Local Veteran Ignores Three High-Res Photos to Ask 'Spore Print?'

The third photograph, cap underside, flash off, a coin left in frame for scale, had been open in the thread for about ninety seconds when the reply landed beneath it, two words long, from Gordon Speer.

The poster had done everything the county society asks of a stranger's picture. Three angles: the cap in place on the hardwood deadfall, the underside, and a cross-section cut with a pocket knife. Habitat named, substrate named, season named, moss on the north face noted because it seemed relevant. The caption ended with the question the photographs were always for: is this what I think it is?

Gordon Speer has been answering that question for the society for twenty-two years, and he has answered it the same way since roughly the third year. Two words, no elaboration, no upper case that anyone has ever been able to agree on. A spore print is a real request. You set an intact cap, gills or pores down, on white paper or black card, cover it against draught, and leave it four hours to a night so the deposit settles in a color you can compare against something. It asks the specimen for evidence a photograph cannot supply. On this point Gordon is not wrong, and the thread's regulars will tell you so before you finish typing your objection.

What the request cannot do is produce the specimen.

The poster had followed the society's own guidance and left the ridge with nothing but images. Take only what you can name, the beginner sheet says; the poster could not name it, so the cross-section was cut in place and the rest stayed on the log, forty minutes' drive and one unmapped turn from the nearest paved road. Vera Pike pointed this out gently, in the way that has got her asked to mediate every dispute in the county and blamed by both parties for the result. She suggested the poster collect a fresh cap next time, explicitly, for the purpose of a print. Gordon said that was lowering the bar. The poster said she was dignifying a sentence that is a stop sign. Both of them thanked her, which is how Vera knows she has lost.

There is a second obstacle, and it is structural. The society's loaner print plates, the black card, and the two glass bowls that fit over a large cap are kept in the shed at the Hollis Street Allotments, behind a padlock whose combination is technically a secret held by the committee, which meets in the same shed. Two of the three people who know it are away until the end of the month. The third has stopped answering messages about it.

Over at the competing group, which shares roughly half its membership with the society, Nadia Evers has a different rule: nobody types a question at a photograph they could answer by walking out to the log with a hand lens. It costs her the threads, and it costs her Gordon's membership for two weeks every autumn, and she gets them back.

Three weeks later, the poster returned to the ridge, cut a fresh cap, and put a print up on a jam jar lid. It was, by every account in the thread, a good print: clean deposit, even ring, readable against the white. The specimen was resolved to everyone's satisfaction and then some, and the thread did not resume, because by then there was nothing left to say.

Gordon posted his own harvest the following Sunday: four photographs, substrate named, season named, the same ridge. The first reply came from the poster, and it was two words. Gordon answered at length, different ground, nine years of familiarity with that particular log, his own records going back before the mapping, and finished with a sentence the thread quoted for a month.

"This one I know."