The two vehicles hit the road, the truck with the small dog bouncing around inside the cab followed by the puttering van. Around a bend, the valley opens up, revealing a large Christmas-tree farm and a house on the far slope that looks like a large-scale version of a log cabin. It’s where John's father lives. He mentions this. Connie is surprised.

“You can see it from the road?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he responds.

“I’ve never seen it.” Connie, who could see just fine until she lost her vision after an infection in college, often speaks of sight as if she still had it.

Another ten minutes go by before John pulls off at a small turnaround. Beyond a metal gate and a cattle grating, a paved road leads past farmland and up between two hills into a forest. Bill carries Beau over the grating, then lets him trot the rest of the way. John ambles, squinting under his blue bicyclist’s cap. Both are carrying truffle rakes, short-handled tools featuring three menacing-looking prongs. Connie strides confidently up the road, bouncing along in sneakers and ignoring her fold-out walking stick. She needs to be warned about certain obstacles, such as the pile of manure looming in the road ahead, but otherwise she’s fearless. Falling down does not faze her; it’s just part of being blind.

When the road bends into the fir woods, John steps off the asphalt and begins walking on the spongy, pine-needle-covered forest floor. It’s suddenly dark and cool, with a feathery breeze wafting up from the creek that gurgles down between the hills. Not much light penetrates below the tops of the trees; all the lower branches of the skinny young Douglas firs are dead, and the dominant green growth along the ground is moss. The evenly spaced woods belong to a private timber company that, says Bill, isn’t bothered by mushroom or truffle foragers wandering through. Indeed, it’s clearly a popular spot for the area’s half-dozen or so truffle hunters; nearly all the ground between the trees has been thoroughly raked over. Beau snorts excitedly and runs off into the woods, while John, his wife and Bill fan out, walking steadily but not too slowly between the trees.

The dog finds the first truffle; he stops and starts digging frantically. Bill hastens over to prevent Beau from eating it on the spot. It’s a black truffle, a knobby bit of fungus that looks like a lump of coal and smells weirdly of apples and cheese. Everybody’s fascinated; these woods have both white and black truffles, but the blacks seem to be harder to find, so they are more prized, at least for today. Connie inhales deeply. John looks wryly amused. Bill drops the truffle into a Ziploc bag and keeps moving.

The Ziplocs are necessary for Connie, who otherwise gets distracted by what she calls “nasal interference” — smelling a truffle that’s already been harvested. She has a different set of tools than the men: lighter-tinted glasses for the dim woods, knee pads, red gardening gloves and her metal walking stick, the end of which she pokes into the dirt at the base of the trees, pulls out, brings to her face and sniffs audibly. The ground should smell sweet, she says, when it hides truffles. A slightly acidic smell means white truffles; a sweeter scent means blacks. She makes John point out exactly where Beau found his truffle, stabs her stick into the dirt, sniffs, then drops the stick and kneels on the ground, digging with her hands and rolling clumps of dirt through her gloved fingers, hoping to catch a fruiting fungus. She lifts dirt clods right up to her face, smelling. Each time she sighs ecstatically, even when no truffles turn up. She finds the scent of the dirt itself delicious.