Foraging (Cumberland Saga)

At breakfast, Sarah informed Blain that she was probably going to give him a new assignment at mid-morning, so he should organize his work for the day so that he could walk away without it all unraveling.

Blain felt put-upon, but he was not going to complain.

He spent the early morning dragging vines and branches from where Sig and the others had been cutting wood over to the nascent gully that was growing into Sarah’s garden allotment. He made separate piles for the vines and for the branches. He made separate piles of the straight sections of limb suitable for cutting into stakes and the poles for the chevrons to divert the flow. He staged them so the items he would need first were closest to the gully and the poles for the chevrons were further away.

A little past mid-morning, Sarah and Mary (Sarah’s six-year-old daughter) came out to where Blain was working. Sarah was pulling a nearly-empty garden cart. Blain recognized the wheels of the cart as the wheels-and-tires from a mountain bike. The combination made for a versatile all-terrain garden cart!

Sarah handed out snacks while she explained the game-plan. “It was windy last night and it knocked a lot of nuts and persimmons off of the trees. We are going to collect them, and while we are at it, we will mark any of the trees that have exceptionally good nuts or persimmons and Sig and the crew will spare them as they clear new ground.”

Blain nodded as he ate the winter-pear dumplings that Sarah had crafted out of some of the pears Blain had brought home from Sally’s. The transformation had been magical. Most of the pears were as hard rocks when Blain put them into the bag. Sally said they could sit on the grass for months before the frost softened them up or before they even started to think about rotting.

Sarah had chopped them finely, sauteed them in butter and mixed them with a bit of precious sugar and cinnamon and then wrapped them in dough. The result was spectacular!

It didn’t hurt that Blain was ravenous hungry from working three hours without a break.

After swigging some of the spring water that Sarah had brought, Blain said “Let’s go!”

Sarah said “Not so fast. Are you comfortable carrying and using a gun?”

Blain’s shock must have shown as he took a literal step back.

“Why?” he asked.

“Hogs and deer aren’t stupid” Sarah said. “They know that the wind knocked down persimmons and hickory nuts and they will be out there, too.”

Blain looked at Sarah quizzically.

“They will be out looking for persimmons and nuts, too. It is cold enough to cure meat and that is what animals are made of: Meat!” Sarah said.

Then she scowled. “Hogs also eat meat, especially from young animals that cannot out-run them” Sarah said as she looked, significantly, at Mary.

Those were dimensions that had never occurred to Blain.

“I never shot a gun” he said, lamely.

“We are going to have to fix that, but not today” Sarah said, shifting gears.

Picking up the handles of the garden cart, she said “Follow me” as she pulled it another hundred yards to the edge of the woods where Sig and the crew had been felling trees.

Parking the cart, Sarah started unloading it. She gave sacks and rope to Blain, a backpack to Mary and she picked up a long gun and made some adjustments to the sling before squirming into it with the gun slung diagonally across her back.

“Carrying it this keeps my hands free” she said to Blain.

Blain was star-struck. The sling angled diagonally across her chest and highlighted her bosoms. Not just any bosoms, but magnificent ones.

Blain had never noticed. Because of Sarah’s habit of dressing in layers of long, baggy, shapeless skirts and tops, there was no way he could have noticed. But God had blessed Sarah, and blessed her generously with very womanly breasts.

Sarah was oblivious of the impact she had on Blain.

She was giddy with joy, almost like a child. She was outside. She was collecting “free food”. And she was with Mary and a guy she was sweet on.

Blain responded to her joy.

Sarah showed him how to tie the parachute cord to a bottle half filled with water and throw it underhand up, into the persimmon trees. Then, slowly pulling it up until the bottle snagged on the bottom of the branch it had looped over. 

Repeatedly yanking on the rope shook the branch and made ripe persimmons tumble to the ground. Once the branch was freed of most of the ripe persimmons, it was a simple matter to let the cord play out through his hands and let the bottle drop down to the ground. 

Then Blain would pick out another branch and do his best to lob the water-bottle over that one.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Sarah ate a couple persimmons from each tree. Some she spit out and said, “Let’s skip this one”. Others she would say “Lets collect some of these.”

