Dogs are not shy about their entitlement to treats. Nor are they averse to approaching perfect strangers on this very same issue. Not without cause, of course. Large dogs in particular whose height places their inquisitive snouts with their powerful ability to sniff out treats, just about the same height as the pocket of the jacket you're wearing where you've stuffed a bag of dog treats for such occasions.

Well, perhaps not those occasions in particular, rather to award your own dogs with treats when they exhibit behaviour that's commendable in your view. Like responding instantly when they're called. Which you'd like them to do in all situations. The alacrity of the response is usually in inverse proportion to the attraction that has taken their attention. Which is understandable; it's hard for us too to tear ourselves away when something truly tempting or interesting is the matter of our focus.

But early on our walk yesterday we came across a woman we see on rare occasions, and she wanted to tell us about an experience she'd had the day before. Yesterday was an opaque, grey day, so dark it resembled perpetual dusk. The day before the sun came out occasionally and the wind was less fierce. She had gone into the ravine at a distant entrance point to ours.

She recounted that she had felt an eerie feeling come over her. As though, somewhere very near, she was being steadily watched. She wasn't alone, she had her fair-sized Golden Retriever with her, a laid-back dog as they tend to be, but the dog didn't exhibit any hints it was aware of another creature nearby, not even when the woman finally realized that in a shadowy area between trees in the forest beyond there was another dog, the size of her own.

Only she soon amended that initial appraisal when she further examined the animal with its more slender conformation, its long, grey fur, its alert demeanor and piercing eyes that never left her face. We have heard, over the past five years, from a handful of people that they'd come across coyotes at dawn and dusk, usually in the winter months. Fearing for her dog, the woman shouted at the coyote and it slipped away, down the bank into the ravine.

So, we've been alerted. Our dogs are quite a bit smaller, the size of miniature poodles though they're  identified as toys, which explains their initial excitable, hostile manner when confronted by other dogs. Unleashed and with their tendency to stray before us on occasion -- Jillie more so than Jackie who tends to stay often beside us, though he also deviates -- we worry about their welfare. Even though we keep them in sight, if they were snatched we could never recover them. So we're torn about whether to keep them on leash, or not.

Yesterday was a Saturday, so there were plenty of people out with their dogs, large and small. The large ones aren't much of a concern, but the small ones, like Taz, a little Chihuahua and a Yorkie we had come across -- like our two -- could be a target for a predator. We were aware, on previous occasions in winters past when we had an influx of Barred and Snowy owls, that though we were thrilled to see those wonderful birds, they are raptors and are known to carry off small animals.

The presence of coyotes seen once again in the ravine was a topic of conversation of those we came across. The dogs, unconcerned, concentrated instead on sniffing out the contents of my jacket pocket. They're small cookies, just larger than a pill, to suit the size of our little dogs, but the big dogs love them too and kept nuzzling me to  keep emptying the little bag I kept them in, and I was glad to oblige.