Kitty the mushroom Hunter

Sometimes the world just needs to slow down.

I’m no technophobe. I love the immediacy of texting, and Instagram as much as the next person, but there is no denying the way a quiet, disconnected, walk in the forest soothes the soul. Especially if there’s a chance money can be made on that walk.

Some might think mushroom hunting is a weird way to make money, but those people have no imagination. And probably don’t have a connection to local chef who pays handsomely for fresh from the dirt stock. As an amateur chef myself I understood the value of the weird looking fungus. It was delicious almost to the point of magical.

Morels are like gold to a well versed culinary artist, amateur or pro. When I was a teen the spring time hunts with Mom were a yearly side hustle to help pad my college fund, but we always kept the batch from the first hunt for ourselves. This spring it became more about us spending time together than money. Even if neither of us admitted it.

The gentle breeze had the trees whispering to us as we hiked through the tree line enjoying the peace and quiet.

“There,” Mom said, pointing at Kitty.

Yes, Mom’s cat was named Kitty.

I’d been lost in thought, but as soon as she spoke, I moved. I had to move quick or Kitty would dig up the mushrooms and nine times out of ten, damage them. Or eat them.

Kitty had expensive tastes.

I picked the Russian Blue with one beautiful golden eye up and passed her to Mom, who cuddled her and cooed at her, telling her what a good girl she was. “Such a pretty girl. Such a smart, pretty girl you are, Kitty.”

Mom’s theory was since the former stray cat only had one eye, her sense of smell, already fourteen times stronger than a humans, was even more enhanced. One afternoon about a week after she’d shown up at my parents door, I’d had some Morels sweating on the stove and Kitty made it clear she not only smelled them, but wanted them.

She’d jumped up onto the kitchen counter, something she’d never done before, and made a beeline for the few I had left of my personal stash. Her scrabbling paws knocked my little black book of recipe ideas to the floor and scattered utensils everywhere. Mom decided right then and there that the cat had survived by foraging in the underbrush and we’d take her with us the next day on our hunt. That hunch had paid off.

The cat truly did like the tasty morsels, and the ones she found were always true Morels, both black and gold, not the toxic fake kind. She’d been our secret weapon for three hunts now and they’d all been bountiful.

Kneeling in front of the dead tree stump she’d stopped at, I brushed aside a mixture of dried and damp leaves, and discovered two of the distinctive conical shaped mushrooms. Nice large golden ones too.

I pulled my very sharp knife from my back pocket and gave the nearby area a good look for more before slicing evenly across the almost translucent stem of the first fungi. I gave the honeycomb top a thorough inspection before setting it in the cloth sack I carried. Kitty was good, but trust by verifying was something Mom taught me early on in life.

“Almost done,” I told Mom as I sliced through the second. “There’s a baby one just there on the other side of the stump we can either leave to grow, or pull out for Kitty’s reward. What do you want to do with it?”

We always made sure Kitty got a reward. People say cats aren’t food motivated, but they didn’t know Kitty. Maybe it was because she was a stray who lived in the forest before she found Mom and Dad’s place, but this was one cat very motivated by food.

Mom set kitty down. “Let her have it.”

We watched as Kitty searched the ground I’d just harvested from, and slowly sniffed her way around the stump to the baby one. A couple of sniffs and the swipe of a fast paw full of claws and Kitty was batting the baby mushroom around on the dirt.

I stood next to Mom and we enjoyed the sight of her playing with her food. The pleasure she clearly got from hunting and foraging made Mom giggle. A sound that lightened my heart like nothing else.

You see, Mom was sick- cancer- and we didn’t often have much to laugh about any more. Even though we lived in a country with a health care system that provided for necessary things like chemo and medication, nothing had helped. After a short remission the tumours were back, and Mom had chosen to forgo treatment this time, instead wanting to just enjoy the time she had left, as best she could. My brother and I had both taken time off work to come home and spend as much time with her as we could, while we could. Life was full of laughs and tears as we strove to make our final memories with her.

These trips into the forest had been where my relationship with Mom had started easing away from overprotective mother and rebellious daughter, toward a genuine friendship. It was somehow easier to open up to her about shit going on in my life when were walking through Mother Nature. Maybe it was the female energy or some sort of earth magic or something, but those walks had made Mom my best friend. She’d become my person, the one I always went to, the one I told everything to. The one who I trusted, and who always gave me good advice.

She’s the reason I am who I am. The reason I had the courage to follow my own path, and become the person I was meant to be, and not just the one I was expected to be. And now I was losing her.

“What’s she got now?”Mom asked.

