Well. I was removing the hallway door, the one in the middle of ersatz New Mexico, when catastrophe struck my house—or, at least, some kind of big cat struck, in a manner of speaking.

All day I had heard the rising drumroll of the rain, as I'd heard it for days, but all of a sudden the snare drum was accompanied by the big thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of tom-toms, which was soon joined by the boom-boom-boom of a bass drum. It sounded like the orchestra was leading up to its big finish, and oh boy, I couldn't have been more right about that.

I went outside to find out what was going on, and saw that the hill above my house was melting into dozens of muddy rivers that were plopping their muck all over my roof. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa went the balls of mud, followed by the occasional boom-boom-boom of rocks hitting the roof. With all the rain we'd had, the weight of the bulldozer perched at the top of the hill was causing the hill to crumble beneath it like a cliff under Wile E. Coyote. The big yellow scoop was tilting toward my house like a raptor homing in on its prey.

"Hey! Get out of the truck!" I shouted up the hill, cupping my hands to throw my voice farther. "GET OUT OF THE TRUUUCK!" But maybe I couldn't throw my voice any better than I could throw the Tupperware, because no one got out of the bulldozer. I started to climb the fence.

But it was already too late. As an avalanche of mud gave way above me, I jumped off the fence and took off running the other way, turning back to see the big scoop hit the hill first, and bounce, vaulting the bulldozer up into the air, and then the bulldozer tumbled onto its back, and the whole thing smashed down onto the roof of my house with one great cymbal crash.

Ta-da.

From somewhere I could hear frantic shouting. I stood in horror for a few long seconds, then I ran toward the upturned bulldozer. It sat on the roof of my squashed bedroom, which was now a mere few feet high, and I easily climbed up onto the creaking roof. I stuck my head inside the cab of the bulldozer, fearing the worst. But there was no one inside. It took me a moment to realize the shouting was not coming from the bulldozer at all, but from the top of the hill. The security guard was shouting at me to get away from the accident, that it wasn't safe, and asking if I was okay.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Stay back from it," he yelled. "Sit tight. I'm calling it in. You sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine," I said again, though I didn't feel so fine.

He disappeared from sight and I could hear him up there dialing his phone. I had a knot in my stomach as I realized the squirrels had probably been sleeping in my sock drawer, like they did most days. Despite what the security guard had said, I decided to enter my house.

Unfortunately, when I tugged on the front door, it wouldn't open. The rhombus was now more of a rhombus/saltbox shape that I don't think even Euclid would have a name for, and apparently the door frame had gotten bent.

The front window was shattered but too small to climb through, so I went around to the kitchen and climbed over the zucchini and through the open window (which was also shattered). I made my way down my hallway, which got gradually shorter and shorter like some kind of funhouse optical illusion. I wondered what the insurance adjusters were going to have to say about this. And then I realized: they wouldn't have anything to say about it, because I was pretty sure my policy had long been canceled.

My bedroom had taken the worst of it. My bed was covered with mud and rocks where a piece of the bulldozer had punctured the ceiling. There was a creaking, groaning noise and the roof seemed to inch a little lower. I rushed to the dresser, which was also covered with mud but mostly undamaged. The squirrels were not in their drawer, but after looking everywhere I finally found them trembling under the bed. I put out my hand to them, acutely aware of the metal roof straining above my head. I couldn't quite reach them, but finally they latched on to the cuff of my flannel shirt and belly-crawled along my sleeve. As they crawled into the safety of my shirt pocket I got out of the bedroom as fast as I could. It seemed the ceiling had at last stopped caving in, but it was hard to be sure.

As I raced down the hall I ducked into the bathroom and saw, to my astonishment, that the spider had not budged at all from his toilet-web. A spiderweb must be a great shock absorber, because to look at the spider, he seemed unaware that anything had happened. He was still just sitting there, happily admiring his gnat, while the world caved in around him.

Suddenly I heard pounding on the front door and indecipherable shouting. I crawled back out the kitchen window and went around, to see the hedgehog hunters trying to pry the door open. Even the dog was trying to rescue me, by digging under the house.

When the hunting party saw me they all cheered. Well, everyone except the dog, who launched into a fit of barking.

The hunting party stopped trying to pry the door open, but the dog didn't stop trying to dig an escape hole under the house.

"Pesha," the father said. The dog ignored him.

"Pesha! Na ker kadya!" the father said again. The dog kept digging. And digging.

The father tried to pull the dog away, but the dog was not having it. His barking became more insistent.

"He's looking for the squirrels," I said. I showed the family the squirrels, safe in my pocket, and the kids grinned. "They go under the house to store their nuts. Probably the dog can smell them."

The family stared at me. The girl's eyebrows went up. She said something to the rest of the family that sounded like a question. They said something back that sounded like the spoken version of a shrug. Curious, the girl crouched down to see where the dog was digging.

"Careful!" I said. Although the roof was no longer creaking, it was probably not designed to support a bulldozer indefinitely. The girl waved away my concern, but with a few sharp words, the father made her back away. He knelt down himself and scooped at the ground, while the mother used all her strength to hold back the excited dog.

It was soon clear why the dog was so excited. Because under my house was not a nut cache at all (at least, not entirely), but an enormous truffle cache. The busy squirrels must have picked the woods clean of the things, and stuffed them all under there. And I'd never had the slightest idea.

At the sight of the truffle cache, the family's eyes got huge. The mother cautiously knelt down and picked up one of the lumpy things. It looked like a dirty mozzarella ball. She cupped it in her hands and inhaled. A big smile spread across her face. Soon everyone was picking up truffles and sniffing them, although the appeal of this was still lost on me. The family spoke to me rapidly, full of excitement.

