Once again as twilight fell last night, so did rainfall. In actual fact, throughout the day skies heavy with black clouds loomed overhead and rolling threats of thunder now and again reminded us of a forecast heavy on rainfall. We had decided to take our chances with a ravine walk as usual, but decided on a much shorter circuit than usual. But nothing amiss occurred, no rain, even though thunder continued to roll through the atmosphere. No doubt the rain fell somewhere, but it was somewhere other than where we are located.

An overnight temperature inversion and a number of rain events brought heavy, opaque fog to our morning landscape. It was meant to burn off and a partially sunny day ensue, but it took its time. After breakfast we'd gone into the garden to tidy up a bit. I took up some of the sunflowers, snipped off their heads, and left them on the little table at the front garden for squirrels and birds to take their fill of the seeds. The first head we'd left out, by far the largest, took a week to be de-seeded.

While I was cleaning up the garden my husband went around to the back garden shed to retrieve a compost bag. When he returned he asked me to come around to the back. And there he showed me a puzzling sight; a pool of partially congealed blood on one of the pavers of the walkway close to the garden sheds. It was a bright red and substantial in size. Beside it lay scattered bits of pinecones. Some little creature had been busy nibbling the pinecone bits and had evidently been taken by surprise.

Blood, but no fur, no feathers, nothing to indicate what it might have been. Could have been a raccoon that had slaughtered a squirrel, we supposed. Many years ago when my husband kept and bred fancy pigeons he realized he had to keep them inside the little shed he'd built for them, rather than allow them to roost and sleep in the wired enclosure around the shed when we found a few of them decapitated one morning. A gruesome sight.

The bloodpool was large and deep enough to be really disturbing, giving us pause to think it must have been a fair-sized mammal at the very least. It's a fearsome thought, nature's processes of existence and death, exemplifying the aphorism 'nature, red in claw and tooth'.

As the day began to gain heat on top of the extreme humidity we thought we'd drive once again to Gatineau; this time to head for a familiar old trail, much closer as drives go. We hadn't visited the Skyline Trail in many years, at least a dozen. We used to take Button there regularly, and made it an especial hiking treat for our granddaughter when we were looking after her in her infant-to-young-girl years. The trail dated from the war years, when it was started as a make-work government program. So off we went to devote several hours to an arduous and pleasant hike in the forest beyond and above the city, in the Gatineau Hills.