My heart pounds as I poke my fingers into the dark mat of forest floor. There is a mound, an unassuming little mound at the base of a ponderosa pine, and suddenly I’m on my knees, excitedly burying my fingers in earth. I brush the spindly brown needles aside, revealing a layer of damp, soft loam. Smaller bits of needles, feathery green reindeer lichen and petals from fallen pinecones nestle together with dark, rich soil in a thin layer of wet—the only moisture to be found in this dry forest.

These are the trees of my childhood, needles in bundles of three that I used to practice braiding, bark in shades of rust and brown, layered puzzle pieces. My friends and I played pioneers in these dry woods: building forts out of fallen branches, “cooking” pinecone soup in rusting coffee cans we’d found among the pines. The texture of the ground, the smell of the trees, the low sun of autumn are all familiar, exhilarating.

This time I am exploring these woods in search of a new quarry—the fruit of a rare fungus with a storied history, growing under the needles, tangled in the roots of the pines, feeding the trees and knitting the layers of soil on this hillside together in a bed mushroom pickers call a shiro. They’re said to be delicious, these mushrooms. People pay hundreds of dollars for them, and the adrenaline of value and a rare find is pumping through me now, as I kneel in the woods.

I wiggle my fingers deeper and feel a change in the density of the soil, a new texture, something hidden. Something solid but spongy, different from the mesh of needles and earth. My heart speeds up again as I feel around it for edges, hoping that this might be one of the mushrooms that had drawn me to this forest. About the size of a plum, it is attached to something deeper; the fabric of this earth is holding tight as I scrape, needles and flakes of papery bark under my fingernails. My excitement fades as I brush away dark soil, only to reveal more dark soil—no milky white skin of matsutake. I loosen the object from the earthy grip, only to find a chunk of wet wood, gone soft with decay and fused to the soil around it. Rocking back on my heels, I brush off my knees and start back up the hill.

As I move from warm afternoon sun into cool shade, the smell of fall in central Oregon rises from the soft ground, pitch and just-damp soil. A single strand of spider web swings across my path, catching the sun and disappearing again into shadow. I scan the ground around the towers of pine for mounds, poking into the occasional bump in the needles only to find more needles, soft soil, gnarled roots. I keep looking, an exciting new quest in a familiar forest.

On the other side of the mountains, I have found matsutake in books, backpack and raincoat slumped next to me on the carpeted floor of the library. In the Nihongi, written in a.d. 720, there is an account of the Japanese emperor Ojin arriving at his Palace of Yoshino in 288. The local chieftains honored him with a song and a feast of forest mushrooms and boiled frogs. Consumption of the matsutake was allowed exclusively in imperial courts until the eighteenth century, and the mushroom has always been considered an honorable offering. Today in Japan’s intense corporate world, the matsutake is still a prestigious gift, given to visiting executives as a sign of the highest respect and honor.

The voluptuous Japanese goddess of mirth, Okame, is associated with mushrooms—matsutake in particular—for their phallic symbolism. Okame, a naughty, gleeful figure, dances through Japanese literature and art, scattering mushrooms behind her. She playfully brought her mushrooms to many a graphic story and poem, and the association stuck. The matsutake became such a common phallic symbol that women in the eleventh century imperial court at Kyoto were forbidden to speak its name—instead, they used the honorific O identifier, referring to the suggestive fungus as O-Matsu.

The matsutake has become a symbol for autumn in Japanese culture. Much as North American autumn-lovers look for maple leaves set afire with color and pick pumpkins with pink-cheeked children, Japanese people go on Matsutake-gari, mushroom hunting picnics, as a rite of the season. It is a contemplative activity, exploring pine forests after the weather has turned a little cold and a little wet, searching the earth for mounds that indicate a crowning fungus hidden under the needles.

Heading east on my matsutake search, I crested Willamette Pass and found the imprint of the matsutake in another community. I passed through the town of Crescent Lake Junction, a former logging town clinging to the meager tourism that keeps the gas station open and the general store stocked with fishing lures and beef jerky. But every fall, the campgrounds fill up, the town bustles with activity—not tourists, but mushroom pickers.

There was a time when matsutake were common in Japan’s mixed pine forests. But in this century, changing usage and devastating blights have wiped out the trees that support the fungi. As a result, the search has spread to the dry pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. Matsutakes are a delicacy, prized for their flavor, which recalls the smell of pine shadows in fall, damp and cool. Now in the fall, instead of searching the woods from Hokkaido to Kyushu, Japanese chefs, soup companies and food retailers pay high prices to import the American matsutake from Oregon, California, Washington and British Columbia.

A few miles east of town, a laminated paper sign points up a dirt road that leads into the Winema National Forest: Mushroom Camp. Farther down the road, a pickup is parked at an abandoned gas station. A banner with a crudely spray-painted silhouette of a mushroom hangs between the truck’s roof and the station’s empty signpost. A plywood sign leans against the driver’s side door: $$ Mushroom Buyer $$. This buyer’s presence and purpose are clear—dollar signs and pictures of mushrooms are critical when most of the customers speak only Laotian or Vietnamese.

