Spring's beauty and mystery

Spring's allure resides in part in its mysteries, which for me this year have been both exhilarating and perplexing.

The abiding puzzle of how to position myself along the path of a tom turkey resolved itself an hour into the first season when a flock of hens escorted a gobbler within easy range of my 12 gauge.

Life's deepest mystery, where fish live and what they will bite, seemed as transparent as the trout stream-like water flowing this spring in the Wapsipinicon, which uncharacteristically surrendered bass and walleyes throughout April and May, when high, muddy water usually prevents my fishing at all.

But where and when morels will fruit, which usually reveals itself to the patient and persistent pursuer, seems more inscrutable now than before my first hunt.

After more than 40 years you think you know a thing or two about the fruiting of the morel - that it happens hereabouts in late April and early May around dead elms and live river birches when soil temperature and moisture are “right.”

“Something is not right” were the words most frequently spoken by me and my friend Arthur Clark of Quasqueton as we searched vainly beneath one promising dead elm after another in the waning days of April. Finally, on May 1, more than two weeks later than our earliest find recorded just a few years ago, our first morel of the season snapped into focus.

After several desultory hunts in Buchanan County, with the soil too cold, too dry or too both, I thought it was going to be “right” when my friend Dave Patterson of Atkins and I spent the week of May 8 in Allamakee County.

Whatever had been wrong before had to have been corrected, we figured, by a heavy rain on May 9, followed by three straight days with high temperatures in the 80s.

We climbed bluffs on both sides of the Mississippi, combing leaf litter beneath dead elms that had not been trampled upon by human feet, and still we found barely enough for two meals for the two of us.

My two best hunts of the season - on successive Saturdays, May 7 and 14 - yielded for Arthur and me a combined total of 6 pounds, which seems even less impressive when you consider we'd invested a combined 28 hours in our quest.

I called it a season on May 16 after Arthur and I managed to extract a mere 20 mushrooms from the increasingly luxurious undergrowth in the bottomland timbers.

As unfruitful as this year's morel fruiting proved to be, the ancillary pleasure of observing pretty birds often nullified the frustration.

In Buchanan County, Arthur and I enjoyed close looks at Baltimore orioles and a rose-breasted grosbeak and lamented that we had not seen a scarlet tanager in years.

In Allamakee County, a vocal pair of sandhill cranes overflew Dave and me, and luminous yellow warblers often flitted in nearby shrubbery.

Then, in a single radiant moment on the edge of a large timber, the futility of our principal pursuit dissolved in the sunlit brilliance of the elusive scarlet tanager.