nobody skips it. The belief is that a fed fungus stays gentle. It does not. The limbs strike the fish, and then the flies and shrews that come for the fish, and the patch around the oldest offering rocks is roughly twice the size of the ones left alone. The meal buys no mercy, only a bigger larder.
I measured the one at the Ozmelka spring by sliding a dry pole across the ground until a limb struck it: seven feet one inch from the stem. The pole came back gray and spongy for the last hand's width. The fungus at the spring is ninety years old. I have nothing in the hollow to test that against. I leave the way I came, the soft end of the pole over my shoulder. The cicadas start again at the thirty-first pace, one voice first, then the rest, and the black loam under my boots gives way to ordinary brown soil a step before they do.
- Classification
- Rooted fungal aberration
- Habitat
- Damp woodland hollows and springs
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 4 ft tall, limbs reach 7 ft
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Wet understory
- Binomial
- Mycotheca lividula
- Diet
- Rotted flesh of trapped prey
- Temperament
- Patient, rooted, reflexive