As we descended the ravine entering the forest yesterday a familiar sight caught our eyes; apples tumbling down the hillside to our left. Ripe apples. Dozens upon dozens of them. Green, round and presumably ripe, since some of them sported bright red sides. Year after year someone trundles wheelbarrows-full of apples into the ravine at just this particular spot, likely shaking them down off a mature apple tree in their backyard and disposes of them like this.

Throwing away apples, wasting, junking them. I remember when I was a young mother of three children we had a peach tree in our backyard. The tree had been a gift from my uncle who had grown it from a pit. When he gave it to us it was a sapling, and it seemed to take little time grow to maturity. And it bore peaches, tons of peaches. We ate them fresh, I made peach jam and put up peach preserves for winter desserts.

Apples can be kept in a cool place almost indefinitely from one season to the next. At home they can remain fresh refrigerated for months. Why, we wondered, would anyone plant an apple tree and then discard the fruit? I imagine we'll never know because we don't know who it is that brings those edible treasures of fall into the ravine, stopping at the top of the hill, tipping over the wheelbarrow to send the apples down the hillside opposite the trail, and then leaves, perhaps satisfied with their disposal techniques.

What we saw yesterday represents only the first deposit. We know from previous years that there will be more. Over time the apples will ripen even more, and begin to rot. As they do, the fragrance of their decomposition will waft in the air and we'll smell it quite a distance. We often wonder if squirrels or other wildlife make use of the fermenting fruit. If birds or squirrels do in late fall, can they become drunk?

Jackie once munched on a wild apple that had fallen to the forest floor in late fall. It had been covered in mould, and it almost immediately affected his nervous system. He became drowsy, wasn't able to stand, and we rushed him to the emergency veterinarian hospital, where his stomach was pumped, and he was given a charcoal treatment to return him to equilibrium. We keep a sharp eye out now to prevent that happening again.

We noticed also as we hiked along the trails that at one particular spot beside the trail where the flat top of a tree stump often hosts colonies of mushrooms, that they're at it again. Mushrooms ringing the stump in the inexorable process of decay. At the other end of the spectrum there's the new life emerging from the plant life of the forest floor. Now that the raspberries are almost gone, and the thimbleberries are coming into their own, blackberries are also ripening. Jackie and Jillie love them all, the greedy little beasts.

At one juncture at a side trail, a Manitoba maple has sent one of its limbs right over the trail so that we must duck under it as we proceed. It creates, along with the other trees on that tight little trail, a kind of green tunnel. Its seeds hang thick and plentiful. Nature's infinite design of decline and renewal. In that area of decline, Japanese beetles have infiltrated the forest just as they have our gardens. And they descend in great numbers, eating everything in sight. Including the bright green foliage of the thimbleberries, leaving behind a delicate lacework of desiccated leaf patterns.

Those are the insects that are predators, spoilers of natural beauty. Their antidote to our sense of the rightness of things in nature's great plan, is the presence of useful, productively important insects like bees. Without their industry plant fertilization would be neglected. Of the 20,000 species of bees, among them solitary bees and colonizing bees, bees that live in hives, bees that live in holes in the ground, only a few species actually make honey. As we exited the ravine yesterday after our circuit, to head back home, we watched a wild honey bee collecting pollen from the tall pilot weed plants in the forest perimeter, knowing he hadn't far to go to reach his hive, at the bottom of the hill, a third of the way up a venerable old pine.