I pulled myself together, subtly wiping away the tear sliding down my cheek. Kitty had something other in her teeth and was almost growling as she tugged at it and shook her head violently, the dirt and leaves shifting with her every movement.

We both jumped forward, Mom snatching Kitty up and me stabbing whatever it was, pinning it to the dirt.

It wasn’t the mouse or vole I’d anticipated. In fact, it wasn’t even alive. I pulled my knife out, and fingered the dirty canvas.

“Leave it,” Mom said, turning away with Kitty in her arms.

Normally I’d listen. These were her woods after all, and I was here to be with her. But something inside urged me to dig deeper, tug harder on the corner that was already loose. “Sarah!” Mom called.

“I wanna see what it is.”

“It’s probably a buried body.”

A vision of human bones flashed through my head and I hesitated. Thank you, Bones marathon.

Giving my head a shake I grabbed the material, set my feet and put my weight into it. After a couple of firm tugs I fell flat on my ass with a hard thump when it came free.

I stared down at the heavy canvas bag in my lap.

“What the hell is that?”

Whatever it was, it was lumpy. And heavy.

Too small to be a bones or a cut up body, I told myself. Holding my breath, I unzipped the bag slowly, and gaped.

“Hoooly shit,” I whispered.

“Hoooly shit,” Mom echoed when she saw the piles of bills filling the bag.

We stared at the surprise bounty blankly, neither saying anything more. I reached out and touched it.

It was real.

It was also American.

How the hell did a bag of American money end up buried in a Slocan Valley forest of British Columbia?

Kitty made a sound between a meow and a growl, jumping from Moms arms. She raced to my side and sniffed at the bag, nosing the edge aside and digging in with a paw. “Stop.” I tried to push her aside as Mom came closer, but Kitty was insistent, pushing back against my hands, and digging into the bag.

“Fine,” I muttered, pushing the edges open further. When I saw what she was scratching at I reached inside, and pulled out a little Moleskin notebook similar to the one I carried with me to jot ideas in. It was older, the corners frayed and the cover soft with use.

I flipped it open, and a photo fell out.

A faded and tattered image of Kitty, sitting pretty with a pirate patch over one eye.

Mom gasped and Kitty butted her head against my hands before rubbing her cheek over the corner of the little books pages, purring the whole time.

Mom sat on the ground next to me, and pulled Kitty onto her lap while I opened the notebook.

“It’s a diary,” I whispered.

The pages were full of words and images. Some in pencil some in ink. Some neat and precise, some scribbled and messy. I handed the book off to Mom and she started to read some of the pages aloud, telling me the story of a man, a former soldier, who suffered from flashbacks and PTSD. He’d decided both he and society were both better off with him living far off the grid and began to wander across the United States. By the time he crossed into Canada a few years ago with his cat, Scarlet, as his only companion, emotions were tightening my throat and making it hard to swallow. I distracted myself by taking the money out and counting it as Mom read on.

He’d found the hippies and Doukhobors of the valley most accepting, and made the Kootenay mountain range his home. He’d camped all over it. How he got the cat across the border he never said, but he did it. There were sketches of the cat as a kitten, and even a heartbreaking page about how Kitty-Scarlet, had lost her eye tangling with a coyote.

There was no mention of where he went, or where the money came from. And the last thing written was a plea impossible to resist.

Scarlet will survive without me, but I’d never have survived without her. Please take care of her. She’s a good girl.

I stopped counting and looked at Mom, Kitty cuddled up and asleep in her lap. Tears streaked down her face.

“Twenty thousand, Mom. This guy left twenty thousand dollars buried in the bush! What should we do with it?” I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to take the money and run, but it was her forest, her cat, and in my mind, her money.

She sat for a minute, rubbing her fingers over Kitty’s back and staring into the trees.

“Take care of Kitty,” she said finally. “It’s clear this guys not coming back, or Kitt—sorry, Scarlet, wouldn’t have lead us here.”


”You think she led us here specifically?”

“Yes.” She met my gaze. “I do. I think whoever that was knew he was dying, and he brought Kitty to our door and left her there.”


”That’s a bit of stretch don’t you think?”


She arched a brow. “After reading that do you think Kitty would’ve left him after all they’d been through if he hadn’t somehow stuck her under our deck?”

Strangely enough, that rang true in my heart. The cat was freaky in the way she seemed to understand us. And she did lead us to the money.

I stared down at Kitty. “So we’re taking it, right?”

“Yes, we are.” She laughed. “You said it yourself, Kitty has expensive tastes. Think of all the cat food we can buy with twenty thousand dollars.”