But reports trickle out from regional rescue services throughout the fall: The western region of Kaluga conducted 21 searches for mushroom hunters, of whom seven were brought to safety, five were found dead and nine were still missing.

Perm reported 11; Irkutsk had carried out 35 by late August.

Aleksandr Zmanovsky, who leads a rescue team near Bratsk, said nearly every year someone goes into the wild and is never found  often because of bears, who so thoroughly bury the remains of a body that “we will never find anything.”

An older generation knew how to navigate by the angle of the light, he said.

“If a person just puts on his sneakers and goes into the taiga, or someone drives him there and he doesn’t know where he is, then of course he gets lost,” Mr. Zmanovsky said. “I call those people the children of asphalt, those who grew up in the city. People who grew up in villages, they don’t get lost.”

One such case drew a flurry of attention to Nizhnaya Salda, a city of 17,000 in the Urals.

Late in September, a 37-year-old woman named Irina Fedyno returned home a full 24 days after she had gone out mushroom picking, and more than two weeks after a search-and-rescue effort had been called off.

Ms. Fedyno’s hair-raising survival story spread as far as the Moscow tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, which quoted her description of the forest, where “from one side, there was shooting  from the other, howling.”

A local journalist took a skeptical view, writing in The City Herald that Ms. Fedyno “appeared completely fresh, not emaciated, after her 24 days in the woods.” Kseniya Vashchenko, a City Herald journalist, said that “in our law enforcement organs, there is some basis for believing that she spent the time with, how should I put it, her friend.”

In an interview, Ms. Fedyno fumed at the rumors that she had “gone on a bender.” Her husband, Alexei Sitnikov, was equally indignant, saying that his wife returned home so smelly that after her ordeal she was ashamed to go to the hospital. He said that she tore up her blouse to wrap around her wounded feet, adding. “it was a nice blouse, too,” and that when she ran into his arms on her return to him, she was so light that he could have thrown her up to the ceiling.

He said he was overjoyed to have her home.

“I thought I would never see Irinka again,” he said. “Twenty days. Nobody can stay alive in the forest that long. But she survived. I believed, and I waited, and finally she was home.”