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

The third photograph, cap underside, flash off, a coin 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, substrate and season named, moss on the north face noted. The caption ended with the question the photographs were always for: is this what I think it is?

Gordon Speer has answered that question for the society for twenty-two years, the same way since roughly the third year. 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. On this point Gordon is not wrong.

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 rest stayed on the log, forty minutes' drive and one unmapped turn from the nearest paved road. Vera Pike, who mediates every dispute in the county and is blamed by both parties for the result, pointed this out gently. She suggested the poster collect a fresh cap next time, for 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.

The society's loaner print plates, the black card and the glass bowls are kept in the shed at the Hollis Street Allotments, behind a padlock whose combination is held by the committee. Two of the three people who know it are away until the end of the month. The third has stopped answering messages about it.

Nadia Evers, who runs the competing group, has a different rule: nobody types a question at a photograph they could answer at the log with a hand lens. It costs her Gordon's membership for two weeks every autumn, and she gets it back.

Three weeks later, the poster returned to the ridge, cut a fresh cap, and put a print up on a jam jar lid: clean deposit, even ring, readable against the white. The specimen was resolved, and the thread did not resume.

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, nine years of familiarity with that particular log, and finished with a sentence the thread quoted for a month.

"This one I know."