As the party drifts through the woods, they don’t talk much. Beau snuffles while the men occasionally snap branches. It’s Connie who keeps up a running commentary, stopping at nearly every tree to sniff the dirt and collapsing to her knees to paw the ground. “Oh my gosh! That’s wonderful!” she exclaims repeatedly. “You guys should smell this!”

Usually, Connie says, she can tell where truffles are just by standing in the woods and sniffing. But these woods have been so picked over that the scents are confusing; she seems to smell truffles everywhere. A raw skunk-cabbage smell floats up from the creek; after a while, the men light up sweetly acrid cigarettes. Connie is nearly as blissed out as Beau, but she’s not having any luck today.

Two weeks before, it was a different story. John and his wife had taken a crowd of people truffling: scientists from Oregon State University, mostly, along with a visiting group of scientists from Russia. John's dog, Katie, found a truffle right off the bat. Connie wasn’t far behind. “I can smell them in the air,” she proclaimed. But a former OSU student, who had introduced John to truffling five years ago, decided to play a trick on Connie the wonder truffler. He sneaked up behind her holding a truffle in his hand and waited. Connie paused, inhaling. “Are you there?” she asked, indignantly. Astonished, the prankster admitted his guilt.

This afternoon, John and Bill use their rakes to uncover several small piles of little white truffles, gnarly looking things that resemble beige-colored brains. John pronounces their find to be “spring truffles,” a late-blooming truffle they haven’t seen much before. Connie smells them, skeptically. They are almost odorless, which is unusual in a truffle. But into the bag they go anyway.

Time floats by unnoticed. Under the forest canopy, the light hardly seems to change, and the rows of trees seem to stretch on into the hills forever. Only the stream’s steady burble grows softer or stronger as the group moves toward or away from it. Beau gets bored and props himself up on a rotting log to sulk. Above the dog looms an ancient apple tree, twisted and weighted like an old man. Bill says the whole area used to be a town called Greenleaf, a town that lived briefly and then died like so many other rural American towns. The settlers had planted the apple trees.

Nobody suggests stopping; the smooth, steady pace of wandering in the woods, eyes to the ground, creates its own hypnotic trance. John and his wife ate some soup around 11 that morning; they are carrying PowerBars, but they don’t unpack them. Bill, who has found more truffles today than anybody else, is too excited to think about food. It’s not until Bill thinks to ask the time, and is shocked to realize that it’s nearly four o’clock, that the group turns and begins the languid trek back.

At the edge of the forest, everybody finally comes to a halt. Bill needs to head back, but John and Connie want to stay until the light is gone. Connie munches a date bar while Bill rescues Beau, who has tried to attack three mules grazing in a nearby field. Down the road, a group of adolescent boys on all-terrain vehicles revs toward the woods; John and Bill carefully hide their rakes and bags of truffles in the roadside shrubbery before the kids rumble past. Even though this particular truffle patch is no secret, they aren’t taking any chances.

John wants to stay until he finds a black truffle. He doesn’t want Bill to be the only one to get the day’s haul of blacks. The two men have a strange dynamic: part friends, part collaborators, part competitors. Bill is only about ten years younger than John, but they had a student-teacher relationship for so long that there is still a vague sense of formality between them. Connie has it easier, being the wife who comes along for the fun. In any case, they all agree that this is the last day for truffles this season. John just isn’t ready to let it go quite yet.

The air is still warm, although a slight evening chill gives notice that it’s not summer yet. Bill says goodbye and starts walking back down the road toward the parked cars, his dog trotting before him. John and Connie wave, then turn back and disappear into the woods.

Caroline Cummins is a second-year student in the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon.