Friday's balmy bright weather was not sustained; by Saturday the temperature had once again plunged and the atmosphere was cruelly winter-obsessed at a time when we are all longing for further manifestations of spring on our very near horizon. We were barely able to muster any enthusiasm to get out and give our little Riley a much-needed hour or two of exercise, but we did end up finally going out for our daily ravine walk.

There are always some pleasurable moments to be grasped there, even when the ramble is undertaken grudgingly and with some discomfort. A young couple was enjoying the crisply icy out-of-doors ravine environment with a whippet, a young dog we've seen before being walked by an older woman. This time, in an acknowledgement of the bitterness of the cold, the string-lean dog was wearing a wrap-around coat to shield her from the cold. She is a frantic mass of moving muscle-and-sinew, tirelessly romping through the woods, here and there and everywhere.

Little did we imagine that later on in the course of our circuit - depositing peanuts as we proceeded as usual in the various cache-places well known to the squirrels and chipmunks (the latter whom we rarely see other than in spring and fall) and even the crows flying overhead this day - that a macabre tableau was straight ahead on the path we were pursuing.

As we approached yet another familiar point of our circuit we could see straight ahead the form of something on the path, and as we drew nearer could make out the presence of a grey squirrel. The ravine's squirrels often await us, confront us, wait for us to offer them peanuts. But not at this time of year. In the summer months, in the fall, they do this, accustomed to recognizing our purpose. In the winter months they are far less often seen, and far more skittish, not given to approaching us. So this appeared at first glance to be a delightful change.

Until finally we came abreast of the stiffly immovable little creature. Stiff and immovable because it was fast frozen to the trail. Its body erectly expectant, bushy tail curled at the tip and held high above its body. It stood there, incredibly, silent witness to its own end, for its head had been neatly removed. Death had obviously been instant, and its pose had been fast-frozen to the spot.

Had it been a winged raptor it would have been swept away through the air somewhere where its killer could horde it and consume it at its leisure. We haven't seen nor heard any owls in the ravine this winter, unlike the past five winters. The hawks that return each spring have not yet, to our knowledge, returned. The coyotes that had been known to make their winter home in the ravine the past few years don't appear to have done so this winter, though who knows?

From our own experience, many decades ago when my husband kept pigeons in a small shed in the backyard of our first house, surrounded by a mesh-wire enclosure, and the gruesome discoveries we made on several occasions of pigeons whose heads had been pulled through the wire's holes, leaving the bodies still erect on their perches, we thought it likely to have been a raccoon.

The deadly scene illustrative of nature's survivalist ethos did not endear us to her stratagems on this occasion.