The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05

"I would say there is mild curiosity," she says as she drives down a dirt road off the Alaska Highway, heading toward the Athabascan community of Tanacross. "If word gets out and this gets big and everybody is capitalizing on that, maybe it will be worthwhile to drop everything and do it, but people really have their own way of doing things.... They go to their fish camps, they are involved in other subsistence activities, and a lot of people raise cash through arts and crafts and souvenir sales. So I really cannot say at what point they might do this."

Yamin walks through the center of Tanacross, a small village made up of a school, a combination clinic/tribal office and several dozen small wooden houses, most with a sled dog chained in the yard.

"Hey," calls a young man through a screen door. "You just looking around?"

Yamin asks if he attended any of the classes put on by the Cooperative Extension Service.

"The what?" he asks, as behind him four more young men emerge, holding DVDs and cans of beer, and all asking Yamin questions at once: Does she like Tanacross? Will she meet them later at a bar in Tok? Can one young man, who wears disturbingly blue contact lenses, touch her hair? Yamin obligingly tilts her head.

Asked whether they will pick morels, the men say no. They've all got jobs building federally funded houses here in Tanacross, the materials for which are staged around the village, including at its north end, across from a small graveyard, where instead of headstones there are coffin-sized houses, brightly painted and decorated with flags and flowers and teddy bears.

Nearby, a young woman pushes a child's bike. Will she pick morels this year?

"Oh no. They do that in Tok," says the woman, as if Tok were a faraway big city and not 13 miles down the highway. Yamin asks if she thinks anyone from Tanacross will pick.

"Not really," says the woman, and wrinkles her nose. "We don't eat them."

By the end of the week, the price per pound is up to $7, and though Southard has told the Mexican pickers he'll get them pillows and blankets, he'll get them pack frames, he still has no assurances that they'll sell to him. And he's got a bigger problem: The Weasel is offering $7.50 a pound.

"He drove into Vuth's camp and told all his pickers this," says Southard, sounding disgusted.

"He's looking for the Mexicans, too, but he can't find them," says Dave. "If he does, we're over. Time to go home."