Of pie and slug yummies.

Mom used to make a pie in the summertime; graham cracker crust filled with vanilla custard mixed with an assortment of berries picked that afternoon in the bush; huckle-, salmon- and thimble-berries, red and orange, juicy, seedy and a little tart, nuggets of taste and colour in the blandness of the custard.

I remembered those pies as I walked the Leiner River trail, carrying a huckleberry branch lopped off by the trail maker, picking and eating the ripe berries as we went. The bush provides.

My son asked about some of the mushrooms we passed: could we eat those? I recognized Russulas, which we had eaten up north. They tasted and had the texture of erasers, I told him, and he lost interest. But there were many others, food for slugs and bears, not for us, not without a specialist to pronounce them safe.

Collybia, I think. Possibly edible. With slug bites.

Typical clearing floor: evergreen twigs, needles, and cones, mosses, wild blackberry leaves, a huckleberry branch. And mushrooms. A slug has been eating a couple of them.

The same mushrooms, from ground level.

Something broke this one off.

Two unidentified mushrooms posing as siamese twins, with a wild blackberry twig growing through them.

Slug eye view. Same mushrooms. (Gilled bolete? Edible?)

On a disintegrating log. Unidentified. The cap of the one on the left has been nibbled on.

Strange, blobby polypores. Shelf fungi that forgot how to make shelves. (Maybe when the tree went from vertical to horizontal.)

Pretty yellow slug, a mushroom eater. One of many. This one's on our picnic table.

We're still here on the Leiner River trail.