egg

In the grass, just up on a flatter stretch of a field under a jagged mountain behind which a glacier creaked, I stumbled upon several perfectly white, imperfectly round objects. Eggs! I thought. So large! What bird had lain them and then flown off at my approach? I did not remember seeing one. These eggs were not speckled and tapered like those of cliff-nesting gulls or guillemots. What bird, then? Some do nest on the heaths and fields, after all.

With a forefinger, I reached to touch the chalky surface of one, expecting a cool, hard shell. But the egg proved yielding and leathery. At once my imagined bird grew scaley and basilisk-like, a claw on each wing and a whiplike tail, and I had almost become anxious that the animal would soon return to her clutch when I realized that I had found mushrooms.