The best thing about being a toadstool farmer, as far as Philbert Philbert was concerned, was that you didn’t actually have to do anything.

There were no toadstool seeds to be planted nor toadstool fields to be tilled, no baby toadstools to nursemaid and certainly no surly toadstool teenagers to try and force to learn their letters. Toadstools could be nothing one moment, sprouted and scrumptious the next. Toadstools simply were.

And that, it seemed to Philbert, ought to be the goal.

Not one for the hoe or the tiller, the spinning wheel or the miller’s either, Philbert spent his days wandering the Hillocks, as the people of his land called the rolling expanse of tall grassy hills that spread in all directions like a lumpy sea of pea soup, searching under root and over stone for his toadstool treasures. He knew where to find the white buttons, spongy and with a simple earthen flavor, sprouting from every damp patch of grass after the rains, and the common muddlenums, blue-tinged and sweet with long necks like a swan. He even knew how to track down the rarest red stinkhorn that only grew from the abandoned nest of the great casselwump and was the only one in the whole of the Hillocks who had ever found a colony of rumple-fanned jelly ears, a rare medicine and highly prized. And so Philbert spent his days loping across the land in leisure and more than a little notoriety, his bare grey feet flopping in front of him like broad dusty fans slapping the ground with each step, his squat body swaying with the rhythm, roving eyes seeking out toadstools and long nimble fingers harvesting them into a great brown sack he lay across his back.

Even by the standards of his people, Philbert Philbert was a squat and paunchy creature, barely three and a half feet tall and with a prodigious swelling of the stomach that announced his presence quite a few paces before the tip of his nose. All of the Plumpins, which is what these folk called themselves in the politest of times, were built as such, and even the most gangly, with wrists and ankles as slender as water willows, sported a similar roundness about the middle, be they man, woman or child. And it remained a source of great contentment for plumpins from every peak and trough of the Hillocks to lay on their back under the noonday sun with their grey swollen bellies exposed to its warmth like a dotting of round and riverworn stones discarded in the grassy waves. But few had so royal a tummy-plump as Philbert, whose boulderous form could oft be descried atop the tallest hills when the sun shone at its brightest. It was a bodily protuberance he had nurtured over many seasons and that he was quite proud of.
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On this particular day, Philbert awoke late. He uncurled his lanky limbs and gave a stretch, feeling the heat of the day already beginning to hang heavy in the thorny underbrush where he made his nightly nest in the thicketed roots of a great tree. Part of him wanted to simply nestle back down into the warm and dusty earth and call it a day before his had even begun, to roll over and put his tummy in the air and watch the mottled sunlight trace across his fleshy form. But it was the fourth dry morning after more than a week of torrential rains and Philbert knew there would be much farming to do. Crawling out from between the thorny branches and spiny vine creepers that held the hollow of his nest in their protection, he arched his spine to let the last dew-dripped points scratch at the thick skin of his back as he passed and gave a great sigh of contentment as he heaved his bulk upright into the sun. Adjusting the raggedy scraps of cloth that swathed his crotch and vouchsafed his modesty, he turned to arrange the great red flowers that served as something of a seasonal door over the shrub-tunneled entrance to his home, pausing to enjoy their scent and listening to the faint buzz and cry of the wandering beetles in their branches.

It would be a good day, he decided to himself.

“Lazy lazy! Sleep too much! Up too late and to no good!”

A shrill voice broke the morning spell and Philbert pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes to stave off the sudden blossoming of what threatened to be a terrible aching of the head.

“Goodmorning, ma’am,” Philbert replied, opening his eyes and turning and craning his eyes skyward to see old Bagatha Barnook sneering down from atop her old stump. It was a good stump, broad and round and padded with moss for good sitting, and Bagatha had made it her perch for as long as Philbert could remember and a good deal before that too. In many ways, Philbert thought she rather resembled her stump, broad and round and with green curling hair that grew in mottled clumps and hung down her back in misshapen braids like drunken moss. But for as good as the stump was, Bagatha was decidedly the opposite. And from her perch atop the stump on the MidHillock, the tallest hill in the deadest center of the Hillocks, she kept eye on all the comings and goings from the Great Northern Brambles down to the pig farms of the low southern hills—and let all within passing know what she thought of all she saw.

“It was morning, you sloth-headed leechworm,” Bagatha snarled back. Shielding her eyes, she tilted her mass back to peer into the cloudless sky and the sun blazing high in its blue course. “Fit to be more’n half a reed on toward midday at this point, and you just crawling from your sleep. And I bet to see you basking your belly with all the rest, all the same!”

Bagatha disliked toadstools, Philbert reminded himself, and this key tragedy in her making explained much about her deficiency of character and was not to be held against her. So he waved and smiled, showed her his rear as he gathered his toadstool sack and his walking stick from where they hung on their thorns, shouldered the traveling pack he’d arranged the night before and flopped his flat flapping feet down the lane in the waning shadow of the MidHillock toward Gusly Cuttel’s farm.