There were only two of the trees that she marked by tying a bit of twine around the trunk. She insisted that Blain compared the “common” persimmons with the better ones. At first he didn’t notice that much difference, but after she had coached him, he was able to discern the ratio of seeds to pulp, the flavor and the smooth, luscious pulp of a "keeper" versus the pasty, juicelessness of some of the others. 

Sarah also cracked a few hickory nuts from beneath each tree. A few of the trees had nuts that popped out with minimal persuasion. Others clung tenaciously to the shell. Sarah marked five of the hickory trees as "keepers".

Walking down the spine of the slope toward a saddle, Blain noticed something white pushing up through the leaves. Curious, he drifted off the trail and pushed the leaves aside with the tip of his shoe. “What’s this?” he asked Sarah.

Blain could see Sarah’s eyebrows shoot up as she walked closer. “Puffballs!” she said.

“What are puffballs?” Blain asked.

“Edible mushrooms!” Sarah said.

For the next half-hour, Blain got an educartion on the importance of edible fungi (and sour cream) in the cuisine of Eastern Europe. He had no idea that his casual find was going to be celebrated by the entire population of Copperhead Cove.

Sarah had them put persimmons in one set of bags. Because they were “squishy” she tied them shut when they were only a quarter full. The hickory nuts, because they were heavy but immune to crushing were tied shut when the bags were half full. The bags that held puffballs were tied shut when they were half-full even though they didn’t weigh all that much.

Sarah was almost dancing. The puffballs were only slightly larger than softballs, which Sarah said was “prime”. Blain had been proud to find one the size of a basketball, but Sarah refused to put it in the bag. “Too big” she said.

Over the next several hours, Blain got a Ph.D level, crash course on foraging. Sarah made notes of where the squirrels were. Blain learned that Sarah refused to waste a shotgun shell* that cost almost a dollar to collect a pound or two of meat when she could send Lliam back later and have him collect the squirrel with a pellet that cost three or four cents.

He learned about Chicken-of-the-Woods and how if they were harvested without damaging the “roots” they would produce again as long as the tree lived. He learned that some hickory trees never produced much but some produced prodigious amounts most years.

Blain saw an entirely different side of Sarah than the Sarah-in-the-house. For one thing, she was moving and smiling and stretching. She caught him "looking" at her a few times when Blain thought it was safe to look. Inexplicably, he was mesmerized by her fluid motions and quite enchanted by trying to figure out what her body looked like beneath the rags she was wearing.

Blain never had that reaction to the girls in the college towns. There was never any mystery since they wore yoga pants or short-shorts and skin-tight or translucent tops. They "displayed" and preened in front of the guys whether they were interested in them or only teasing. Nope, there was never any shortage of women to look at in a college town.

Sarah was...different. Unlike the college-town girls, she did not take ten "selfies" a day to practice her merchandising skills. She just lived life.

And now, that meant bending over, stretching and reaching, picking up heavy bags and other motions that stretched the baggy clothing tightly against assorted, muscular body-parts. Parts that had suddenly become objects of fascination to Blain. The quick glimpses of small arcs and curves of her shape presented a challenge, a puzzle. Blain's brain would not let Blain leave that puzzle unsolved.

Catching Blain "looking", Sarah dimpled a smile and blushed...turned away and kept picking up hickory nuts.

Totally absorbed by the novel circumstances, Blain did not notice that Mary seemed quite taken with him. Sarah’s joy was a beacon that Blain had tuned into and Mary, in turn, resonated with both of them.

Mary was not a shy, retiring soul. She was a BIG personality in a small child’s body. Already, she was was a person who spurned half-way measures. She was either all-in, or all-out.

And with Blain, she was all-in.

Blain did not notice.

But Sarah did.

*For those who are curious about minutia, Sarah was carrying a single-shot, 12 gauge with a Foster slug in the chamber in case they encountered deer or hogs. She is also carrying a couple of rounds, loose in her pocket of bird-shot in case they came across turkeys. They are worth burning up a shotgun round on.

No, she does not have a hunting license. 

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