Following is a story from Rose. For the next three suns, we will be running a series of her posts from Hazelnut Camp and then back at Wabanong.

“When I was walking through here I saw so many hazelnuts it just boggled my mind.” Dakota guides us down a National Forest road west of our new camp, a manic gleam in her merry eyes.

Peering through the hazelnut bushes lining either side of the two track road, eyes straining, I do not feel encouraged. I’ve been to an abundant hazelnut area about an hour and a half away via a box on wheels that feeds on noxious fumes, and what I’m seeing doesn’t even remotely compare. My search image is not refined yet, and I can only pick out a handful of fuzzy green bells. I’ve heard from people who have lived here for years that we don’t have a lot of hazelnuts and it’s almost impossible to wrestle them from the squirrels.

I didn’t exactly believe Dakota at first when she returned from her walkabout and enthusiastically proposed a spontaneous Hazelnut Camp to take advantage of the mountains of wild foods she was finding. We would form a separate camp about three miles away from Wabanong and live entirely off the land, no food drop from the support center, basically for as long as we could stand it.

“I realized I could drop off the face of the earth, or I could take half the clan with me,” she laughed. “We’re going to go out for a quarter moon! Maybe even half a moon!”

Uh-huh, I thought.

On my morning scouting the area with Rab, high on an irresponsible volume of blackberries, I allowed myself to get excited. If there were enough nuts we could live off them and send them back to Wabanong to cure and put up for the White Season. But I’ve lived with people who have gone out on eight sun trips into these woods with no food, people with a decade of experience on us, and listened to their stories of how hard it was. But here I am, dedicated to trying.

“We’re gonna be out here half a moon,” Rab says with his typical mellow confidence and a small nod, all square framed glasses and surfer hair.

Three suns, I think, maybe four, and we might be fasting the last two, and we’ll be back at Wabanong.

In the westering light I heft my pillowcase and start plucking. The soft peach fuzz is deceptive, and my hands rapidly fill with tiny spines.

“I’m leaving the little ones,” I say to Dakota as she cruises by me in green army wool and graying curls, enviably efficient, her search image already fine-tuned.

“I’m taking them all,” she tells me gleefully.

Thinking of the squirrels and future generations of hazelnuts, I’m torn: There’s not a lot here, and we’re going to need everything that we can get. When gathering plants we generally have a Rule of Three– take one third of what’s there and the plant or area will be able to recover and reproduce. Should I only take one in three hazelnuts when there are so few here?
The question nags at me as I pick everything I find, my hands rapidly desensitized to the needles.

Finally, I ask Hazelnut, What should I do? How much can I take?
And she says to me, Take it all. You’re the only ones doing this in this time and this place, going to this edge to relearn how to live with us. Take what you need.

~~~

“There is somuch food here,” Rab enthuses, eying our dinner feast spread around the hearth through his square frames. A pile of beaked hazelnuts, a pyramid of fish, skewers of grasshoppers, bandanas full of greens, a handful of frogs. Culinary quality and variety we lack not.

“I know!” Chris says, stripping a toasted grasshopper off the skewer, still looking after four moons in the woods like he stepped out of a city gym in a sleeveless hoodie. “It’s amazing.”

My estimation of our calories is different, but I don’t say anything. I know we’re not getting as much food as we would on the food drop, but many people don’t feel hungry. They’re being filled by something other than food, filled with the empowerment of independence, of being able to do something about being hungry instead of just waiting for the food drop to magically arrive at the trailhead.

“I was thinking, ‘The Mother provides,'” I tell them, “but can we keep up?” I crack another hazelnut, hull spraying lemony juice, and pick out the white meat to add to my pile. I’m pretty sure hazelnuts are our best source of bulk fat right now, the one thing our diet is really lacking, and I’m hitting them hard. All sun every sun we gather food, and the rest of the time we crack hazelnuts and sleep.

Claire nibbles on a leaf across the hearth, ever quiet, notebook out and ready on her knee to record her many thoughts.

“More berries,” Fridolin informs the after-dinner-glow, attempting to finger comb through the snarls in his shoulder length hair, a cherry stuck in his beard.

“Don’t talk to me about berries,” I moan. Even the thought makes me feel mildly ill, considering I ate a ball of them about the size of my head for breakfast.

“There can never be too many berries,” Rab informs me, popping to his feet and scrubbing hazelnut stickers out of his hands on the front of his pants.

“Look at this one!” I hold out a hulled hazelnut almost as big as the first digit of my forefinger. I’ve always heard that beaked hazelnuts are smaller than the wild American Hazelnuts I’ve gathered before, but these nuts rival or surpass any American Hazelnut I’ve eaten.

“Whoaaa,” Rab says.

“And look at this,” I continue, holding up what appears to be a small nut, still tightly encased in spiny hull. “Looks small in the hull, inside, totally average nut. The big hulls are all full of air space.”

It’s sun five of Hazelnut Camp, and I wasn’t even convinced we would make it to sun four. My mind opening up to the ever expanding universe of possibility, I realize that I haven’t been as a question. I always heard there weren’t a lot of hazelnuts, that they were small, so I didn’t believe they could be worth gathering. The people I know with Turns of experience were severely challenged by eight sun trips living off the land, so I didn’t believe we could do it. But I didn’t open myself to the potential of seasonal variation, a low squirrel population, or that my more experienced clanmates were giving themselves other challenges, like going into the wild without fishing hooks and line, or going in the White Season, or going in the Hunger Moons.

We have hooks and line, and thanks to Dakota’s scouting and Rab’s initiative to go the very next morning after Hazelnut Camp was proposed, we have had the incredible opportunity to go as incompetent infants into the wild and be consistently fed. Closed to possibility, sure I had the answers, I could never have been a catalyst for this experience. What Dakota saw as abundance I compared to my previous experience and wouldn’t have bothered with. But for five suns the hazelnuts have fed nine people.

“Berries?” Fridolin proposes, dusting off the thick wool coat he wears even on mild suns.

Chris: “Fer sure, man!”

Rab: “Ye-ah!”

Me: “Ughhhh…”