It’s an unusually warm Saturday in March, and bright yellow swamp lilies are blooming in the mucky bottoms of the Siuslaw River in western Oregon. John Getz and his wife, Connie, are traveling upriver, barreling north along Highway 36 in their battered gold Volkswagen Vanagon.

Occasionally John waves an arm at the steep hills sloping up from either side of the river valley. Those hills over there, they’re good for chanterelles, he says. Those other ones, over there, he used to see deer there all the time. Not anymore. But the chanterelles, they keep coming back. He’ll check the hills for them early this fall.

Today John and his wife are going truffle-hunting. It’s the end of the truffle season in Oregon, which usually begins in late fall and winds down in early spring. Truffling is a nascent industry here, more of a hobby than a job, even for experienced mushroom pickers like John. He’s been picking mushrooms professionally for more than 20 years; he’s only been searching for truffles for the past five, ever since he found one by mistake while picking chanterelles. Because truffles, unlike their mushroom cousins, never break the surface of the ground, finding them takes a good deal more guesswork. Hunters in Europe use dogs and pigs to sniff them out. John relies on his wife.

“Are we almost there?” Connie asks. She’s rolled down the window on the passenger side of the van and is calmly sniffing the air – the stink of the swamp lilies, the cool scent of the river, the pungent odor of gas exhaust. When she first climbed into the van, back in the small riverside town of Mapleton, she had paused, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “What’s that smell?” she asked. “Don’t you smell it? Like detergent. A strong chemical smell.” John had shrugged. She eventually shrugged it off, too. But odors are more potent for Connie than for most people. Even before she went blind, she says, she had an unusually strong sense of smell.

On this unseasonably warm day, Connie is wearing multiple layers: a black sweater under a red hooded sweatshirt under a yellow-and-black nylon vest. She has fibromyalgia and gets chilled easily. Her long black hair, streaked with gray, is pulled back into a ponytail, and she wears thick wraparound black sunglasses, the blocky kind that the elderly often wear over their regular glasses. Connie wears hers because she’s legally instead of completely blind, and the little light she can see is often glaringly harsh.

She and John have been married for three years. John was married once before and has three teenagers; Connie was married once before, too, and has a teenaged son. They met when he showed up at her house one day to lay flooring – his summer job, when mushrooms take time off – and she fell for his low, slow voice. He brought her a mushroom on their first date.

A hand-painted wooden sign on the left-hand side of the road announces, “Welcome to Deadwood / Where Diversity Lives.” John, a lanky, slouchy man with a thin face, gray stubble and a couple of missing teeth, has been quiet while his wife chatters, and now he says, in the measured, almost drawly way he has of talking, that he should check on Bill. Bill Murphy, another professional mushroom forager who apprenticed under John nearly 20 years ago, lives in Deadwood. John hasn’t told him about today’s truffling expedition, but he doesn’t want to drive by Bill’s place without at least stopping to invite him along.

Bill’s house, an L-shaped structure nearly obscured by a greenhouse, three trucks and a vast assemblage of rusting appliances, is just off the highway. In the bare space that serves as both yard and driveway sits a white pickup truck with several mountain bikes strapped together in the back. Bill is indeed home. He was just about to head into town to sell the bikes, but he’s thrilled to see John, and he’s sorely tempted by the idea of spending the afternoon tromping through a dark fir forest hunting for truffles. He waves his arms around for a bit, whips his baseball cap on and off, scratches his short, graying hair, and finally calls his dog. “Beau! C’mere, we’re going to look for truffles!” A small beige pug waddles out from the house, snorting heavily in that pompous way of pugs. Bill has been training Beau to find truffles, and he can’t resist the chance to rationalize a few hours in the woods as a training exercise.

The two vehicles hit the road, the truck with the small dog bouncing around inside the cab followed by the puttering van. Around a bend, the valley opens up, revealing a large Christmas-tree farm and a house on the far slope that looks like a large-scale version of a log cabin. It’s where John’s father lives. He mentions this. Connie is surprised.

“You can see it from the road?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he responds.

“I’ve never seen it.” Connie, who could see just fine until she lost her vision after an infection in college, often speaks of sight as if she still had it.

Another ten minutes go by before John pulls off at a small turnaround. Beyond a metal gate and a cattle grating, a paved road leads past farmland and up between two hills into a forest. Bill carries Beau over the grating, then lets him trot the rest of the way. John ambles, squinting under his blue bicyclist’s cap. Both are carrying truffle rakes, short-handled tools featuring three menacing-looking prongs. Connie strides confidently up the road, bouncing along in sneakers and ignoring her fold-out walking stick. She needs to be warned about certain obstacles, such as the pile of manure looming in the road ahead, but otherwise she’s fearless. Falling down does not faze her; it’s just part of being blind.

When the road bends into the fir woods, John steps off the asphalt and begins walking on the spongy, pine-needle-covered forest floor. It’s suddenly dark and cool, with a feathery breeze wafting up from the creek that gurgles down between the hills. Not much light penetrates below the tops of the trees; all the lower branches of the skinny young Douglas firs are dead, and the dominant green growth along the ground is moss. The evenly spaced woods belong to a private timber company that, says Bill, isn’t bothered by mushroom or truffle foragers wandering through. Indeed, it’s clearly a popular spot for the area’s half-dozen or so truffle hunters; nearly all the ground between the trees has been thoroughly raked over. Beau snorts excitedly and runs off into the woods, while John, his wife and Bill fan out, walking steadily but not too slowly between the trees.