Each fall, a lucrative and contentious economy springs up in these small towns on the slopes of the Cascades: Horse Creek, Crescent Lake Junction, Chemult, Cle Elum, Squamish. Camps full of migrating pickers move from the Siskiyous to the north Cascades, following the fruiting patterns of the mushrooms living in symbiosis with Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine. They frame tents with small logs and branches, covering the frames with plastic tarps. Families of pickers gather around camp stoves and fires bearing steaming pots of noodles and rice.

Buyers go, too, paying hundreds of dollars per pound for the matsutakes. They make shipments nightly to Japan, where the mushrooms are graded, weighed and sold again for up to $1,200 per pound. Thousands of dollars in cash change hands each evening in the buyers’ tents—and everyone in the camps know that everyone else has cash stashed in tents and pickup trucks, under coats and hidden in boots. When the harvest in North America first began in the late 1980s, pickers patrolled their picking territories vigilantly—often with guns. In camps, they celebrated with matsutake-infused vodka. The combination of alcohol, valuable goods and competition has been deadly: four people have been murdered during the mushroom harvest in the last decade.

It is not unusual for pickers to carry weapons with them—and there was a time when they would signal to each other with shots fired to the sky, through the canopy of towering pines. Before regulated harvest programs and sanctioned camp areas, mushroom camps were dense neighborhoods of violence, extortion and alcohol-induced intensity. Rumors of prostitution, thefts and gunplay still linger.

But in 1997, the U.S. Forest Service and state and local law enforcement stepped up their patrols and reorganized the camps. They spread out the sites and hired private concessionaires to orchestrate camping permits and establish an agency presence in the camps. Rangers began handing out whistles to harvesters, and now pickers signal to each other with chirping codes, not gunfire. A curfew was enacted, prohibiting buyers from conducting business after 10 p.m. Both rangers and harvesters have noticed fewer late-night fights, less alcohol.

The season is slow this year—the mushrooms are young, caps still curl down around themselves, protecting delicate honey-colored gills. In a few weeks, they will unfurl and end up looking like umbrellas turned inside out in a strong wind. The pickers wait, check on the fruiting areas. Their picking tools, narrow blades that pry the mushroom out without disturbing the delicate web of roots, stay sheathed.

I stop by the ranger station and find brochures about the harvest in English, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese. A mustachioed ranger shakes his head, hoping that the rains come soon. This ranger station, once concerned mostly with logging and deer hunting, has hired an interpreter. With her help, the rangers hold extensive orientation sessions each fall to teach harvesters responsible picking methods and to discuss sustainability of the matsutake harvest. Continuing my search, I wander through the pines as my shadow lengthens.

I step over an uprooted tree and see that the hole left by its roots is a window into the layers below the needles: first dry brown needles, then darker damp ones. Below that, sandy gray soil and layers of yellow pumice. The layers are fine and distinct—and firm, held together by a dense network of tiny roots and fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi, the matsutake included, hold this hill together. They create a mat of cohesive fungal matter in the soil, preventing erosion and absorbing moisture and nutrients that eventually feed the host trees.

I don’t find any mushrooms, but turn for home grateful for an afternoon spent in the forest. Descending the hill, I think about the fungus under my feet, remembering how tightly it held to the chunk of spongy wood as I scraped and dug, and I’m glad that I didn’t have a reason to disturb it any further. It’s fine that I didn’t find any mushrooms today—I like knowing that they’re under there, curled deep and growing quietly in the needles. I step gingerly on the way back to the car.

I did eventually find some matsutake. A few weeks after my search, Tom Horton, a mycologist from Oregon State, gave in to my pleas to accompany him in the field. As we followed a trail to the islands of pine forest in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, Horton pointed out spongy King Boletes, beds of slimy orange corts, the famous red and white Amanita muscaria. All the while, he talked about mushrooms.

He told me about how some lactate when disturbed, staining pickers’ fingers with school bus–yellow liquid. He told me that some mushrooms grow up to a foot across—overnight. He also explained that if the commercial matsutake harvest is going to survive, logging companies can’t comb through the woods, thinning and cutting without regard to soil compaction (if the soil in a shiro is heavily trampled, the mycelium will die). He showed me the proper depth for the layer of decaying needles and pointed out the relationship between fungi and fire. Too much needle layer—as a result of fire suppression, for instance—and fungi can’t grow.

I lagged behind him, listening and looking for matsutake. Finally, after hours of looking, he called me over to a group of pines on a gentle slope. He’d found mounds. We brushed the needles away, hoping. Dry needles gave way to wet ones and then a smooth, white cap. Horton slid his knife down along the stem and popped out a perfect matsutake. He showed me the delicate hairlike roots that clung to the base of the stem, and we smelled for the pungent pine fragrance. After we’d picked a few more, we brushed the needles back gently, restoring the slope as much as possible. I asked if picking was damaging to the fungi, feeling a pang of guilt for emptying the shiro of fruit. As he headed up the hill, Horton likened it to picking apples off a tree: as long as the tree is healthy, more fruit will grow.