There's no question that fall is valued as one of those times of year when vivid colour takes over the natural landscape, bright enough in certain areas to take our breath away. The months of September and October excel in providing us with poetics-inducing rhapsodies of aesthetic beauty, exposing us to colour schemes and shades of colour that only nature's outstanding skills can coax into extravagant painted display. It is as though nature reserves this time of year to mount a play reliant on diminishing light and shorter days to extract from her landscapes reflections of abundant joy expressed in tints and shades of conceit.

And then comes November. The month which surely qualifies as the dreariest, darkest, most unpleasant in nature's calendar of events. When light continues its flight and we are left with truly shorter days before darkness follows an early dusk and nights become too long. When all colour has been drained from the landscape, and we see dark trunks and dim forest interiors and there is nothing to break the damp and cold tedium of a forest's temporary retirement from championing a verdant landscape in every direction one looks.

Now, rain is more frequent and it's a cold rain. Now, the night time temperatures flirt shamelessly with frost, and whatever vegetation has been left at this point, feeling it might yet survive the worst that fall can wreak upon living things, experiences what frost is capable of wreaking, destroying fibres and shrinking still-lively plants to limp and wretchedly-rotting discards.

There was just enough of a lull in yesterday's rain before noon to allow us to get out for a ravine walk, under a low cloud ceiling that threatened at any moment to begin leaking again. If the forest floor hadn't seemed deep enough in leaf litter the day before, it certainly did now. Touches of frost alongside voluminous rain and wind put the finishing touches to baring deciduous branches of their still-bright foliage, tumbling them all to the ground.

The atmosphere was saturated both from the endless multiple-days'-worth of rain and more that also fell consecutively overnight, including the humid atmosphere prepared at any moment to release more on the landscape. With the woods so bare that even forest undergrowth as well as all the vegetation that normally covers the forest floor has seemed somehow to disappear in a concerted abandonment of fresh green, the denuded shrubs and trees and the soaked ground leave a hint of what an underwater world might feel like.

Jackie and Jillie take it all in their stride. They just spurt along the trails, since for them there is always curiosity, entertainment and the expectant draw of what lies ahead. They too with the great clearing of undergrowth, can see squirrels busily going about their fall ritual-collecting in preparation for oncoming winter. We met up with Jago, the female Husky again and her connection with nature in the raw is far more genetically developed than Jackie and Jillie's.

For her, it's serious business to race after the squirrels and tree them. Jackie and Jillie are rank amateurs in comparison, and it's the way we prefer them to be, rather than risk a physical confrontation. Jago has been known to catch up with fleeing wild creatures and the end result has not been pleasant. That too is nature's way, since this is an expression of her breed's function. When she was younger she ran down a fox  and the fox failed to survive the encounter. Makes it hard to feel admiration for nature's rules sometimes.