Then the girl said to me, "We sale, we split?"

I slowly nodded.

The father pulled out a cell phone and started typing like the wind. He was answered with a chirp. He typed again. Chirp. Type. Chirp. He gave me a thumbs-up.

The girl said to me, "Dealer come."

The mother conjured up a couple of cloth bags from inside a sack she carried over her shoulder. She passed them to the kids. She knelt down and scooped truffles out from under the house and into a pile, and the kids put them in the bags. I stood in the middle of this whirlwind of activity.

"Wait . . ." I said, thinking the squirrels were not going to be happy when they woke up to find their cupboard was bare.

The girl handed me a full bag. "Quick, put in fridge before spoil."

"But the squirrels," I protested.

"Squirrel?"

"Aren't we, you know, stealing?"

"Steal, from squirrel?" The girl exploded into giggles. "Squirrel not care. You buy squirrel corn cob, sunflower seed, squirrel all forgive. And Oreos cookie. Squirrel like Oreos cookie."

"Really?" I said.

She grinned slyly. "If squirrel not want, I eat." And she giggled again.

My fridge of course was of no use, so I walked over the flattened fence and up what was left of the hill and down to the filling station for ice. Technically I suppose I was still trespassing, but I figured when a bulldozer crashes through a fence and onto your house, you can claim certain rights.

By the time I got back, a man had joined the hunting party. He was an impressive figure. To say he was large would be an understatement, although he was not tall. His latitude came close to exceeding his longitude. He seemed to have no natural waist at all, so an equatorial belt randomly defined his circumference and separated the northern hemisphere from the southern. There was something professor-y about him, whether it was the rust-colored corduroy suit (with elbow patches) and bow tie, or the eye-distorting Groucho glasses, or the mostly-bald head paired with mutton chops. He was studying one of the truffles like a jeweler studying a diamond. He was talking to the hedgehog hunters—or I guess now I should call them the truffle hunters—in their fascinating jangly language of plentiful consonants.

When the man saw me, he said something to me in that language I couldn't understand, but it sounded friendly enough.

I shrugged back, in English.

"Ah!" he said (also in English). "So you're not a traveler."

I explained that this was not really true; I had come here from California, and to there from Kentucky, and was headed back to California on a bus very soon.

He looked puzzled, then nodded, and explained that he was a mushroom supplier for the restaurant industry, had a PhD in mycology (which I gathered was a fancy academic word for mushroomology), and was an expert on a number of Balkan and Slavic languages, and also (though why he added this, I'm not sure), he was considered "something of a leading authority" on the British television series Doctor Who.

He went back to studying the truffle, this time speaking in English, though he mostly seemed to be talking to himself. "Yes, indeed," he said, "this is definitely not Tuber oregonense. Not here, no no. Not Tuber gibbosum either. Smells more like . . . Tuber magnatum, be still my heart! Of course, that's impossible. Unless—!

"I mean, there've been rumors of a superb, very rare variety, somewhere in these mountains . . . a 'great white,' you might say! But it's forager gossip, no mycologist has ever been able to corroborate . . . although . . . there was talk of a man back in the fifties, an Italian immigrant, from near Turin, I think— You know, Turin was in shambles after World War II—such a shame! Beautiful city, Turin . . .

"Well, after the war he came to America. He'd been a truffler, back in Italy. Took nothing with him but the clothes on his back, and a cigar box holding . . . guess what? Wild boar feces. Wild boar feces! Because that's how the Alba spreads its spores, of course.

"Word is he buried it somewhere in these woods, under a tree. Of course, this was all wilderness back then. Well, I guess it still is, no? Haha. Now and then he'd disappear into the woods to 'check on his truffles,' and come back empty-handed. Everyone thought he was crazy, even his wife. Irish, the wife was, and—well, if you can't boil it, what good is it, right? Haha.

"Then one day the guy comes home—him and his five-year-old son—with a bag full of the things, story goes. Showed 'em around, proud as a peacock . . . but we're talking 1950s America, meat and potatoes America, haha. Nobody knows what the damn things are!

"Still, word spread, among immigrants at least. 'Would you believe this fella's growing Albas here in America! Good as the Old World! Better than the Old World! Swear it on my so-and-so's memory!'

"And then one day he up and dies. Heart attack, poor soul. Thing is, he never told anyone where the truffles were. No one had ever been to the spot, except him and sometimes his kid. But his kid wasn't more than eight, nine? Supposedly the son went back dozens of times . . . couldn't remember where his dad had taken him. Drove himself crazy trying to find the spot, haha. After a while, people started to question. People said maybe the whole thing was a hoax. There was no proof, except the word of some immigrants who are all dead and gone now."

The mushroomologist seemed to realize that we were all staring at him, identically slack-jawed. He jumped a little as if he didn't know where we all came from. He cleared his throat. "Yes, yes, well. That's all to say . . . I do believe, that what we may have here, is the legendary T. albidus gigantea."

The father said something to him then, a bit impatiently, and the mushroomologist answered him. Whatever he said, it made the whole family smile.

Then the mushroomologist told me how much he was offering for all the truffles.

"Is that dollars, or hundreds?" I said, not wanting to make the same mistake I'd made with the Sioux chef.

"Dollars or hundreds . . . ?" the mushroom dealer said, looking puzzled. He laughed uneasily, like when someone tells a joke you don't really understand, but you laugh because everyone else is. "Dollars or hundreds? No, no, haha. Of course not. That's thousands, of course."