Earlier this month, a sodden and unshaven man emerged from the woods near the southern Russian village of Goryachy Klyuch, telling rescuers he spent three nights perched in trees to get away from jackals. A similar tale came from the taiga near Bratsk, in Siberia, where a 22-year-old man wandered for five days, covering himself with pine boughs at night to ward off frostbite.

Eleven time zones to the west, near the Baltic Sea, a rescue team found an elderly couple in a swamp where they had spent the night, the wife in what officials described as “a state of panic.” It happens every mushroom season.

Russians are passionate about gathering mushrooms, an ancient pastime they call the “quiet hunt,” and become so hypnotized that they get hopelessly lost. Rescue teams fan out on foot or in helicopters, occasionally enlisting tracking dogs or parachute jumpers, and newspapers retell their stories with gusto.

Fall has drawn Russians into the forest for many centuries. Even hardened urbanites whisper endearments to the wood spirits before turning their eyes to the ground, a gesture to their pagan ancestors. But Muscovite Aleksandr Kuznetsov, who founded an online “mushroomers’ club,” said he believed that Russians’ sense of the natural world had dulled, leaving them too often disoriented in the woods. “People are leaning on technology, forgetting that nature is still nature,” said Kuznetsov, whose web site advertises a mobile global positioning system as “the mushroomer’s best friend.”

“Civilization carries a certain negative side, and people are losing their natural instincts,” he added. “They are city people now.”

... contd.