Veteran Forager Successfully Defends 'Strictly No Hand-Picking' Policy by Using Entirely Different Definition of 'Hand-Picking'

The thumbprint sat in the fourth cap, a clean crescent the width of a thumbnail. By the time the group reached the track it had been explained three times: handling damage, basket pressure, and a feature of the flush itself.

On Wednesday, Rhoda Vane's weekend harvest went into the society thread. Forty-one specimens laid out on a slate, captioned with the ethic behind them: strictly no hand-picking. The reply came underneath in the group's usual two words: "Spore print?" Rhoda answered with a print on dark card, taken that evening. The identification held. Nobody disputed the identification.

At Saturday's walk, a second-year member named Ellis asked at the tail of the line: if nothing had been hand-picked, what had been done with the other forty?

Three answers came back before lunch.

"Hand-picking means dragging a specimen out by the base," Rhoda said, at the first stump. "I cut."

Oksana's Counterclaim: nine of the forty-one show bases pulled free rather than cut. Fourteen carry thumbprints.

"Hand-picking is market language," she said next, further along the ride. "It means taking the good ones and leaving the rest. I take what's in front of me."

Oksana's Counterclaim: forty-one taken, six left standing where they grew.

The third definition arrived by email that evening, addressed to the thread and copied to Vera Pike, who mediates every dispute in the society and is blamed for all of them. "Hand-picking," Rhoda wrote, "means selecting before the group has finished identifying." The photograph had gone up Wednesday. The identification thread opened Thursday morning.

Ellis replied with two words of his own: "So the photo."

Vera's ruling ran four sentences and concluded that the phrase was ambiguous in context. Rhoda said the rule had always described character rather than technique, which meant the ruling agreed with her. Ellis said a rule that agrees with everyone has not ruled. Both asked Vera to confirm their reading. She declined, and both blamed her for the outcome.

"The rule used to describe what you do to a mushroom," Vera said. "Now it describes what you are."

By Friday the phrase had spread. Two other members added "strictly no hand-picking" to their own captions; one of them had not been on the walk. A pinned comment appeared under Rhoda's post defining the term in nine lines. The new harvest went up the same afternoon: fifty-two specimens, same caption, thumbprints visible in the third and seventeenth.

At the track on Saturday, Ellis held out an empty hand and asked the last question.

"So can I touch one before we've agreed?"

Rhoda looked at the basket, then at the hand.

"Only if you're keeping it."