On a Friday afternoon well into late summer, I realize I have no plans after work. Finally, a free evening! Texting a friend who a month earlier had offered to take me mushroom hunting, I ask if it is too late (and hot) in the season.

She quickly responds that she and her partner in grime have been collecting chanterelles out their backyard where it is shady and are heading out this day to finally harvest a chicken of the woods they’d been letting grow. “We also found a delicacy back there, a mushroom that gets turned into a different kind of mushroom by another mushroom.” Can I be at their house at 4:30? Indeed, I can.

Mushroom hunting is not a hobby someone should charge into since several deadly mushrooms can be found in our woods, and I chose my guides carefully. I’ll call them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Let me be clear: this is not a how-to column. Perhaps this is a why-to column—or a why-not-to column, depending on how you feel at the end. I am instructed to wear shoes I don’t mind getting muddy, so I show up in shorts and calf-high muck boots/waders I’ve never worn before. Wal-Mart specials. Tweedle Dee looks at me and asks if I want to borrow a water bottle or take a beer. She’s zipping up a small backpack. I say, “I thought we were walking in your backyard?”

“We’re starting in the backyard.”

“How long will we be gone?”

“A few hours.”

I accept both the water bottle (she puts it in her pack) and the beer. I expect that, too, to go in her pack but Tweedle Dum pops the top on his and says, “This way we’ve drunk them by the time we get to the forest.” A little liquid bread sounds good, since I skipped lunch. Then out the yard and down a hill we go into the wilds of Wellsboro.

The grass is really high, but they’ve more or less tramped a trail. Tweedle Dum charges ahead, while I slide around in my boots. Near a pond’s edge the footing becomes slippery and uneven. A little lightheaded, I’m thinking a beer on an empty stomach wasn’t the smartest move. I fall a bit behind, but he waits inside the edge of the woods where the temperature drops. There has been enough moisture that in hemlock woods this thick mushrooms have been able to thrive. Yesterday the rich soil and dried beech leaves were dotted orange with chanterelles.

Both my guides pause and look around. Apparently, they were expecting more orange, but they laugh. Tweedle Dum explains that we are competing with critters and weather. “I’ll take a small mushroom versus nothing the next day,” he says. “Younger mushrooms taste better. Chicken nugget size.”

“Sometimes we don’t find anything,” says Tweedle Dee. Mushrooms there the previous day can disappear like Brigadoon. Instead of seeds, mushrooms release spores as fine as the fog that cloaks the fictional Scottish town. When they land in a hospitable place they germinate and create the mycelium. This is the hidden soul, what you can’t see that makes the mushroom a mushroom. That which we call mushrooms are the fruit that some fungi produce. Depending on your perspective, that fruit’s purpose is either to produce spores or be the centerpiece of your favorite cream sauce. After dispersing the spores, the mushroom dies back—but it’s not really dead. The mycelium waits unseen for an opportunity to rise again. Their lifespan is infinite, though they can be killed.

By letting the large cluster of chicken of the woods grow one more day, Dee and Dum were taking a risk, and it pays off when we reach the log with the meaty orange fans. My guides pull out serrated knives and bags. “Chicken and biscuits tonight!” Tweedle Dum crows. He’ll batter and fry it.

Nearby they show me some old chanterelles, ones that are soft and spongy after releasing their spores—but, look, there are some we can gather. They point out what to look for underneath and how to pull the stem apart to be sure I’m getting chanterelles and not jack-o-lanterns, which will make a person sick. I borrow a knife to collect some, sawing the stem above the ground rather than plucking it, to leave the mycelium intact to fruit again.

“Lobster!” Tweedle Dum shouts. He reaches underneath a bulge in the forest floor duff and gently tilts it, brushing of the dirt and needles. The orange is more vibrant than any of the other orange mushrooms today, almost red liked cooked lobsters with white flesh inside, but how did he know it’d be there? “Look for shrumps,” he says. Around us are hemlock trees and ghost pipes, a non-edible non-photosynthesizing fungus distinctive for its translucent colorlessness. Their presence is a tip-off that lobster mushrooms might be hiding under dirt humps because they are both parasitic and need similar conditions to thrive.

Most mushrooms, including chanterelles and chicken of the woods, are saprophytes, feeding off decay and reanimating, like zombies. Ghost pipe and lobster mushrooms are parasitic, making them more like the aliens in my monster analogy. Nothing to be afraid of! Lobster is a good monster, at least from a human perspective. Hypomyces lactifluorum spores look for Russula brevipes, which like to grow in symbiotic relationship with conifers like hemlock, and form an orange mold that inverts the cap into more of a trumpet shape and turns the bland or bitter white mushroom into a tasty treat. Around us we can see some of both.

Finally making use of my waders, I slosh through a marsh, squealing when a snake swims by, almost get a boot sucked off, and claw up the rise across from my friends. Ah, here, on land far away from the ocean or the seafood section in Wegmans, I find my first lobster and give a yell. The size of my palm and a deep orange, it is firm and easy to brush the dirt from. Underneath are ridges instead of gills. After adding it to my bag, I gather a few smaller ones nearby.

Later, standing over a cast iron skillet in my kitchen, amazed, I inhale the unmistakable smell of seafood from the chopped pieces of lobster mushroom sizzling in butter. Across town, Tweedles Dee and Dum are frying up “chicken” filets, saving their “lobster” for tomorrow’s pasta. The feasts and fun of monster, er, mushroom hunting have hooked me, and I can’t wait to venture out with my friends again soon. Depending on the weather and our timing, we should be able to forage for these through early fall. Tweedle Dee told me that once the leaves start falling, it’s harder to spot our favorite orange ground mushrooms in the autumn carpet.

But that won’t stop us from trying. After all, local lobster is worth the effort.