Jackie and Jillie are content to settle back into routine at home after their week away in the White Mountain National Forest Range in New Hampshire. Like ourselves eager to embark upon the occasional adventure outside our usual daily routine, the challenge of something new is forever appealing to them, but there is always that interior visceral-emotional pull to return to the familiar quotidian.

And so, once again they're travelling the routes so well known to them from puppyhood when they were a pair of little hellions and we wondered what we'd got ourselves into, at our age. They've settled down admirably, into their 'late-teen' years at age three, no longer as mischievous and hair-pullingly up to tricks. Now, we're content they no longer chew the wood of furniture legs, nor wreck zippers of sweaters casually left lying about on sofas, nor eager to shred paper leaving bits and pieces here and there that they haven't managed to actually eat.

Their settling into near-adulthood has given us the signal to trust them more and allow them more freedom. When we're out in the ravine on the forest trails we no longer keep them leashed, but we do want to have them in our sightlines at all times. When other dogs appear on the trails our two rush ahead, both to greet and to challenge, with the accompanying language of barks and yips.

For the most part, however, we've got the trails to ourselves, and now that fall has arrived and local squirrels are busy gathering acorns and pine and spruce and hemlock cones to set aside for the cold, snowy months to come, Jackie leaps and bounds over the bracken on the forest floor as he enters the forest interior time and again to chase after the squirrels. Jillie makes a feeble show of emulating him, but her heart just isn't in it. Jackie covers double the ground his sister does, but he returns to us immediately we call him back.

Yesterday we came across a young garter snake, alarmed at our presence as a potential threat, rapidly slithering from the trail over to the base of a tree trunk. When it realized we were no threat it just remained there quietly, unmoving. For some odd reason our dogs have never 'recognized' the presence of snakes, just looking beyond as though they don't exist, which is fine with us.

All the signs of fall are very visible now, from the bright red berries at the apex of the False Solomon's Seal fronds, to a collection under a spruce of cones meant as a winter cache of food, to the growing proliferation of fungi on ailing tree trunks. There are subtle, and not-so-subtle changes in the vegetation, with some undistinguished plants on the forest floor, responding to the shorter daylight hours by rapidly turning yellow before seeming to 'melt' into the mass of decaying foliage that accumulates there year after year.