With nightfall, the nocturnal witch began her evening by drinking a special potion comprising two or three small bog slugs and a drop of bird spittle, all boiled in her tea water. The medicine was at its best when brewed fresh. Otherwise, it grew too thick with slug slime and became difficult to swallow. It protected her from all manner of illness she might encounter from the bog’s damp nights.
While sipping her brew, Manti would wait patiently as the night’s mysterious fog wrapped its life-giving wetness over and under the bog’s orchids and mushrooms, thus impregnating them with healing fluids. When the night mist rolled away, it often revealed the gentle full moon. Over time, she had nurtured an age-old kinship with the moon and depended on her friendly light.
Embraced within the faithful moon’s light, Manti moved in her quiet manner ever so slowly through the bog. Under the radiance of the moon, her bristly white hair glowed like strands of pure silver. When the moisture of the night air collected and dripped from her wild hair, the albino witch blended into the bog and appeared as a rare white orchid wrapped in opossum fur.
Manti’s sharp-eyed pet fisher was always with her and often acted as a lookout, warning of approaching danger. Fishers are the only natural predator to seek out and eat porcupines. Furred and pugnacious, her pet resembled a large weasel with a wedge- shaped snout; this was perfect for flipping porcupines onto their backs. The fisher would then bite the porcupine’s soft throat and belly, avoiding the long sharp quills and providing himself with one of his favorite meals. Oddly, his least favored meal was fish.
The albino witch had a serious aversion to porcupines. Once, while hunting sweet roots, she stumbled close to a porcupine that happened to be lumbering slowly near her. The frightened rodent’s quills pierced Manti’s bare misshapen feet. His sharp, hollow spines, like fishhooks, were difficult and painful to remove. When her friend the fisher was at her side Manti feared nothing in the bog except the evil oil trolls.
The wiry fisher often frolicked through the mushrooms dotted across the bog’s damp soil. Millions of fungal spores would float about, dropping onto and embracing the damp humus and crusty tree trunks of the swampy bog. Manti was grateful for his playfulness. When released, the primitive spores thread their tangles of fungus under the dark damp soil. Days later, spores burst into mushrooms with smooth or wrinkled faces attached to gilled necks.
Like beautiful females, some mushrooms flaunted their fleshy bodies with complexions of red, yellow, and the deepest orange and brightest purple. Some, not as pretty, poked their ragged, bulbous heads out of the acid-rich muck so prevalent in the bog. Polka dot red and sulfur yellow mushrooms were Manti’s favorites; when cut they bled pinkish milky latex. She used this sticky fluid to heal the wounds of mountain trolls after battles with the oil trolls. Small white mushrooms covered with green fuzz, when simmered, were sour but with an overall pleasant flavor. Manti made these into a tea she drank every morning. This brew warded off maladies such as twitching, scratching, sneezing, crying and sometimes limping.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
A favorite dessert of the fisher was a foul smelling and sticky mushroom that Manti called stinkhorn. Finding the mushroom was easy; all the fisher had to do was follow his nose. Spores of this mushroom grew out of the bog’s wet leaf litter and formed slender tentacles that tickled his whiskers while he ate them.
Pink, pretty and plump mushrooms bloomed only at night; they gave the impression of innocence, but were dangerous. Red mushrooms with little white warts all over the top stank like rotten meat and attracted big black flies. Manti picked this one because it was a valuable fungal ingredient in her recipe for arthritis.
While gathering mushrooms, she enjoyed following the perfumed scent of foxgloves growing near her lake. She collected the lavender and pink flowers along with the leaves to grind into a powder. Manti would use the powder of foxglove to treat old mountain trolls with weak hearts.
Some evenings, the moon dwindled to a humble shred of light and then disappeared altogether, letting blackness take control. On these nights, Manti collected a diminutive mushroom that blushed orange in the dark. This rare mushroom had the unpleasant scent of bad fish and contained deadly toxins that only Manti understood.
Carefully she gathered the desirable fungi and carried them, in many pockets, back to her humble tree. Using these and other plants gathered in her bog, the shrewd witch mixed medicines that could save a life; however, she was also capable, on occasion, of mixing potions that could bring on a painful yet quick death. Manti would not hesitate to use the poisonous mushrooms as protection against the oil trolls who had tried in the past to destroy her bog. Manti knew that eating an unidentified mushroom could easily kill you, even if a slug or swamp mouse had previously nibbled on it without harm.
On warm, sultry evenings when the moon was elsewhere, the air thick with silence, and the night darker than blue, Manti sought a rare mushroom with the odd appearance of a dead troll’s finger. Growing under a thick mat of sphagnum moss, the mushroom’s pudgy gray finger emitted a shine and was easy to see in the shadows. This gruesome looking fungus was poisonous when consumed in its raw form. From this mushroom, Manti developed several potions.
After gathering the fungi and upon her return to the tree’s hollow root, she hung the finger mushrooms up high in its tangled branches to dry. Once dried, she would crush the mushrooms and combine them with special grease. Next, and most important, she dropped in several bog bugs with green blood; this was due to eating plants with copper in them. If she simmered the brew for three days, she concocted a jellied healing ointment that was also a powerful painkiller for burns. But she also had a special recipe for making a dangerous hallucinogen.
Manti had to be careful to keep from confusing the hallucinogenic potion for the healing ointment. She kept the extra dried troll finger mushrooms in a wooden box hidden in a hole at the top of a tall white spruce in which her pet fisher often slept.
Since the healing salve took so long to prepare, it was always important to keep a fresh supply in the leather pouch that hung from her neck at all times. One never knew when one might need it.