The dog finds the first truffle; he stops and starts digging frantically. Bill hastens over to prevent Beau from eating it on the spot. It’s a black truffle, a knobby bit of fungus that looks like a lump of coal and smells weirdly of apples and cheese. Everybody’s fascinated; these woods have both white and black truffles, but the blacks seem to be harder to find, so they are more prized, at least for today. Connie inhales deeply. John looks wryly amused. Bill drops the truffle into a Ziploc bag and keeps moving.

The Ziplocs are necessary for Connie, who otherwise gets distracted by what she calls “nasal interference” – smelling a truffle that’s already been harvested. She has a different set of tools than the men: lighter-tinted glasses for the dim woods, knee pads, red gardening gloves and her metal walking stick, the end of which she pokes into the dirt at the base of the trees, pulls out, brings to her face and sniffs audibly. The ground should smell sweet, she says, when it hides truffles. A slightly acidic smell means white truffles; a sweeter scent means blacks. She makes John point out exactly where Beau found his truffle, stabs her stick into the dirt, sniffs, then drops the stick and kneels on the ground, digging with her hands and rolling clumps of dirt through her gloved fingers, hoping to catch a fruiting fungus. She lifts dirt clods right up to her face, smelling. Each time she sighs ecstatically, even when no truffles turn up. She finds the scent of the dirt itself delicious.

As the party drifts through the woods, they don’t talk much. Beau snuffles while the men occasionally snap branches. It’s Connie who keeps up a running commentary, stopping at nearly every tree to sniff the dirt and collapsing to her knees to paw the ground. “Oh my gosh! That’s wonderful!” she exclaims repeatedly. “You guys should smell this!”

Usually, Connie says, she can tell where truffles are just by standing in the woods and sniffing. But these woods have been so picked over that the scents are confusing; she seems to smell truffles everywhere. A raw skunk-cabbage smell floats up from the creek; after a while, the men light up sweetly acrid cigarettes. Connie is nearly as blissed out as Beau, but she’s not having any luck today.

Two weeks before, it was a different story. John and his wife had taken a crowd of people truffling: scientists from Oregon State University, mostly, along with a visiting group of scientists from Russia. John’s dog, Katie, found a truffle right off the bat. Connie wasn’t far behind. “I can smell them in the air,” she proclaimed. But a former OSU student, who had introduced John to truffling five years ago, decided to play a trick on Connie the wonder truffler. He sneaked up behind her holding a truffle in his hand and waited. Connie paused, inhaling. “Are you there?” she asked, indignantly. Astonished, the prankster admitted his guilt.

This afternoon, John and Bill use their rakes to uncover several small piles of little white truffles, gnarly looking things that resemble beige-colored brains. John pronounces their find to be “spring truffles,” a late-blooming truffle they haven’t seen much before. Connie smells them, skeptically. They are almost odorless, which is unusual in a truffle. But into the bag they go anyway.

Time floats by unnoticed. Under the forest canopy, the light hardly seems to change, and the rows of trees seem to stretch on into the hills forever. Only the stream’s steady burble grows softer or stronger as the group moves toward or away from it. Beau gets bored and props himself up on a rotting log to sulk. Above the dog looms an ancient apple tree, twisted and weighted like an old man. Bill says the whole area used to be a town called Greenleaf, a town that lived briefly and then died like so many other rural American towns. The settlers had planted the apple trees.

Nobody suggests stopping; the smooth, steady pace of wandering in the woods, eyes to the ground, creates its own hypnotic trance. John and his wife ate some soup around 11 that morning; they are carrying PowerBars, but they don’t unpack them. Bill, who has found more truffles today than anybody else, is too excited to think about food. It’s not until Bill thinks to ask the time, and is shocked to realize that it’s nearly four o’clock, that the group turns and begins the languid trek back.

At the edge of the forest, everybody finally comes to a halt. Bill needs to head back, but John and Connie want to stay until the light is gone. Connie munches a date bar while Bill rescues Beau, who has tried to attack three mules grazing in a nearby field. Down the road, a group of adolescent boys on all-terrain vehicles revs toward the woods; John and Bill carefully hide their rakes and bags of truffles in the roadside shrubbery before the kids rumble past. Even though this particular truffle patch is no secret, they aren’t taking any chances.

John wants to stay until he finds a black truffle. He doesn’t want Bill to be the only one to get the day’s haul of blacks. The two men have a strange dynamic: part friends, part collaborators, part competitors. Bill is only about ten years younger than John, but they had a student-teacher relationship for so long that there is still a vague sense of formality between them. Connie has it easier, being the wife who comes along for the fun. In any case, they all agree that this is the last day for truffles this season. John just isn’t ready to let it go quite yet.

The air is still warm, although a slight evening chill gives notice that it’s not summer yet. Bill says goodbye and starts walking back down the road toward the parked cars, his dog trotting before him. John and Connie wave, then turn back and disappear into the woods.