Page 14 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

"You have thirty-eight acres and a hundred-year-old orchard."

"Yeah," he says. "And then you stayed for the frost pick."

A man is at my elbow who wasn't there a moment ago. I didn't see him arrive, and I'm not sure anyone did. He's got a wooden crate under one arm with four jars in it, dark as engine oil against the flames.

"Last of it," he says.

The woman with him takes one out and holds it up to the fire, and the light goes through it red at the very edge.

"Four jars," she says. "There were twenty-two on opening weekend. I bought three of them in the first twenty minutes, and he wouldn't tell me where the hives were."

"I told you eventually," Heath says.

Anaya gets the crate onto the table and within four minutes there's a queue, because half this valley knows exactly what that jar is and the other half has been informed by the half that does. Heath stands beside it with his hands in his pockets while she does all the talking, and every so often she says something and he looks at her a second longer than the sentence needs, and that's the entire man, in public, saying nothing.

Then somebody sets a basket down at the end of our table and takes the cloth off it and I lose the crowd completely.

"That's not fair," Orrin says.

"You've got twelve bottles and I've got a basket."

Matsutake, lobster mushrooms, the last of the yellowfoot. A row of small jars behind them. The woman beside him reaches past and rearranges his own basket in front of him, which he permits without comment.

"Pickled the small ones," Lena Vidal says. "The restaurant's putting them on the fall menu. His name goes on the menu, under the sourcing line."

"She insisted on that," Daniel says.

"You forage in the dark and drive to Prince George twice a week. You get a line." She hands me a jar. "For your bar. Cider and pickled chanterelle, don't argue, I've done the work."

Half the town comes over to ask what's in the basket. Daniel names every single thing out loud, correctly, to every single person, and doesn't tire of it once in an hour. I watch a man in his seventies ask what a lobster mushroom is and get a two-minute answer delivered like good news.

The last vehicle in is a mud-brown Ministry rig that comes down off the fire road with its lights still on.

The man who gets out of it has a week of field on him and the specific pallor of someone who has not seen two hundred people in one place since spring. The woman's already out the passenger side.

"He said he'd come down for an hour," Nadia Osei says.

"I said I'd come down."

"You said an hour."

"I didn't say an hour."

Orrin shakes his hand and asks how long it's been, and Creed Ellery considers the question the way I gather he considers everything, which is proper.

"Nine years," he says. "There's a reason, and it isn't interesting."

"It's mildly interesting," Nadia says.

She doesn't push it further. She puts her hand around his arm and stands beside him and lets him take the whole field in at his own speed — the noise, the kids, a fire the size of a shed — and after a minute he takes the glass Orrin hands him and stays.

I've been in this town for six days. I know eleven names and every one of them is holding a cup of our cider, and I notice the our about a half-second after I've thought it.

Orrin climbs onto the tailgate of Rourke Harding's truck at eight because the fire's high and the field's full and somebody yells for him to say something.

He does the thing I've watched him do a dozen times now. He waits until the last conversation stops on its own instead of talking over it.

"Forty years of this market," he says. "Thirty-nine of them I wasn't old enough to be useful at, so I'm not going to take credit for the institution."