Wild and Wet

J & R's black lab, Jade, has been sick and they called us last night to see if perhaps we'd been putting out poison for the gophers.

"No..... They're back big time with everything getting green again, but we don't want to go that route. Probably for this very reason."
"I don't know what it is, but she's drooling like crazy," said R. "I'm sure it's nothing, but we may take her to the vet and we thought that if there was poison out there, that would be something to go on."

"I wonder if it was a mushroom," I mentioned to J when we crossed paths at the turn-off to Los Osos Valley Road. I'd been thinking about it all night because there are so many kinds of mushrooms sprouting everywhere. As a fungi lover, I have to poke at each one, look it over, sniff it and wonder if I could take just the tiniest of bites. Some of them are puffy and purple, like a nasty bruise. Others are big and smooth, with lovely curves. Some look like psilocybin mushrooms. I take pictures and send them to horticulturist friends, hoping to find an answer, but to no avail. How can Nature tempt me like this?

"I don't know. She seems fine now, but if it was a mushroom, she must be having a helluva trip," he laughed. "She's still just drooling all over the place."

Maybe it was. I saw her in the afternoon and she wasn't drooling any more. In fact, she came up to me in an uncharacteristically friendly way. Hmmm. 'Shrooms?

After the rains, I'll go into the woods and see if I can find some chanterelles. At least I know what they look and smell like! (I can hear the mushroom experts gasping, "but xyz that's terribly deadly looks just like a chanterelle!") Until then, we're busy filling burlap bags with sand and hauling those puppies around the ranch. It's going to be a wild and wet winter, for sure.