Hypnotized picking mushrooms? Hmmm.
MOSCOW — 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 search and 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 routinely become so hypnotized that they get hopelessly lost.
Something tells me they were eating some of the wrong mushrooms.
via: nytimes.com
