Shadow Economy : Forever Amber: On the Baltic, They Dig for the Stuff of Myth : Their quarry is that lovely, precious resin of prehistory. These enterprising Poles work quietly, after dark, because sometimes this is not exactly legal.

It was a dark night in a pine forest, the Baltic Sea a faint murmur on a gravel beach a quarter-mile away. Three men--amber hunters--were out checking on their digs in the woods.

Leszek, Krzysiek and Andrzej, young advocates of unbridled private enterprise, were moving with a certain stealth. It was vault-dark, and they carried no flashlights, but the way was familiar.

They were on the lookout for police. The problem is, they said, that the authorities issue only a few licenses for amber digging, contending that it causes environmental damage.

Andrzej and his colleagues had a six-man crew working in the forest. They were looking for a “fritz,” their word for a cabbage-sized chunk of amber. Andrzej, who wore a blue jogging suit that appeared to glow faintly in the gloom, stepped carefully around the depressions in the forest floor where his crews had been working earlier in the week. It was nearly midnight. The lights of a car approached on a nearby lane. The three men froze, watched until the car was gone, then walked on, talking quietly.

“Well, yes, it’s true nothing much grows for five or six years after amber diggers have been around,” Leszek admitted. But he preferred to take a long view of the damage. “It will come back, eventually. In the meantime, now that we’re reforming the system, the government ought to just declare this a mining area and get on with it.”

Leszek, Krzysiek and Andrzej have three perfectly legal amber digs in the pastures of local farmers and employ about 30 diggers to search for the amber. The work in the forest amounts to supplementary income, but they are convinced that this is where the best stuff comes from. In fact, it is probably where most Polish amber comes from.

Once it came only from the beach. A few times a year, most commonly in the fall, storms blowing out of the northwest churn up the floor of the Baltic Sea. For longer than anyone can remember, inhabitants of the Baltic coast have hurried to the shore on mornings after the big storms to pick up amber left behind by the waves.

“You go out early in the morning,” Krzysiek said, smiling at the vision, “and you can see it, a line of it, floating off shore. It’s like a tide of money. When it comes in, people run around like crazy, picking it up and stuffing it into bags.”

Leszek and company, however, are not the type of fellows who are content to hang around depending on the weather for a chance to go to work. Like scores of other amber diggers who do their mining at midnight, they apply considerable creative energy to outfoxing the police and developing ever more efficient systems to haul up the amber buried in the forest floor.

“You wait for storms,” said Leszek.

“Watch out!” whispered Krzysiek. “Who’s that?”

They stopped and peered at a figure lumbering through the trees. It was a large man, carrying coils of fire hose over his shoulder.

“It’s Karol.”

“This way,” said Karol, and led on through the trees.

Amber is an old obsession, the stuff of mystery, myth and commerce, apparently since prehistoric times. It has turned up at Stonehenge and in ancient Greek tombs. Romans wore amber amulets as protection against witchcraft; a slave could be purchased for the price of an amber figurine.

As far as Leszek, Krzysiek and Andrzej are concerned, this goes back to before communism was invented, and then died, and therefore ought to predate any strong governmental claim. They recognize this argument as a shaky legal position, so their methods of operation are designed to attract as little attention as possible. Apparently, thousands of years of amber gathering has still left what Leszek confidently calls “an endless supply,” and he and his colleagues are dedicated to its extraction.

Amber is a curious material, the fossilized sap, possibly of pine trees, broken by frost and swept into the sea some 60 million to 70 million years ago. It is, in effect, nature’s own plastic, a material so light that it will float in a strong solution of salt water, buoyant enough in seawater to have been carried along on bottom currents for millions of years. It is soft enough to be scratched by a copper penny, breakable but not bendable. When rubbed, it gives off a pleasant, resinous aroma. It dissolves slowly in alcohol, and old remedies call for carrying a bit of amber in a vial of alcohol and sipping the resulting brew as a tonic for rheumatism.

It ranges in color from a milky white to a ruby red, but it is most commonly the variable brownish-yellow hue associated with its name. The prettiest pieces, with interior cracks and “clouds,” seem to glow from within. Some show trapped insects or plants, apparently thousands of years old. By jewelers’ standards, amber in raw form is cheap. Sold wholesale by weight, prices range from $45 to $300 per kilogram (2.2 pounds), depending on the quality, although single large and unusual pieces and those with visible “inclusions” of plants or insects sell individually for more. Most amber hunters have rare pieces, favorites they will not sell. Leszek, for example, has a set of amber “icicles,” a collection he has accumulated over 20 years.

No one around Gdansk seemes to know just how much amber comes from the southern Baltic every year.

“A tremendous amount is smuggled down here from the Soviet Union,” said Romuald Moch, president of Gdansk’s Cooperative of Polish Artists, whose craftsmen work the amber into jewelry. “Russia still is the world’s largest producer. But the Russians, they have no soul for amber. The best is from here.”

Leszek claims that it was his own father (widely known among amber hunters here as “One-Armed Max”) who hit on the currently employed method of mining amber, back in the late 1960s. He had taken his horse and wagon down to the construction site for the North Port of Gdansk, and, as he sat watching aboard his wagon, he noticed amber swirling up from the watery sands when cranes removed old pilings from a pier.

“He said, ‘Son, I’ve got an idea,’ ” Leszek recalled. “He bought an old pump and some hose, loaded it on the wagon and drove to the forest. He pumped water out of a pond and pushed the hose straight down into the sand. That’s how we started.”

Refining his technique, One-Armed Max learned to attach the hose to a pole and thrust the nozzle deep into the ground, the force of the water boring a hole in the sand and heaving up sand and bits of wood.

And amber, lots of amber, which floated straight out of the hole, bright yellow in a mass of wood scrap. Sometimes Max would hit a whole layer of amber, and it would rattle in the water as it rose to the surface.

Max and Leszek worked in state-owned forest lands, mostly. Essentially these were parks, and the amber diggers left behind pond-sized circles of white sand that blanketed the topsoil and wiped out all vegetation except large trees. People complained. Police came. Pumps and wagons were confiscated and sold at auction, quite often to their original owners, who set them to work again, stealthily, at night.

It’s been going on that way now for at least 15 years, and, on some nights and in some stretches of coastal forest around Gdansk, on land that was seabed a few thousand years ago, it is not unusual to find several amber crews at work.

In the old days, when the amber hunters used small gasoline-powered pumps, they could hear each other. Because the police could hear them, too, the arrest rate was bothersome.

“Now we use electric pumps,” Andrzej said. “We just tap into a power line, or sometimes we take it from some factory. Pay for it? Are you kidding? This is state electricity.” The pumps now are more powerful, up to 3,500 gallons per minute, and almost silent.

“You got a fritz there yet?” said Andrzej, who had found his crew bent over a pool of water, raking muck into a long narrow net.

“Yeah, but we hid it,” said Karol, the crew chief, a rotund veteran of the moonless forest whose crew once hauled out 50 kilograms of amber in one night.

The hose bored a hole about a foot in diameter. One crew member worked the pole, up and down. As the pole drew out of the hole, the sand filled in behind it, with fresh material, and the pole man pushed the hose down again. After 10 minutes or so with poor luck, the crew moved to another spot 15 feet away.

The pole sank down again.

There was a rattling sound in the water.

It was a clump of dirt. Karol broke it open under the beam of a flashlight and handed it to Leszek.

“Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

The piece of amber was the size of a matchbox, clear on one end. Inside was an insect, perhaps an ant.

“Take care of him,” Andrzej said. “He’s been trying to get out of there for 40 million years.”