Instead of answering, he took a deep, calming breath. He unscrewed his thermos and drank his coffee and tried to focus on the warm, tingly feeling that spread from the center of his chest. A minute passed, and his headlights automatically clicked off. The blue of the starlit night—pulsing with meteors—set in and the forest somehow seemed less threatening.

“I was thinking . . . as soon as we’re done here . . . we go to the bookstore?” Jack said this in his cheeriest voice. “Pick up a few graphic novels? Maybe even some of that weird candy they sell by the register? Those jelly-bean things that taste like boogers.” He didn’t think of it as bribery as much as payment. His daughter was doing him a solid, after all. “And—how about this? You can choose any restaurant for dinner.”

At this she perked up. “Even TGI Fridays?”

“Even there.”

“Even though you hate that place?”

“Even though it’s totally gross, I’ll go. For you.”

“I can get dessert, right?” Mia turned the flashlight on Jack now, making him squint. “One of those big brownie-cake sundaes?”

“Fine.”

“And a Coke?”

“Sure.” He put his hand over the flashlight and it glowed through his fingers. “Quit with the light. You’re ruining my already crummy night vision.”

At that Mia unclicked her seat belt and pushed open the door. “Let’s go!”

Jack was an assistant professor in the biology department at the University of Washington. He taught two classes every semester, but most of his energy went into research, publishing, and grant-writing. He was a mycologist. Surely the least sexy profession in the world, his wife, Nora, used to say, right after garbageman, sewer-pipe cleaner, and roadkill collector. People called him the mushroom man, which sounded like a lousy superhero name.

For the past few years, he had been working on a project titled “Diversity, Production, and Dynamics of Fungal Organisms in the Hoh Rain Forest.” Hectare by hectare, season by season, he was mapping out the fungal landscape of the wettest environment in the country.

The trouble was, his surveys were constantly interrupted and his data compromised by pickers. As Seattle’s economy continued to boom—encouraged by the tech industry—so had the locavore food movement. Restaurants paid as much as fifteen dollars a pound for the chanterelles, lobsters, shaggy manes, morels, matsutake, cyans, ringers, cauliflowers, pig’s ears, hedgehogs, angel wings, and boletes that grew here. Fourteen hundred species altogether.

And then there was the hallucinogenic crowd—the dealers and druggies—who were after the Psilocybe azurescens. Also called blue runners and blue angels and—Jack’s favorite—flying saucers.

By dawn, the woods would be busy with people, some carrying permits, all of them carrying knives so that they could snip the stems of new growth. A few wore pistols holstered to their belts, and Jack had read in the newspaper about shoot-outs and robberies in the Mount Rainier wilderness over prized patches.