Wild life | 3 May 2018

Laikipia, Kenya

Neighbours Tom and Jo came by with a bucketful of wild African mushrooms, which they had collected in old cattle bomas on the way to the farm. I asked: ‘How do you know they are not toadstools?’ Tom said you could peel the caps, the gills were dark brown, not white, there was a ring around the stem like a Jacobean ruff — and they did not smell poisonous. ‘Fine,’ I said and into a great pot they went with butter and parsley from the garden. Everything else for supper was from the garden too — even the road runner cockerel — except the flagons of wine brought by guests David and Kate, also from a farm only two hours’ drive away. The mushrooms were delicious. I expected my friends to turn red and horns to sprout from their heads, and that after hallucinating over pudding we would all then be found dead in our chairs at dawn. Waking alive next morning, I arranged with Tom to go mushroom foraging that evening. ‘We must work fast,’ he advised. ‘All the warthogs and elephants have the same idea as us.’ That afternoon I drove over to Tom’s and as we reached a cluster of old bomas, or night enclosures for cattle, it was clear that the sounders of pigs and herds of pachyderms had already been rooting in the middens of rotted manure. The sheer quantity of cow shit, which must be just the right vintage, and weeks of heavier rains than we have had for two decades, meant there were mushrooms in vast quantities for all wild creatures and people. We piled in together with the ranch hands to pick great quantities of fungus exploding out of the ground. At a second supper that night, Tom said he had noticed orange toadstools in close proximity to the safe mushrooms.